Of the dazzling and beautiful array in our modern confectioners' shops little Priscilla and Hate-Evil could never have dreamed, even in visions. A few comfit-makers made "Lemon Pil Candy, Angelica Candy, Candy'd Eryngo Root & Carroway Comfits;" and a few sweetmeats came to port in foreign vessels, "Sugar'd Corrinder Seeds," "Glaz'd Almonds," and strings of rock-candy. Whole jars of the latter adamantine, crystalline, saccharine delight graced the shelves of many a colonial cupboard. And I suppose favored Salem children, the happy sons and daughters of opulent epicurean Salem shipowners, had even in colonial days Black Jacks and Salem Gibraltars. The first-named dainties, though dearly loved by Salem lads and lasses, always bore — indeed, do still bear — too strong a flavor of liquorice, too haunting a medicinal suggestion to be loved by other children of the Puritans. As an instance, on a large scale, of the retributive fate that always pursues the candy-eating wight, I state that the good ship Ann and Hope brought into Providence one hundred years ago, as part of her cargo, eight boxes of sweetmeats and twenty tubs of sugar candy, and on the succeeding voyage sternly fetched no sweets, but brought instead forty-eight boxes of rhubarb.

The children doubtless had prunes, figs, "courance," and I know they had "Raisins of the Sun" and "Bloom Raisins" galore. Advertisements of all these fruits appear in the earliest newspapers. Though "China Oranges" were frequently given to and by Judge Sewall, I have not found them advertised for sale till Revolutionary times, and I fancy few children had then tasted them. The native and domestic fruits were plentiful, but many of them were poor. The apples and pears and Kentish cherries were bettor than the peaches and grapes. The children gathered the summer berries in season, and the autumn's plentiful and spicy store of boxberries, checkerberries, teaberries or gingerbread berries with October's brown nuts. There were gingerbread and "cacks" even in the earliest days; but they were not sold in unlimited numbers. The omnipotent hand of Puritan law laid its firm hold on their manufacture. Judge Sewall often speaks, however, of Banbury cakes and Meers cakes; Meer was a celebrated Boston baker and confectioner. The colonists had also egg cakes and marchepanes and maccaroons.

There were children's books in those early days; not numerous, however, nor varied was the assortment from which Puritan youth in New England could choose. Here is the advertisement of one:

Somehow, from the suggestion of the title we should hardly fancy this to be an edifying book for children. John Cotton supplied them with