e gone. The
family fled up stairs, but Margaret, remembering the baby in the cradle
below, ran back, seized the baby, and when she was half way up the
flight, an Indian flung his tomahawk at her head, which, missing her,
buried itself in the wood, and left its historic mark to the present
time."[92]

_VIII. Parental Training_

We sometimes hear the complaint that the training of the modern child is
left almost entirely to the mother or to the woman school teacher, and
that as a result the boy is becoming effeminate. The indications are
that this could not have been said of the colonial child; for, according
to the records of that day, there was admirable co-operation between man
and wife in the training of their little ones. Kindly Judge Sewall, who
so indiscriminately mingled his accounts of courtships, weddings,
funerals, visits to neighbors, notices of hangings, duties as a
magistrate, what not, often spared time from his activities among the
grown-ups to record such incidents as: "Sabbath-day, Febr. 14, 1685.
Little Hull speaks Apple plainly in the hearing of his grandmother and
Eliza Jane; this the first word."[93]

And hear what Samuel Mather in his _Life of Cotton Mather_ tells of the
famous divine's interest in the children of the household: "He began
betimes to entertain them with delightful stories, especially
scriptural ones; and he would ever conclude with some lesson of piety,
giving them to learn that lesson from the story.... And thus every day
at the table he used himself to tell some entertaining tale before he
rose; and endeavored to make it useful to the olive plants about the
table. When his children accidentally, at any time, came in his way, it
was his custom to let fall some sentence or other that might be monitory
or profitable to them.... As soon as possible he would make the children
learn to write; and, when they had the use of the pen, he would employ
then in writing out the most instructive, and profitable things he could
invent for them.... The first chastisement which he would inflict for
any ordinary fault was to let the child see and hear him in an
astonishment, and hardly able to believe that the child could do so base
a thing; but believing they would never do it again. He would never come
to give a child a blow excepting in case of obstinacy or something very
criminal. To be chased for a while out of his presence he would make to
be looked upon as the sorest punishment in his fam