A good jack-knife was the most highly desired possession of a boy. Days of weary work and hours of persistent pleading were gone through with in hundreds of cases before the prize was secured. Barlow knives had a century of popularity. Some now in Deerfield Memorial Hall are here shown. Note the curved end, a shape now obsolete, but in truth an excellent one for safe pocket carriage. Knives of similar shape have been found that are known to be a century and a half old. I have never seen in America any of the old knives used as lovers' tokens, with mottoes engraved on them, referred to by Shakespeare. The boy's stock of toys was largely supplied by his own jack-knife: elder pop-guns, chestnut and willow whistles, windmills, water-wheels, box-traps, figure 4 traps. Toy weapons have varied little from the Christian era till to-day. Clubs, slings, bows and arrows, air-guns, are as old as the year One. Ere these were used as toys, they had been formidable weapons. They were weapons still, for some years of colonial life. In 1645 the court of Massachusetts ordered that all boys from ten to sixteen years old should be exercised with bows and arrows. [Illustration: Bangwell Putt] Skating is an ancient pastime. As early as the thirteenth century Fitzstephen tells of young Londoners fastening the leg-bones of animals to the soles of the feet, and then pushing themselves on the ice by means of poles shod with sharp iron points. Pepys thought skating "a very pretty art" when he saw it in 1662, but it was then a novelty to him, and he was characteristically a little afraid of it; justly disturbed, too, that the Duke of York would go "though the ice was broken and dangerous, yet he would go slide upon his scates which I did not like--but he slides very well." [Illustration: White House Doll] Wooden skates shod with iron runners were invented in the Low Countries. Dutch children in New Netherlands all skated, just as their grandfathers had in old Batavia. The first skates that William Livingstone had on the frozen Hudson were made of beef bones, as were those of mediæval children. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, skating was among the many Dutch ways and doings practised by English folk in the new world. The Plymouth Pilgrims brought these Dutch customs to the new world through their long and intimate sojourn in Holland; the New Haven and Connecticut Valley settlers learned them through their constant trade and intercourse with their neighbors, the Dutch of Manhattan; but the Massachusetts Bay settlers of Boston and Salem had known these Dutch ways longer,--they brought them from England across seas, from the counties of Essex and Suffolk, where the Dutch had gone years before and married with the English. [Illustration: Old Tin Toy]