"This day was published Nurse Truelove's New Years Gift or the book of books for children, adorned with cuts, and designed as a present for every little boy who would become a great man, and ride upon a fine horse; and to every little girl who would become a great woman and ride in a lord-mayor's gilt coach. Printed for the author who has ordered these books to be given gratis to all boys and girls, at the Bible and Sun in St. Paul's Churchyard, they paying for the binding which is only twopence for each book." Other books were sold "with a Ball and Pincushion, the use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good boy, and Polly a good girl." The juvenile characters in the books are always turning aside to read or buy some one of Mr. Newbery's little books; or pulling one of Mr. Newbery's "nice gilded library" out of their pockets, or taking Dr. James' Fever Powder, which was also one of Mr. Newbery's popular specialities. The Revolutionary patriot and printer, Isaiah Thomas, was said to be very "ingenious in spirit." I do not know the exact significance of this term unless it means that he was a wide-awake publisher, which he certainly was. He was a bright, stirring man of quick wit and active intelligence in all things. He brought out just after the Revolution many little books for children. Few of them have any pretence of originality, even in a single page. Nearly all are wholesale reprints of various English books for children, chiefly those of John Newbery. I don't know what made Thomas so ready to catch up the reprinting of these children's books in advance of other American printers. Perhaps his attention was led to it by the fact that his "Prentice's Token," or specimen of his work when he was a printer's 'prentice, was one of those little books. It was issued in 1761 by A. Barclay in Cornhill, Boston, and a copy now in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Massachusetts, is indorsed in Thomas' own handwriting as being by his 'prentice hand. The book is entitled, _Tom Thumbs Play Book. To Teach Children their letters as soon as they can speak_. It contains the old rhyme, "A, Apple pye, B, bit it, C, cut it," etc. Then came the rhymes beginning, "A, was an Archer and shot at a frog;" also a short catechism. Isaiah Thomas lived in Worcester, printed these books there, and founded there the American Antiquarian Society; in the library of that society now in that city may be seen copies of nearly all these children's books which he reprinted; and a collection of pretty, quaint little volumes they are. It is the universal decision of the special students of juvenile literature, that Goldsmith wrote _Goody Two Shoes_. Washington Irving thought the title-page plainly "bore the stamp of the sly and playful humour" of the author of the _Vicar of Wakefield_. It reads thus:--