d when religious customs and duties were in question.
On January 22d, 1694, Judge Sewall thus records:

"A very extraordinary Storm by reason of the falling and driving of
the Snow. Few women could get to Meeting. A child named Alexander
was baptized in the afternoon."

He does not record Alexander's death in sequence. He writes thus of the
baptism of a four days' old child of his own on February 6th, 1656:

"Between 3 & 4 P.M. Mr. Willard baptizeth my Son whom I named
Stephen. Day was louring after the storm but not freezing. Child
shrank at the water but Cry'd not. His brother Sam shew'd the
Midwife who carried him the way to the Pew. I held him up."

And still again on April 8th, 1677, of another of his children when but
six days old:

"Sabbath day, rainy and stormy in the morning but in the afternoon
fair and sunshine though with a Blustering Wind. So Eliz. Weeden
the Midwife brought the Infant to the Third Church when Sermon was
about half done in the Afternoon."

Poor little Stephen and Hull and Joseph, shrinking away from the icy
water, but too benumbed to cry! Small wonder that they quickly yielded
up their souls after the short struggle for life so gloomily and so
coldly begun. Of Judge Sewall's fourteen children but three survived
him, a majority dying in infancy; and of fifteen children of his friend
Cotton Mather but two survived their father.

This religious ordeal was but the initial step in the rigid system of
selection enforced by every detail of the manner of life in early New
England. The mortality among infants was appallingly large; and the
natural result--the survival of the fittest--may account for the present
tough endurance of the New England people.

Nor was the christening day the only Lord's Day when the baby graced the
meeting-house. Puritan mothers were all church lovers and strict
church-goers, and all the members of the household were equally
church-attending; and if the mother went to meeting the baby had to go
also. I have heard of a little wooden cage or frame in the meeting-house
to hold Puritan babies who were too young, or feeble, or sleepy to sit
upright.

Of the dress of these Puritan infants we know but little. Linen formed
the chilling substructure of their attire--little, thin, linen,
short-sleeved, low-necked shirts. Some of them have been preserved, and
with their tiny rows of hemstitching and drawn work and the