E-text prepared by Louise Hope, Steven desJardins, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 20765-h.htm or 20765-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/0/7/6/20765/20765-h/20765-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/0/7/6/20765/20765-h.zip) Transcriber's Note: Spelling, punctuation and capitalization are as in the original. This includes the writer's various spellings of her own name. Ordinals such as "1st", "2d", "4th" were consistently written in superscript. They are shown here as unmarked text. Other superscript abbreviations are shown with caret as M^rs, Hon^d. The printed book included a facsimile image of a typical diary page. A transcription of this passage appears immediately before the diary proper. DIARY OF ANNA GREEN WINSLOW A Boston School Girl of 1771 Edited by ALICE MORSE EARLE [Illustration: ANNA GREEN WINSLOW] [Publisher's Device: Tout bien ou rien] Boston and New York Houghton, Mifflin and Company The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1895 Copyright, 1894, By Alice Morse Earle. All rights reserved. Third Edition. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. This Book _Is Dedicated_ _To_ _The Kinsfolk Of_ _ANNA GREEN WINSLOW_ _FOREWORD._ _In the year 1770, a bright little girl ten years of age, Anna Green Winslow, was sent from her far away home in Nova Scotia to Boston, the birthplace of her parents, to be "finished" at Boston schools by Boston teachers. She wrote, with evident eagerness and loving care, for the edification of her parents and her own practice in penmanship, this interesting and quaint diary, which forms a most sprightly record, not only of the life of a young girl at that time, but of the prim and narrow round of daily occurrences in provincial Boston. It thus assumes a positive value as an historical picture of the domestic life of that day; a value of which the little girl who wrote it, or her kinsfolk who affectionately preserved it to our own day, never could have dreamed. To many New England families it is specially interesting as a complete rendering, a perfect presentment, of the childish life of their great grandmothers, her companions._