Children did not always pose either as models of decorum or propriety in their relations with each other. In a little book called _The Village School_, we read of their beating and kicking each other, and that there was one bleeding nose. Worse yet, when the girls went forth to gather "daisies and butter-flowers," the ungallant boys kicked the girls "to make them pipe." CHAPTER XII RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND TRAINING _Puritanism is not of the Nineteenth Century, but of the Seventeenth, the grand unintelligibility for us lies there. The Fast Day Sermons, in spite of printers, are all grown dumb. In long rows of dumpy little quartos they indeed stand here bodily before us; by human volition they can be read, but not by any human memory remembered. The Age of the Puritans is not extinct only and gone away from us, but it is as if fallen beyond the capabilities of memory itself; it is grown what we may call incredible. Its earnest Purport awakens now no resonance in our frivolous hearts, ... the sound of it has become tedious as a tale of past stupidities. --Oliver Cromwell's Life and Letters. Thomas Carlyle, 1845._ The religious aspect of the life of children, especially in early colonial days, and most particularly in New England, bore a far deeper relation to the round of daily life than can be accorded to it in these pages. The spirit of the Lord, perhaps I should say the fear of the Lord, truly filled their days. Born into a religious atmosphere, reared in religious ways, surrounded on every side by religious influences, they could not escape the impress of deep religious feeling; they certainly had a profound familiarity with the Bible. The historian Green says that the Englishman of that day was a man of one book, and that book the Bible. It might with equal truth be said that the universal child's book of that day was the Bible. There were few American children until after the Revolution who had ever read from any book save the Bible, a primer, or catechism, and perhaps a hymn book or an almanac.