The second hornbook is owned by Miss Grace L. Gordon of Flushing, Long Island. It is a family heirloom, having come to its present owner through a great-uncle who was born in 1782, and stated that it was used by his father, who was born in 1736. The tablet is of oak, and the back is covered with a red paper stamped with the design of a double-headed eagle. The third, owned by Mrs. John W. Norton of Guildford, Connecticut, is almost precisely like Miss Gordon's, and is equally well preserved. [Illustration: Hornbook owned by Miss Gordon] From these shabby little relics and from thousands of their ill-printed, but useful kinsfolk, childish lips in America first read aloud the letters, pointed firmly out by a knitting needle in some dame's hand. Undisturbed by kindergarten inductions and suggestions, unbewildered by baleful processes and diagrams, unthreatened by scientific principles of instruction, did the young colonists stoutly shout their a-b abs, did they spell out their prayer, did they read in triumphal chorus their criss-cross row. Isn't it strange that these three lonely little ghosts of old-time schooling should be the only representatives of their regiments of classmates? Wouldn't it seem that tender association, or miserly hoarding, or even forgetful neglect would have made some greater salvage from the vast number of hornbooks sent to this country in the century after its settlement; that by intent or accident many scores would have survived? But these are all; three little battered oaken backs and stubby handles, three faded paper slips, a splintered sheet or two of horn, a few strips of brass tape, a score of tiny hand-wrought nails--all poor things enough, but shaping themselves into precious and treasured relics. Another of their kindred, a penny hornbook, proved its present value at a sale in London in 1893, by fetching the far from ignoble sum of sixty-five pounds. One of these little hornbooks filled in its single self what has become a vast item in public school expenses. As Mr. Martin wittily expresses it, "it was in embryo all that the Massachusetts statutes now designate by the formal phrase 'text-books and supplies.'" The knitting needle of the schooldame could be dignified by the pompous name of fescue, a pointer; and something of that nature, a straw, a pin, a quill, a skewer of wood, was always used to direct children's eyes to letter or word. There certainly were plenty of these humble little engines of instruction in America; old Judge Sewall had them for his fourteen children at the end of the seventeenth century, as we know from his diary; he wrote in 1691 of his son Joseph going to school "his cousin Jane accompanying him, carrying his horn-book." Waitstill Winthrop sent them to his little Connecticut Plantation nieces in 1716. It is told of one zealous Puritan minister that hating the symbolism of the cross he blotted it out of the criss-cross row of a number of hornbooks imported to Boston.