No such objection as Mrs. Burr made to this lady’s “Annales” was possible in regard to another French book, by Berquin.  Entitled “Ami des Enfans,” it received under the Rev. Mr. Cooper’s translation the name “The Looking Glass for the Mind.”  This collection of tales supposedly mirrored the frailties and virtues of rich and poor children.  It was often bound in full calf, and an edition of seventeen hundred and ninety-four contains a better engraved frontispiece than it was customary to place in juvenile publications.  For half a century it was to be found in the shop of all booksellers, and had its place in the library of every family of means.  There are still those among us who have not forgotten the impression produced upon their infant minds by certain of the tales.  Some remember the cruel child and the canary.  Others recollect their admiration of the little maid who, when all others deserted her young patroness, lying ill with the smallpox, won the undying gratitude of the mother by her tender nursing.  The author, blind himself to the possibilities of detriment to the sick child by unskilled care, held up to the view of all, this example of devotion of one girl in contrast to the hard-heartedness of many others.  This book seems also to have been called by the literal translation of its original title, “Ami des Enfans;” for in an account of the occupations of one summer Sunday in seventeen hundred and ninety-seven, Julia Cowles, living in Litchfield, Connecticut, wrote:  “Attended meeting all day long, but do not recollect the text.  Read in ’The Children’s Friend.’” Many children would not have been permitted to read so nearly secular a book; but evidently Julia Cowles’s parents were liberal in their view of Sunday reading after the family had attended “meeting all day long.”

In addition to the interest of the context of these toy-books of a past generation, one who handles such relics of a century ago sees much of the fashions for children of that day.  In “The Looking Glass,” for instance, the illustrations copied from engravings by the famous English artist, Bewick, show that at the end of the eighteenth century children were still clothed like their elders; the coats and waistcoats, knee breeches and hats, of boys were patterned after gentlemen’s garments, and the caps and aprons, kerchiefs and gowns, for girls were reproductions of the mothers’ wardrobes.

Again, the fly-leaf of “The History of Master Jacky and Miss Harriot” arrests the eye by its quaint inscription:  “Rozella Ford’s Book.  For being the second speller in the second class.”  At once the imagination calls up the exercises in a village school at the end of a year’s session:  a row of prim little maids and sturdy boys, standing before the school dame and by turn spelling in shrill tones words of three to five syllables, until only two, Rozella and a better speller, remain unconfused by Dilworth’s and Webster’s word mysteries.  Then the two children step forward