“Young pious Ruth
  Left all for Truth.”

One of the best-loved rhymes was one put into the series after the Revolution to stir the pride of every young American by reminding him that

  “Great Washington brave
  His country did save.”

In the pages that followed were to be found an illustrated poem telling of the awful fate of John Rogers, burned at the stake while his wife and their ten children looked on, and a dialogue between Christ, a youth and the devil, in which the youth was finally overcome by Satan’s temptations.

This story of the terrifying fate of the youth was placed after the shorter Westminster catechism, possibly as a warning to all children who would not obey their religious teachings.  The one hundred seven questions of the catechism must be answered correctly, even though the five-syllable words were even harder to understand than to pronounce.

Religious songs and pictures and descriptions of good and of bad children were also scattered through the book, and in some copies is to be found the little prayer beginning:  “Now I lay me down to sleep,” which was probably published for the first time in the Primer.

As the years went on, pictures and verses and little articles about the objects of nature and the everyday things that children are interested in began to take the place of the Bible verses and subjects; and at length when people saw how well children liked this new way of teaching, better books than the Primer took its place.

While the young folks in New England families were thus being warned in story and verse against the awful temptations that lay all around them, the children in old England were being entertained by popular penny-books that treated of all kinds of subjects, from the History of Joseph and his Brother to The Old Egyptian Fortune Teller’s Last Legacy.  These books were of a size scarcely larger than that of the letter-paper made for little folks, and they contained usually from sixteen to twenty-four pages.  Illustrations that looked a good deal like the pictures made by a small boy in his schoolbooks adorned the rough little volumes.

In every city and town and even in the villages peddlers went along the streets selling these chapbooks, as they were called.  Imagine how the children, and the grown people too, must have flocked around the peddler as he began taking out one after another of his queer little books, for he had something to please every one.  The boys might choose stories like The Mad Pranks of Tom Tram, A Wonderful and Strange Relation of a Sailor or The True Tale of Robin Hood, and we can see them almost getting into a brawl over the possession of The Merry Life and Mad Exploits of Captain James Hind, the Great Robber of England.  Probably the girls would choose Patient Grissel, The History of Mother Bunch or Cinderella.  For the small children there were, for example, the History of Two Children in the Wood, The Pleasant History of Jack Horner and Tom Thumb.  Most likely it was only the pennies of much-tried mothers and fathers that were spent for A Timely Warning to Rash and Disobedient Children.