E-text prepared by Louise Hope, Steven desJardins,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
()
Spelling, punctuation and capitalization are as in the original. Thisincludes the writer's various spellings of her own name.
The portrait of Anna Green Winslow, originally printed as theFrontispiece, has been moved down a few pages to avoid visual collisionwith the book cover.
DIARY OF ANNA GREEN
WINSLOW
A BOSTON SCHOOL GIRL OF 1771
EDITED BY
ALICE MORSE EARLE
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1895
Copyright, 1894,
By ALICE MORSE EARLE.
All rights reserved.
THIRD EDITION.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
This Book
IS DEDICATED
TO
THE KINSFOLK OF
ANNA GREEN WINSLOW
ANNA GREEN WINSLOW
iii
FOREWORD.
IN the year 1770, a bright little girl ten years of age, Anna GreenWinslow, was sent from her far away home in Nova Scotia to Boston, thebirthplace of her parents, to be "finished" at Boston schools by Bostonteachers. She wrote, with evident eagerness and loving care, for theedification of her parents and her own practice in penmanship, thisinteresting and quaint diary, which forms a most sprightly record, notonly of the life of a young girl at that time, but of the prim andnarrow round of daily occurrences in provincial Boston. It thus assumesa positive value as an historical picture of the domestic life of thatday; a value of which the little girl who wrote it, or her kinsfolkwho affectionately preserved it to our own day, never could havedreamed. To many New England families it is specially interesting as acomplete rendering, a perfect presentment, of the childish life oftheir great grandmothers, her companions.
It is an even chance which ruling thoughtiv in the clever little writer, a love of religion or a love of dress,shows most plainly its influence on this diary. On the whole,I think that youthful vanity, albeit of a very natural and innocentsort,