for years.

Certain titles indicate the nature of the meagre juvenile literary fare
in the beginning of the new eighteenth century. In seventeen hundred
Nicholas Boone, in his "Shop over against the old Meeting-house" in
Boston, reprinted Janeway's "Token for Children." To this was added by
the Boston printer a "Token for the children of New England, or some
examples of children in whom the fear of God was remarkably budding when
they dyed; in several parts of New England." Of course its author, the
Reverend Mr. Mather, found colonial "examples" as deeply religious as
any that the mother country could produce; but there is for us a grim
humor in these various incidents concerning pious and precocious infants
"of thin habit and pale countenance," whose pallor became that of death
at so early an age. If it was by the repetition of such tales that the
Puritan divine strove to convert Cressy, it may well be that the son
considered it better policy, since Death claimed the little saints, to
remain a sinner.

By seventeen hundred and six two juvenile books appeared from the press
of Timothy Green in Boston. The first, "A LITTLE BOOK for
children wherein are set down several directions for little children:
and several remarkable stories both ancient and modern of little
children, divers whereof are lately deceased," was a reprint from an
English book of the same title, and therefore has not in this chronicle
the interest of the second book. The purpose of its publication is given
in Mather's diary:

[1706] 22d. Im. Friday.

About this Time sending my little son to School, Where ye Child was