In a society where marriages were formed very early, girls often wedding at sixteen or less, and where widows were wooed almost at the bier of the dear departed,[471] it is perhaps not surprising if "old maids" were ridiculed and sometimes despised. A woman became an "antient maid" at twenty-five.[472] In an often quoted passage of his _Life and Errors_, John Dunton thus praises a woman who remained single, not from "necessity," but from "choice," and who knew that time is a "dressing-room for Eternity, and therefore reserves most of her hours for better uses than those of the Comb, the Toilet, and the Glass": "It is true an _old_ (or super-annuated) maid in Boston is thought such a curse as nothing can exceed it (and look'd upon as a _dismal spectacle_); yet she, by her good-nature, gravity, and strict virtue, convinces all (so much as the fleering Beaus) that it is not her necessity, but her choice, that keeps her a Virgin. She is now about thirty years (the age which they call a _Thornback_), yet she never disguises herself, and talks as little as she thinks of Love. She never reads any Plays or Romances, goes to no Balls, or Dancing-match, as they do who go (to such Fairs) in order to meet with Chapmen. Her looks, her speech, her whole behaviour, are so very chaste, that but once (at Governor's Island, where we went to be merry at roasting a hog) going to kiss her, I thought she would have blushed to death."[473] [Footnote 471: Thus Judge Sewall went home with Widow Denison from her husband's funeral and "prayed God to keep house" with her: _Diary_, in 5 _Mass. Hist. Coll._, VII, 179 (March 26, 1718). _Cf._ also EARLE, _Customs and Fashions_, 45, 46. "The colonists married early and they married often. Widowers and widows hastened to join their fortunes and sorrows. The father and mother of Governor Winslow had been widow and widower seven and twelve weeks respectively, when they joined their families and themselves in mutual benefit, if not in mutual love. At a later day the impatient governor of New Hampshire married a lady but ten days widowed."--EARLE, _op. cit._, 86. On early marriages see WEEDEN, _Ecc. and Soc. Hist. of N. E._, II, 541, 739.] [Footnote 472: EARLE, _op. cit._, 38.] [Footnote 473: DUNTON'S _Life and Errors_ (Westminster, 1818), I, 102, referring to Boston in 1686. In DUNTON'S _Letters from New-England_ (ed. by WHITMORE for the Prince Society, Boston, 1867), 99, where this passage appears in a modified form, the age of a "thornback" is reduced to twenty-six years. The paragraph is also quoted by WEEDEN, _op. cit._, I, 299, 300; and EARLE, _op. cit._, 38, 39.]