many cases, with their entire library for week-day reading. "Successive
numbers hung from a string by the chimney or ranked by years and
generations on cupboard shelves."[26-A] But when Franklin made "Poor
Richard" an international success, he, by giving short extracts from
Swift, Steele, Defoe, and Bacon, accustomed the provincial population,
old and young, to something better than the meagre religious fare
provided by the colonial press.

Such, then, were the literary conditions for children when an
advertisement inserted in the "Weekly Mercury" gave promise of better
days for the little Philadelphians.[26-B] Strangely enough, this attempt
to make learning seem attractive to children did not appear in the
booksellers' lists; but crowded in between Tandums, Holland Tapes,
London Steel, and good Muscavado Sugar,--"Guilt horn books" were
advertised by Joseph Sims in 1740 as "for sale on reasonable Terms for
Cash."

[Illustration: _The Devil appears as a French Gentleman_]

Horn-books in themselves were only too common, and not in the least
delightful. Made of thin wood, whereon was placed a printed sheet of
paper containing the alphabet and Lord's Prayer, a horn-book was hardly,
properly speaking, a book at all. But when the printed page was covered
with yellowish transparent horn, secured to the wooden back by strips of
brass, it furnished an economical and practically indestructible
elementary text-book for thousands of English-speaking children on both
sides of the Atlantic. Sometimes an effort was also made to guard
against the inconvenient faculty of children for losing school-books, by
attaching a cord, which, passing through a hole in the handle of the
board, was hung around the scholar's neck. But since nothing is proof