From the viewpoint of a twentieth-century child, her small feet were set in a hard, if not thorny, path. The limits of an early colonial house allowed no space for the nursery devoted exclusively to a child, and filled with every conceivable appliance for her instruction and amusement. There were no wonderful mechanical animals, lifelike in form and color, and capable of exercising many of their functions. One stiff-jointed, staring, wooden effigy was the only prophecy of the enchanting doll family,--the blue-eyed, brown-eyed, flaxen-curled, sleeping, talking, walking, and dimpled darlings of latter-day children,--and the wooden-handled board, faced with horn and bound with brass, the sole representative of the child's picture-book of to-day. No children's books were printed in England until the middle of the eighteenth century; but one Thomas Flint, a Boston printer, appreciating the rhymes that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Goose, sang to his children, published them in book form and gave them a name than which none is more sure of immortality. This, however, was in 1719--too late for our little Mary Ball. She had only the horn-book as resource in the long, dark days when the fairest of all books lay hidden beneath the snows of winter--the horn-book, immortalized by Thomas Tickell as far back as 1636:--
"Thee will I sing, in comely wainscot bound, And golden verge enclosing thee around: The faithful horn before, from age to age Preserving thy invulnerable page; Behind, thy patron saint in armor shines With sword and lance to guard the sacred lines. The instructed handles at the bottom fixed Lest wrangling critics should pervert the text."
The "sword and lance" were in allusion to the one illustration of the horn-book. When the blue eyes wearied over the alphabet, Lord's prayer, and nine digits, they might be refreshed with a picture of St. George and the Dragon, rudely carved on the wooden back. The "instructed handle" clasped the whole and kept it together.
All orphans and poor children in colonial Virginia were provided with public schools under the care of the vestries of the parishes--"litle houses," says Hugh Jones in 1722, "built on purpose where are taught English, writing, etc." Parents were compelled to send their children to these schools, and masters to whom children were bound were required to give them schooling until "ye years of twelfe or thereabout" without distinction of race or sex. For instance, in the vestry book of Petsworth Parish, in Gloucester County, is an indenture dated Oct. 30, 1716, of Ralph Bevis to give George Petsworth, "a molattoe boy of the age of 2 years, 3 years' schooling; and carefully to instruct him afterwards that he may read well any part of the Bible." Having mastered the Bible, all literary possibilities were open to the said George. The gentry, however, employed private tutors in their own families,--Scotchmen or Englishmen fresh from the universities, or young curates from Princeton or Fagg's Manor in Pennsylvania. Others secured teachers by indenture. "In Virginia," says the _London Magazine_, "a clever servant is often indentured to some master as a schoolmaster." John Carter of Lancaster directed in his will that his son Robert should have "a youth servant bought for him to teach him in his books in English or Latin." Early advertisements in the _Virginia Gazette_ assured all "single men capable of teaching children to Read English, write or Cypher or Greek Latin and Mathematicks--also all Dancing Masters," that they "would meet with good encouragement" in certain neighborhoods.