must, when I am Dead,
Remember every Thing, that I now said unto her. I sett before her
the sinful condition of her Nature and I charged her to pray in
secret places every day. That God for the sake of Jesus Christ
would give her a New Heart. I gave her to understand that when I am
taken from her she must look to meet with more Humbling
Afflictions than she does now she has a Tender Father to provide
for her."

I hardly understand why Cotton Mather, who was really very gentle to his
children, should have taken upon himself to trouble this tender little
blossom with dread of his death. He lived thirty years longer, and,
indeed, survived sinful little Katy. Another child of his died when two
years and seven months old, and made a most edifying end in prayer and
praise. His pious and incessant teachings did not, however, prove wholly
satisfactory in their results, especially as shown in the career of his
son Increase, or "Cressy."

No age appeared to be too young for these remarkable exhibitions of
religious feeling. Phebe Bartlett was barely four years old when she
passed through her amazing ordeal of conversion, a painful example of
religious precocity. The "pious and ingenious Jane Turell" could relate
many stories out of the Scriptures before she was two years old, and was
set upon a table "to show off," in quite the modern fashion. "Before she
was four years old she could say the greater part of the Assembly's
Catechism, many of the Psalms, read distinctly, and make pertinent
remarks on many things she read. She asked many astonishing questions
about divine mysteries." It is a truly comic anticlimax in her father's
stilted letters to her to have him end his pious instructions with this
advice: "And as you love me do not eat green apples."

Of the demeanor of children to their parents naught can be said but
praise. Respectful in word and deed, every letter, every record shows
that the young Puritans truly honored their fathers and mothers. It were
well for them to thus obey the law of God, for by the law of the land
high-handed disobedience of parents was punishable by death. I do not
find this penalty ever was paid, as it was under the sway of grim
Calvin, a fact which redounds to the credit both of justice and youth in
colonial days.

It was not strange that Judge Sewall, always finding in natural events
and appearances symbols of spiritual and religious signification, should