serve the dismal sound
Came from the body just laid in the ground."

The Puritan pride in funeral display is naively exhibited in the
portrayal of the girl when she "in her coffin sat, and did admire her
winding sheet," before she related her experiences "among lonesome wild
deserts and briary woods, which dismal were and dark." But immediately
after her description of the lake of burning misery and of the fierce
grim Tempter, the Puritan matter-of-fact acceptance of it all is
suggested by the concluding lines:

"When thus her story she to them had told,
She said, put me to bed for I am cold."

The illustrations of a later edition entered thoroughly into the spirit
of the author's intent. The contemporary opinion of the French character
is quaintly shown in the portrait of the Devil dressed as a French
gentleman, his cloven foot discovering his identity. Whatever
deficiencies are revealed in these early attempts to illustrate, they
invariably expressed the artist's purpose, and in this case the Devil,
after the girl's conversion, is drawn in lines very acceptable to
Puritan children's idea of his personality.

Almanacs also were in demand, and furnished parents and children, in
many cases, with their entire library for week-day reading. "Successive
numbers hung from a string by the chimney or ranked by years and
generations on cupboard shelves."[26-A] But when Franklin made "Poor
Richard" an international success, he, by giving short extracts from
Swift, Steele, Defoe, and Bacon, accustomed the provincial population,
old and young, to something better than the meagre religious fare
provided by the colonial press.

Such, then, were the literary conditions for children when an
advertisement inserted in the "Weekly Mercury" gave promise of better
days for the little Philadelphians.[26-B] Strangely enough, this attempt
to make learning seem attractive to children did not appear in the
booksellers' lists; but crowded in between Tandums, Holland Tapes,
London Steel, and good Muscavado Sugar,--"Guilt horn books" were
advertised by Joseph Sims in 1740 as "for sale on reasonable Terms for
Cash."

[Illustration: _The Devil appears as a French Gentleman_]

Horn-books in themselves were only too common, and not in the least
delightful. Made of thin wood, whereon was placed a printed sheet of
paper containing the alphabet and Lord's Prayer, a horn-book was hardly,
properly speaking, a book at all. But when the pr