“Hot Corn” was also cried by children, whose business it was to “gather cents, by distributing corn to those who are disposed to regale themselves with an ear.”  Baked pears are pictured as sold “by a little black girl, with the pears in an earthen dish under her arm.”  At the same season of the year, “Here’s your fine ripe water-melons” also made itself heard above the street noises as a street cry of entirely American origin.  Again there were pictured “Oyster Stands,” served by negroes, and these were followed by cries of

   “Fine Clams:  choice Clams,
    Here’s your Rock-a-way beach
    Clams:  here’s your fine
    Young, sand Clams,”

from Flushing Cove Bay, which the text explains, “turn out as good, or perhaps better,” than oysters.  The introduction of negroes and negro children into the illustrations is altogether a novelty, and together with the scenes drawn from the street life of the town gave to the old-fashioned child its first distinctly American picture-book.  Indeed, with the exception of this and an occasional illustration in some otherwise English reproduction, all the American publishers at this time seem to have modelled their wares for small children after those of two large London firms, J. Harris, successor to Newbery, and William Darton.

To Darton, the author of “Little Truths,” the children were indebted for a serious attempt to improve the character of toy-books.  A copper-plate engraver by profession, Darton’s attention was drawn to the scarcity of books for children by the discovery that there was not much written for them that was worth illustrating.  Like Newbery, he set about to make books himself, and with John Harvey, also an engraver, he set up in Grace Church Street an establishment for printing and publishing, from which he supplied, to a great extent, the juvenile books closely imitated by American printers.  Besides his own compositions, he was very alert to encourage promising authors, and through him the famous verses of Jane and Ann Taylor were brought into notice.  “Original Poems,” and “Rhymes for the Nursery,” by these sisters, were to the old-time child what Stevenson’s “Child’s Garden of Verses” is to the modern nursery.  Darton and Harvey paid ten pounds for the first series of “Original Poems,” and fifteen pounds for the second; while “Rhymes for the Nursery” brought to its authors the unusual sum of twenty pounds.  The Taylors were the originators of that long series of verses for infants which “My Sister” and “My Governess” strove to surpass but never in any way equalled, although they apparently met with a fair sale in America.

[Illustration:  Little Nancy]

Enterprising American booksellers also copied the new ways of advertising juvenile books.  An instance of this is afforded by Johnson and Warner of Philadelphia, who apparently succeeded Jacob and Benjamin Johnson, and had, by eighteen hundred and ten, branch shops in Richmond, Virginia, and Lexington, Kentucky.  They advertised their “neatly executed books of amusement” in book notes in the “Young Gentlemen and Ladies’ Magazine,” by means of digressions from the thread of their stories, and sometimes by inserting as frontispiece a rhyme taken from one used by John Harris of St. Paul’s Churchyard: