The baby dresses of olden times are either rather shapeless sacques drawn in at the neck with narrow cotton ferret or linen bobbin, or little straight-waisted gowns of state. All were exquisitely made by hand, and usually of fine stuff. But the babies in pioneer settlements a century ago had to share in wearing homespun. It is told of one in a log cabin in a New Hampshire clearing that when the grandmother rode out eighty miles on horseback to see her son's first baby, she shed bitter tears at beholding the child, but a few months old, clad in a gray woollen homespun slip with an apron or tier of blue and white checked linen. The mother, a frontier lass, dressed the infant according to the fashions she was accustomed to. Nothing could show so fully the costume of children in olden times as their portraits, and a series of such portraits of successive dates will be given in these pages. Many of them are asserted to be by the three well-known artists of colonial days,--Blackburn, Smibert, and Copley; a few are by Peale, Trumbull, and Stuart. I have accepted all family traditions as true, and in many cases believe them to be true, especially since there were few painters of any rank in the community, and no others who could paint portraits such as those which have been preserved. The Gilbert Stuarts and Trumbulls usually have some authentic pedigree. Many of these pictures have no artist's signature and are absolutely valueless as works of art, and probably meritless as likenesses; but as records of costume they are always of interest and historical worth. There is a certain sweetness in some of these old-time portraits; they are stiff and flat, but some of them have a quaintness that reminds me of the angels of the early Florentine painters. They have little grace of figure, but the details of costume make them pleasing even if they are not beautiful. The first child's portrait in this series is one of extraordinary interest. It is opposite page 4, and has never before been given to the public. It is the reputed miniature of the Pilgrim Father, Governor Edward Winslow, when a boy about six years of age, which would be in 1602; it is the only miniature in existence of any of the Pilgrims at any age. I have, in deference to the wishes of the Rev. Dr. William Copley Winslow of Boston (to whom I am indebted for it), entitled it the reputed miniature of the child Edward Winslow, though the term expresses neither his belief nor mine; and seems scarcely just to a portrait whose claims to authenticity are far more definite than those of many of the family portraits that have descended to us. [Illustration: Infant's Mitts, 16th Century]