Customs and Fashions in Old New England

								

"lazie Squaes" when they saw the latter embroidering coifs instead of
digging in the fields. Mr. Brownell, the Boston schoolmaster in 1716,
taught "Young Gentle Women and Children all sorts of Fine Works as
Feather works, Filigree, and Painting on Glass, Embroidering a new Way,
Turkey-work for Handkerchiefs two new Ways, fine new Fashion purses,
flourishing and plain Work." We find a Newport dame teaching "Sewing,
Marking, Queen Stitch and Knitting," and a Boston shopkeeper taking
children and young ladies to board and be taught "Dresden and Embroidery
on gauze, Tent Stitch and all sorts of Colour'd Work." Crewels,
embroidery, silks, and chenilles appear frequently in early newspapers.
Many of the fruits of these careful lessons of colonial childhood
remain to us; quaint samplers, bed hangings, petticoats and pockets, and
frail lace veils and scarfs. Miss Susan Hayes Ward has resuscitated from
these old embroideries a curious stitch used to great effect on many of
them, and employed also on ancient Persian embroideries, and she points
out that the designs are Persian also. This stitch was not known in the
modern English needlework schools; but just as good old Elizabethan
words and phrases are still used in New England, though obsolete in
England, so this curious old stitch has lived in the colony when lost in
the mother country; or, it may be possible, since it is found so
frequently in the vicinity of Plymouth, that the Pilgrims obtained both
stitch and designs in Holland, whose greater commerce with the Orient
may have supplied to deft English fingers the Persian pattern.
Other accomplishments were taught to girls; "cutting of Escutcheons" and
paper flowers--"Papyrotamia" it was ambitiously called--and painting on
velvet; and quilt-piecing in a hundred different and difficult designs.
They also learned to make bone lace with pillow and bobbins.
The boys were thrust at once into that iron-handed but wholly wise
grasp--the Latin Grammar. The minds trained in earliest youth in that
study, as it was then taught, have made their deep and noble impress on
this nation. The study of mathematics was, until well into this century,
a hopeless maze to many youthful minds. Doubtless the Puritans learned
multiplication tables and may have found them, as did Marjorie Fleming,
"a horrible and wretched plaege," though no pious little New Englanders
would have dared to say as she did, "You cant conceive it the most
Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7, it is what nature itself
can't endure."
Great attention was paid to penmanship. Spelling was nought if the
"wrighting" were only fair and flowing. I have never read any criticism
of teachers by either parents or town officers save on the one question
of writing. How deeply children were versed or grounded in the knowledge
of the proper use of "Simme colings nots of interiogations peorids and
commoes," I do not know. A boundless freedom apparently was given, as