The early English settlers in the United States introduced many of the manners and customs of their native land. The ducking-stool was soon brought into use. Mr. Henry M. Brooks, in his carefully written work, called "Strange and Curious Punishments," published in 1886, by Ticknor & Co., of Boston, gives many important details respecting punishing scolds. At the present time, in some parts of America, scolding females are liable to be punished by means of the ducking-stool. We gather from a newspaper report that in 1889, the grand jury of Jersey City--across the Hudson River from New York--caused a sensation by indicting Mrs. Mary Brady as a "common scold." Astonished lawyers hunted up their old books, and discovered that scolding is still an indictable offence in New Jersey, and that the ducking-stool is still available as a punishment for it, not having been specifically abolished when the revised statutes were adopted. In Delaware, the State next to the south of New Jersey, the whipping-post is an institution, and prisoners are sentenced to suffer at it every week. The Common Scold Law was brought from England to Connecticut by the Puritans and settlers, and from Connecticut they carried it with them into New Jersey, which is incorrectly considered a Dutch state. In closing this chapter, we may state that a Dalziel telegram from Ottawa, published in the London newspapers of August 8th, 1890, says that Miss Annie Pope was yesterday charged before a police magistrate, under the provisions of an antiquated statute, for being a "common scold." She was committed for trial at the assizes, as the magistrate had no ducking-stool. FOOTNOTES: [42] Boyle's "Hedon," 1895. The Brank, or Scold's Bridle. [Illustration] The brank was an instrument employed by our forefathers for punishing scolds. It is also sometimes called the gossip's bridle, and in the Macclesfield town records it is designated "a brydle for a curste queane." In the term "queane" we have the old English synonym for a woman; now the chief woman, the Queen. The brank is not of such great antiquity as the ducking-stool, for the earliest mention of it we have been able to find in this country is in the Corporation records of Macclesfield, of the year 1623. At an earlier period, we have traces of it in Scotland. In Glasgow burgh records, it is stated that in 1574 two scolds were condemned to be "branket." The Kirk-session records of Stirling for 1600 mention the "brankes" as a punishment for the shrew. It is generally believed that the punishment is of Continental origin.