life would savor too much of ridiculing those things that were sacred and serious to the people of that day.  Yet the main incidents of the story were these:  Henry’s conversion took place after a year and a half of hard work on the part of a missionary, who finally had the satisfaction of bringing little Henry “from the state of grossest heathen darkness and ignorance to a competent knowledge of those doctrines necessary to salvation.”  This was followed immediately by the offer of Henry to give all his toys for a Bible with a purple morocco cover.  Then came the preparations for the teacher’s departure, when she called him to her room and catechized him in a manner worthy of Cotton Mather a century before.  After his teacher’s departure the boy, mindful of the lady’s final admonition, sought to make a Christian of his bearer, Boosy.  Like so many story-book parents, Henry’s mother was altogether neglectful of her child; and consequently he was left much to the care of Boosy—­time which he improved with “arguments with Boosy concerning the great Creator of things.”  But it is not necessary to follow Henry through his ardent missionary efforts to the admission of the black boy of his sinful state, nor to the time when the hero was delivered from this evil world.  Enough has been said to show that the religious child of fiction was not very different from little Elizabeth Butcher or Hannah Hill of colonial days, whose pious sayings were still read when “Little Henry” was introduced to the American child.

Indeed, when Mrs. Sherwood’s fictitious children were not sufficiently religious to come up to the standard of five-year-old Henry, their parents were invariably as pious as the father of the “Fairchild Family.”  This was imported and reprinted for more than one generation as a “best seller.”  It was almost a modernized version of Janeway’s “Token for Children,” with Mather’s supplement of “A Token for the Children of New England,” in its frequent production of death-bed scenes, together with painful object lessons upon the sinfulness of every heart.  To impress such lessons Mr. Fairchild spared his family no sight of horror or distress.  He even took them to see a man on the gallows, “that,” said the ingenuous gentleman, “they may love each other with a perfect and heavenly love.”  As the children gazed upon the dreadful object the tender father described in detail its every phase, and ended by kneeling in prayer.  The story of Evelyn in the third chapter was written as the result of a present of books from an American Universalist, whose doctrines Mrs. Sherwood thought likely to be pernicious to children and should be controverted as soon as possible.  Later, other things emanating from America were considered injurious to children, but this seems to be the first indication that American ideas were noticed in English juvenile literature.