[Illustration: Back of Hornbook] "Gilt horns" were sold in Philadelphia with Bibles and Primers, as we learn from the _Pennsylvania Gazette_ of December 4, 1760, and in New York in 1753, so says the _New York Gazette_ of May 14, of that year. Pretty little lesson-toys, these gilded horns must have proved, but not so fine as the hornbooks of silver and ivory used by young misses of quality in England. Scores of pictures by seventeenth-century artists--on canvas and glass--show demure little maids and masters with hanging hornbooks. Even the pictures of the Holy Family show the infant Christ, hornbook in hand, tenderly taught by the Virgin Mother. The hornbook was called by other names, horn-gig, horn-bat, battledore-book, absey-book, etc.; and in Dutch it was the _a-b-boordje_. They were worked in needlework, and written in ink, and stamped on tin and carved in wood, as well as printed, and Prior tells in rhyme of a hornbook, common enough in England, which must have proved eminently satisfactory to the student. "To master John the English maid A horn-book gives of gingerbread; And that the child may learn the better, As he can name, he eats the letter." To this day in England, at certain Fairs and in Kensington bake-shops, these gingerbread hornbooks are made and sold in spite of the solemn warning of British moralists--"No liquorish learning to thy babes extend." Still "All the letters are digested, Hateful ignorance detested." I have seen in New England what were called "cookey-moulds," which were of heavy wood incised with the alphabet, were of ancient Dutch manufacture, and had been used for making those "koeckje" hornbooks. [Illustration: The Royal Battledore] The sight of an old hornbook must always be of interest to any one of any power of imagination or of thoughtful mind, who can read between the irregular lines, the ill-shapen letters, its true significance as the emblem, the well-spring of English education and literature. This thought of the symbolism of the hornbook is expressed in quaint words on the back of a shabby battered specimen of questionable age in the British Museum:-- "What more could be wished for even by a literary Gourmand under the Tudors than to be able to Read and Spell; to repeat that holy Charm before which fled all unholy Ghosts, Goblins, or even the Old Gentleman himself, to the very bottom of the Red Sea; to say that immortal Prayer which seems Heaven to all who _ex animo_ use it; and to have those mathematical powers by knowing units, from which spring countless myriads." For a fuller account of the hornbook, readers should go to the _History of the Hornbook_, by Andrew W. Tuer, two splendid volumes forming one of the most interesting and exhaustive accounts of any special educational topic that has ever been written.