I have seen in different families five of precisely the same pattern and size, all made about the time of the Revolution. One given to a Boston baby, while his new home was in state of siege, bore the inscription, "Welcome little Stranger, tho' the Port is closed." These words were formed by the heads of pins. Another, about five inches long and three inches wide, is of green figured silk with a flowered vine stuck in pins and the words, "John Winslow, March, 1783, Welcome, Little Stranger." Anna Green Winslow tells of her aunts making one with "a planthorn of flowers" and the name. I have seen one with similar inscription knitted of fine silk and with the name sewed on in steel beads, among which pins were stuck in a graceful pattern. [Illustration: Indian Cradle] The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies. In Pilgrim Hall still may be seen the quaint and finely wrought wicker cradle of Peregrine White, the first white child born in Plymouth. This cradle is of Dutch manufacture; and is one of the few authentic articles still surviving that came over on the _Mayflower_. It was brought over by William White, whose widow married Governor Edward Winslow. A similar wicker cradle may be seen at the Essex Institute in Salem, together with a heavy wooden cradle in which many members of the Townes family of Topsfield, Massachusetts, were rocked to sleep two centuries ago. Judge Sewall bought a wicker cradle for one of his many children and paid sixteen shillings for it. A graceful variant of the swinging cradle is shown in the Indian basket hung at either end from a wooden standard or frame. In this strong basket, fashioned by an Indian mother, many a white child has been swung and sung to sleep. A still more picturesque cradle was made of birch bark, that plentiful material so widely adaptive to household uses, and so deftly manipulated and shaped by the patient squaws. In these cradles the colonial baby slept, warmly wrapped in a homespun blanket or pressed quilt. _Poor Robin's Almanack_ for the year 1676 enumerates among a baby's outfit:-- "Blanckets of a several scantling Therein for to wrap a bantling." Of these wraps, of the thinner sort, may be named the thin, close-woven, homespun "flannel sheet," spun of the whitest wool into a fine twisted worsted, and woven with a close sley into an even web as enduring as the true Oriental cashmere. The baby's initials were often marked on these sheets, and fortunate was the child who had the light, warm wrappings. My own children had "flannel sheets" that had seen a century or more of use with generations of forbears. [Illustration: Governor Bradford's Christening Blanket, 1590]