In the _Jests of Scogin_, a popular work of the time of Henry VIII., and probably reliable as a faithful portraiture of the habits and notions of the latter half of the fifteenth and opening decades of the following century, one of the sections relates "How a Husbandman put his son to school with Scogin." From the text it is plain that the lad was very backward in his studies, or had commenced them unusually late, considering that it was the farmer's ambition to procure his admission into holy orders. "The slovenly boy," we are told, "would begin to learn his A. B. C. Scogin did give him a lesson of nine of the first letters of A. B. C., and he was nine days in learning of them; and when he had learned the nine Christ-cross-row letters, the good scholar said, 'am ich past the worst now?'" The important feature in this passage is the reference to the Christ-cross-row, which contained the nine letters of the alphabet from A to I in the form of the Cross. The time consumed in this particular instance in the acquisition of a portion of the rudiments is, of course, ascribable to a pleasant hyperbole, or to the scholar's phenomenal density; but the _Abacus_ or Christ-cross-row was, no doubt, the first step in the ladder, and although it was superseded by the Horn-book and the Primer, it did not substantially disappear from use in petty schools till the present century. Its shape and functions, however, underwent a material change, and instead of being employed as a medium for grounding children in the Accidence, it became a vehicle for arithmetical purposes, and resembled a slate in form and dimensions, consisting of a small oblong wooden frame fitted with rows of balls of wood or bone strung on transverse wires. To those who, like the present writer, saw this apparatus in common use to induct the young into the art of counting, its pedigree was naturally unknown. It was an evolution from the contrivance which Scogin put into the hands of the country bumpkin whom he was engaged to prepare for the priesthood, and who, as we learn from subsequent passages in these Anecdotes, was actually ordained a deacon within a limited period. II. To the Abacus, prior to the Reformation, was added the printed A. B. C. accompanied by prayers and a metrical version of the Decalogue, and in 1553 appeared the first Protestant A. B. C. and Catechism for the use of schools and the young. It is after this date and the accession of Elizabeth that we find a marked and permanent stimulus given to elementary literature; and the press from 1553 onward teemed with A. B. C.'s of all sorts; as, for instance, "an a. b. c. for children, with syllables, 1558;" "an a. b. c. in Latin," 1559; "the battle of A. B. C.," 1586; "the horn a. b. c., 1587;" and even the title itself grew popular, not only for manuals of other kinds, but for publishers' signs and ballads. There was "the aged man's A. B. C," the "Virgin's A. B. C.," and "the young man's A. B. C."