The Mother of Washington and Her Times. Sara Agnes Rice Pryor
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An Old Doll.
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.
Horn-book.
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.
But this was after Mary Ball's childhood. Days of silent listening to the talk of older people were probably her early school days. In Virginia there were books, true, but the large libraries of thirty years later had not yet been brought over. There was already a fine library at Stratford in Westmoreland. Colonel Byrd's library was considered vast when it attained to "3600 titles." Books were unfashionable at court in England. No power in heaven or earth has been yet found to keep the wise and witty from writing them, but in the first years of the eighteenth century it was very bad form to talk about them. Later, even, the first gentleman in England was always furious at the sight of books. Old ladies used to declare that "Books were not fit articles for drawing-rooms." "Books!" said Sarah Marlborough; "prithee, don't talk to me about books! The only books I know are men and cards."
But there were earnest talkers in Virginia, and the liveliest interest in all kinds of affairs. It was a picturesque time in the life of the colony. Things of interest were always happening. We know this of the little Mary—she was observant and wise, quiet and reflective. She had early opinions, doubtless, upon the powers of the vestries, the African slave-trade, the right of a Virginia assembly to the privileges of parliament, and other grave questions of her time. Nor was the time without its vivid romances. Although no witch was ever burnt in Virginia, Grace Sherwood, who must have been young and comely, was arrested "under suspetion of witchcraft," condemned by a jury of old women because of a birth-mark on her body, and sentenced to a seat in the famous ducking-stool, which had been, in the wisdom of the burgesses, provided to still the tongues of "brabbling women,"—a sentence never inflicted, for a few glances at her tearful eyes won from the relenting justice the order that this ducking was to be "in no wise without her consent, or if the day should be rainy, or in any way to endanger her health!"
Ducking-stool.
Stories were told around the fireside on winter nights, when the wooden shutters rattled—for rarely before 1720 were "windows sasht with crystal glass." The express, bringing mails from the north, had been scalped by Indians. Four times in one year had homeward-bound ships been sunk by pirates. Men, returning to England to receive an inheritance, were waylaid on the high seas, robbed, and murdered. In Virginia waters the dreaded "Blackbeard" had it all his own way for a while. Finally, his grim head is brought home on the bowsprit of a Virginia ship, and a drinking-cup, rimmed with silver, made of the skull that held his wicked brains. Of course, it could not be expected that he could rest in his grave under these circumstances, and so, until fifty years ago (when possibly the drinking-cup was reclaimed by his restless spirit), his phantom sloop might be seen spreading its ghostly sails in the moonlight on the York River and putting into Ware Creek to hide ill-gotten gains in the Old Stone House. Only a few years before had the dreadful Tuscaroras risen with fire and tomahawk in the neighbor colony of North Carolina.
The Old Stone House.
Nearer home, in her own neighborhood, in fact, were many suggestive localities which a child's fears might people with supernatural spirits. Although there were no haunted castles with dungeon, moat, and tower, there were deserted houses in lonely places, with open windows like hollow eyes, graveyards half hidden by tangled creepers and wept over by ancient willows. About these there sometimes hung a mysterious, fitful light which little Mary, when a belated traveller in the family coach, passed with bated breath, lest warlocks or witches should issue therefrom, to say nothing of the interminable stretches of dark forests, skirting ravines fringed with poisonous vines, and haunted by the deadly rattlesnake. People talked of strange, unreal lights peeping through the tiny port-holes of the old Stone House on York River—that mysterious fortress believed to have been built by John Smith—while, flitting across the doorway, had been seen the dusky form of Pocahontas, clad in her buckskin robe, with a white plume in her hair: keeping tryst, doubtless, with Captain Smith, with none to hinder, now that the dull, puritanic John Rolfe was dead and buried; and, as we have said, Blackbeard's sloop would come glimmering down the river, and the bloody horror of a headless body would land and wend its way to the little fortress which held his stolen treasure. Moreover, Nathaniel Bacon had risen from his grave in York River, and been seen in the Stone House with his compatriots, Drummond, Bland, and