much to encourage this manner of marshalling and dividing themselves. Every child was permitted to entertain the whole company on its birth-day, and once besides, during winter and spring. The master and mistress of the family always were bound to go from home on these occasions, while some old domestic was left to attend and watch over them, with an ample provision of tea, chocolate, preserved and dried fruits, nuts, and cakes of various kinds, to which was added cider or a syllabub, for these young friends met at four, and did not part till nine or ten, and amused themselves with the utmost gaiety and freedom in any way their fancy dictated. I speak from hearsay; for no to these meetings: other children or young people visit occasionally, and are civilly treated, but they admit of no person that does not belong to the company is ever admitted intimacies beyond their company. The consequence of these exclusive and early intimacies was, that, grown up, it was reckoned a sort of apostasy to marry out of one’s company, and indeed, it did not often happen. The girls, from the example of their mothers, rather than any compulsion, became very early notable and industrious, being constantly employed in knitting stockings, and making clothes for the family and slaves: they even made all the boys’ clothes. This was the more necessary, as all articles of clothing were extremely dear. Though all the necessaries of life, and some luxuries, abounded, money, as yet, was a scarce commodity. This industry was the more to be admired, as children were here indulged to a degree that, in our vitiated state of society, would have rendered them good for nothing. But there, where ambition, vanity, and the more turbulent passions were scarce awakened; where pride, founded on birth, or any external pre-eminence, was hardly known; and where the affections flourished fair and vigorous, unchecked by the thorns and thistles with which our minds are cursed in a more advanced state of refinement; affection restrained parents from keeping their children at a distance, and inflicting harsh punishments. But then they did not treat them like apes or parrots, by teaching them to talk with borrowed words and ideas, and afterwards gratifying their own vanity by exhibiting these premature wonders to company, or repeating their sayings. They were tenderly cherished, and early taught that they owed all their enjoyments to the divine source of beneficence, to whom they were finally accountable for their actions; for the rest they were very much left to nature, and permitted to range about at full liberty in their earliest years, covered in summer with some slight and cheap garb, which merely kept the sun from them, and in winter with some warm habit, in which convenience only was consulted. Their dress of ceremony was never put on but when their company were assembled. They were extremely fond of their children; but, luckily for