ugh and were drowned,
just as country boys are nowadays. Judge Sewall wrote on November 30th,
1696:

"Many scholars go in the afternoon to Scate on Fresh Pond. Wm.
Maxwell and John Eyre fall in, are drowned."

In the _New England Weekly Journal_ of January 15th, 1728, we read:

"On Monday last Two Young Persons who were Brothers, viz Mr. George
and Nathan Howell diverting themselves by Skating at the bottom of
the Common, the Ice breaking under them they were both drowned;"

and in the same journal of two weeks later date we find record of
another death by drowning.

"A young man, viz, Mr. Comfort Foster, skating on the ice from
Squantum Point to Dorchester, fell into the Water & was drown'd. He
was about 16 or 18 years of age."

Advertisements of "Mens and Boys Scates" appear in the _Boston Gazette_,
of 1749, and the _Boston Evening Post_, of 1758. The February _News
Letter_, of 1769, has a notice of the sale of "Best Holland Scates of
Different Sizes."

In the list of goods on board a prize taken by a privateersman in 1712
were "Boxes of Toys." Higginson, writing to his brother in 1695, told
him that "toys would sell if in small quantity." In exceeding small
quantity one would fancy. In 1743 the _Boston News Letter_ advertised
"English and Dutch Toys for Children." Not until October, 1771, on the
lists of the Boston shop-keepers, who seemed to advertise and to sell
every known article of dry goods, hardware, house furnishing, ornament,
dress and food, came that single but pleasure-filled item "Boys
Marbles." "Battledores and Shuttles" appeared in 1761. I know that no
little maids could ever have lived without dolls, not even the
serious-minded daughters of the Pilgrims; but the only dolls that were
advertised in colonial newspapers were the "London drest babys" of
milliners and mantua-makers, that were sent over to serve as fashion
plates for modish New England dames. A few century-old dolls still
survive Revolutionary times, wooden-faced monstrosities, shapeless and
mean, but doubtless well-beloved and cherished in the days of their
youth.

As years rolled by and eighteenth century frivolity and worldliness took
the place of Puritan sobriety and religion, New England children shared
with their elders in that growing love of amusement, which found but few
and inadequate methods of expression in the lives of either old or
young. In the year 1771 there was sent from Nova