LITTLE PHARISEES IN FICTION.
In that accurate and interesting study of Puritanism which Alice Morse Earle has rather laboriously entitled "Customs and Fashions in Old New England," there is a delightful chapter devoted to the little boys and girls who lived their chastened lives under the uncompromising discipline of the church. With many prayers, with scanty play, with frequent exhortations, and a depressing consciousness of their own sinful natures, these children walked sedately in the bleak atmosphere of continual correction. By way of pastime, they were taken to church, to baptisms, and to funerals, and for reading they had the "Early Piety Series," "Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes," "The Conversion and Exemplary Lives of Several Young Children," and a "Particular Account of Some Extraordinary Pious Motions and Devout Exercises observed of late in Many Children in Siberia,"—a safe and remote spot in which to locate something too
