In glancing over old school contracts it will be noted that in a majority of cases the teacher is specified as a writing-master; without doubt the chief requisite of a satisfactory teacher in colonial days was that he should be a good teacher of penmanship. We have seen in our own day distinct changes in the handwriting of an entire generation; the colonists whose lives ended with the seventeenth century had a characteristic handwriting which retained certain elements of old English, even of mediæval script. It was a handsome and dignified chirography and an impressive one, and was usually easy to read. The writing of the first Pilgrim and Puritan fathers was not over-good. Governor John Winthrop's was not much better than Horace Greeley's. Bradford's we are familiar with through the beautiful facsimiles of his _Relation_. The first half of the succeeding century did not send forth such good writers; nor did it send forth writers so universally; the proportion of signatures to public documents by cross instead of writing increased. Our grandparents and great-grandparents all wrote well. In hundreds of century-old letters which I have examined an ill-written letter is an exception. Children at the close of the eighteenth century wrote beautifully rounded, clear, and uniform hands, if we can judge from their copy-books. Little Anna Green Winslow, writing in 1771, showed page after page in a hand far better than that of most girls of her age to-day. Claude Blanchard was commissary of supplies for the French army which landed in Newport in 1780. He visited the Newport school and gave this tribute to the scholars:-- "I saw the writing of these children, it appeared to me to be handsome; among others that of a young girl nine or ten years old, very pretty and very modest, and such as I would like my own daughter to be when she is so old; she was called Abigail Earle, as I perceived upon her copy-book, on which her name was written. I wrote it myself, adding to it 'very pretty.'" An "exhibition piece" is here given of the penmanship of Anne Reynolds, a little girl of Norwich, Connecticut, who died shortly after this "piece" was written. Writing-masters were universally honored in every community. A part of the funeral notice of one in Boston, who died in 1769, reads thus:-- "Last Friday morning died Mr. Abiah Holbrook in this town. He was looked upon by the best Judges as the Greatest Master of the pen we ever had among us, of which he has left a beautiful Demonstration."