Customs and Fashions in Old New England

								

natural result--the survival of the fittest--may account for the present
tough endurance of the New England people.
Nor was the christening day the only Lord's Day when the baby graced the
meeting-house. Puritan mothers were all church lovers and strict
church-goers, and all the members of the household were equally
church-attending; and if the mother went to meeting the baby had to go
also. I have heard of a little wooden cage or frame in the meeting-house
to hold Puritan babies who were too young, or feeble, or sleepy to sit
upright.
Of the dress of these Puritan infants we know but little. Linen formed
the chilling substructure of their attire--little, thin, linen,
short-sleeved, low-necked shirts. Some of them have been preserved, and
with their tiny rows of hemstitching and drawn work and the narrow edges
of thread-lace are pretty and dainty even at the present day. At the
rooms of the Essex Institute in Salem may be seen the shirt and mittens
of Governor Bradford's infancy. The ends of the stiff, little, linen
mittens have evidently been worn off by the active friction of baby
fingers and then been replaced by patches of red and white cheney or
calico. The gowns are generally rather shapeless, large-necked sacks of
linen or dimity, made and embroidered, of course, entirely by hand, and
drawn into shape by narrow, cotton ferret or linen bobbin. In summer and
winter the baby's head was always closely covered with a cap, or
"biggin" often warmly wadded, which was more comforting in winter than
comfortable in summer.
The seventeenth century baby slept, as does his nineteenth century
descendant, in a cradle, frequently made of heavy panelled or carved
wood, and always deeply hooded to protect him from the constant drafts.
Twins had cradles with hoods at both ends. Judge Sewall paid sixteen
shillings for a wicker cradle for one of his many children. The baby was
carried upstairs, when first moved, with silver and gold in his hand to
bring him wealth and cause him always to rise in the world, just as
babies are carried upstairs by superstitious nurses nowadays, and he had
"scarlet laid on his head to keep him from harm." He was dosed with
various nostrums that held full sway in the nursery even until Federal
days, "Daffy's Elixir" being perhaps the most widely known, and hence
the most widely harmful. It was valuable enough (in one sense of the
word) to be sharply fought over in old England in Queen Anne's time, and
to have its disputed ownership the cause of many lawsuits.
Advertisements of it frequently appear in the Boston News Letter and
other New England newspapers of early date.
The most common and largely dosed diseases of early infancy were, I
judge from contemporary records, to use the plain terms of the times,
worms, rickets, and fits. Curiously enough, Sir Thomas Browne, in the
latter part of the seventeenth century, wrote of the rickets as a new