"This is the last letter I shall write to you as a little boy, for to-morrow you will attain your ninth year; so that for the future, I shall treat you as a youth. You must now commence a different course of life, a different course of studies. No more levity. Childish toys and playthings must be thrown aside, and your mind directed to serious objects. What was not unbecoming to a child would be disgraceful to a youth" etc. Letter after letter continued in this tone. For years was the process carried on. The result was a striking proof of the futility of such methods. The son died when but little past his youth, a failure in everything the father had most fondly desired and striven for. The crowded brain ever stumbled and hesitated when put to any important test. It was inevitable that New England parents, with their fairly passionate intensity of zeal for the education of their children, should in many cases overstimulate and force the infant minds in their charge. It seems somewhat anomalous with the almost universal distrust and hindrance of female education that one of the most precocious flowers of Puritanism should have been a girl, the "pious and ingenious Mrs. Jane Turell," who was born in Boston in 1708. Before her second year was finished she could speak distinctly, knew her letters, and "could relate many stories out of the Scriptures to the satisfaction and pleasure of the most judicious." Governor Dudley and other "wise and polite" New England gentlemen were among those entitled "judicious," who placed her on a table to show off her acquirements. When she was three years old she could recite the greater part of the _Assembly's Catechism_, many of the psalms, many lines of poetry, and read distinctly; at the age of four she "asked many astonishing questions about divine mysteries." As her father was President of Harvard College, it may be inferred she had an extended reading course; but in a catalogue of Harvard College library printed a year or two later there is not a title in it of any of the works of Addison, or any of the poems of Pope, nothing of Dryden, Steele, Young, or Prior. In 1722, when Jane Turell was twenty years old, the works of Shakespeare were first advertised for sale in Boston. [Illustration: The Copley Family] In many families of extreme Puritanical thought, the children developed at an early age a comprehension of religious matters which would seem abnormal to-day, but was natural then. A striking instance of this youthful development (as he was of highly sensitive thought of every description) was Jonathan Edwards. A letter of his written when he was twelve years old is certainly precocious in its depth, though there is a certain hint of humor in it. Some one had stated the belief that the soul was material and remained in the body until after the resurrection. Young Edwards wrote:--