many children"--fourteen in all. Truly, book-making did prosper a man
mightily both at home and abroad in colonial days.

In a book-printer's wife, the mother of the nineteen children, did
Dunton find his ideal New England wife; in a book-printer did he find
his most agreeable companion.

"To name his trade will convince the world he was a man of good
sense and understanding. He was so facetious and obliging and his
conversation such that I took a great delight in his company."

So it may be seen that the book-sellers were rivalled by the
book-printers--equally rich and witty though not so beautiful. To the
credit of both callings, then and for a century to follow, redounds the
fact that almost to a man they were deacons in the church. Mayhap their
worldly and family prosperity was the reward of their piety. As
nine-tenths of the authors were ministers, and the publishers all
deacons, the church had at that time what might be called a monopoly of
the book trade.

Dunton had a vast interest in the fair sex, owning plainly that he had a
"heart of Wax, Soft, and Soon mellowing," though he was careful on every
page to make everything seem perfectly straight and proper for the
suspicious perusal of his English wife; but any nineteenth-century
reader can read between the lines. His famous long-winded eulogies of
the Boston virgin, the wife, the widow, "Madam Brick the flower of
Boston," and the half widow "Parte per Pale, Madam Toy," whose husband
was at sea; and his long rides with one or the other of them
a-pillion-back behind him, and his tedious conversations with them on
platonics, the blisses of matrimony, and the chief causes of love, show
plainly that he had a "wandering eye." He had a deal to say also of his
lady customers (who were much the same in olden times as nowadays)--one
simple soul who turned over his books rather vacantly till he asked her
"in Joque" whether she wanted "Tom Thumb" (a penny chapbook). To his
surprise she answered, "Yes;" and he said, still guying, "in Folio and
with marginal notes?" and the dull creature replied, "Oh the best."
Another hectored him by constantly changing her mind:

"Reach me that book, yet--let it alone; but let me see it however,
and yet its no great matter either."

Another sedate Boston dame wished "The School of Venus," to which he
reprovingly answered that he had best give her instead "The School of
Virtue." Another, to whom he gave a sa