father bore seventeen; Roger Clap of Dorchester, Massachusetts, “begat” fourteen children by one wife; William Phipps, a governor of Massachusetts, had twenty-five brothers and sisters all by one mother.  Catherine Schuyler, a woman of superior intellect, gave birth to fourteen children.  Judge Sewall piously tells us in his Diary:  “Jan. 6, 1701.  This is the Thirteenth child that I have offered up to God in Baptisme; my wife having borne me Seven Sons and Seven Daughters.”  One of the children had been born dead, and therefore had not received baptism.  Ben Franklin often boasted of the strong constitution of his mother and of the fact that she nursed all of her own ten babes; but he does not tell us of the constitution of the children or of the ages to which they lived.  Five of Sewall’s children died in infancy, and only four lived beyond the age of thirty.  It seems never to have occurred to the pious colonial fathers that it would be better to rear five to maturity and bury none, than to rear five and bury five.  The strain on the womanhood of the period cannot be doubted; innumerable men were married twice or three times and no small number four times.

Industry was the law of the day, and every child soon became a producer.  The burdens placed upon children naturally lightened as the colonies progressed; but as late as 1775, if we may judge by the following record, not many moments of childhood were wasted.  This is an account of her day’s work jotted down by a young girl in that year:  “Fix’d gown for Prude,—­Mend Mother’s Riding-hood, Spun short thread,—­Fix’d two gowns for Welsh’s girls,—­Carded tow,—­Spun linen,—­Worked on Cheese-basket,—­Hatchel’d flax with Hannah, we did 51 lbs. apiece,—­Pleated and ironed,—­Read a Sermon of Dodridge’s,—­Spooled a piece—­Milked the Cows,—­Spun linen, did 50 knots,—­Made a Broom of Guinea wheat straw,—­Spun thread to whiten,—­Set a Red dye,—­Had two Scholars from Mrs. Taylor’s,—­I carded two pounds of whole wool and felt Nationaly,—­Spun harness twine,—­Scoured the pewter,—­Ague in my face,—­Ellen was spark’d last night,—­spun thread to whiten—­Went to Mr. Otis’s and made them a swinging visit—­Israel said I might ride his jade [horse]—­Prude stayed at home and learned Eve’s Dream by heart."[89]

VII.  Indian Attacks

The children whose comment has just been quoted were probably safe from all dangers except ague and sparking; but in the previous century women and children daily faced possibilities that apparently should have kept them in a continuous state of fright.  Time after time mothers and babes were stolen by the Indians, and the tales of their sufferings fill many an interesting page in the diaries, records, and letters of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth.  Hear these words from an early pamphlet, A Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New England, inserted in Sewall’s Diary: