The boys were thrust at once into that iron-handed but wholly wise grasp--the Latin Grammar. The minds trained in earliest youth in that study, as it was then taught, have made their deep and noble impress on this nation. The study of mathematics was, until well into this century, a hopeless maze to many youthful minds. Doubtless the Puritans learned multiplication tables and may have found them, as did Marjorie Fleming, "a horrible and wretched plaege," though no pious little New Englanders would have dared to say as she did, "You cant conceive it the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7, it is what nature itself can't endure." Great attention was paid to penmanship. Spelling was nought if the "wrighting" were only fair and flowing. I have never read any criticism of teachers by either parents or town officers save on the one question of writing. How deeply children were versed or grounded in the knowledge of the proper use of "Simme colings nots of interiogations peorids and commoes," I do not know. A boundless freedom apparently was given, as was also in orthography--if we judge from the letters of the times, where "horrid false spells," as Cotton Mather called them, abound. It is natural to dwell on the religious teaching of Puritan children, because so much of their education had a religious element in it. They must have felt, like Tony Lumpkin, "tired of having good dinged into 'em." Their primers taught religious rhymes; they read from the Bible, the Catechism, the Psalm Book, and that lurid rhymed horror "The Day of Doom;" they parsed, too, from these universal books. How did they parse these lines from the Bay Psalm Book? "And sayd He would not them waste; had not Moses stood (whom he chose) 'fore him i' th' breach; to turn his wrath lest that he should waste those." Their "horn books"-- "books of stature small Which with pellucid horn secured are To save from fingers wet the letters fair," those framed and behandled sheets of semi-transparent horn, which were worn hanging at the side and were studied, as late certainly as the year 1715 by children of the Pilgrims, also managed to instil with the alphabet some religious words or principles. Usually the Lord's Prayer formed part of the printed text. Though horn-books are referred to in Sewall's diary and in the letters of Wait Still Winthrop, and appear on stationers' and booksellers' lists at the beginning of the eighteenth century, I do not know of the preservation of a single specimen to our own day. The schoolhouses were simple dwellings, often tumbling down and out of repair. The Roxbury teacher wrote in 1681: