And in 1658 she makes her last curtsey before the Assembly and ourselves, a living proof of the fallacy of the statement that men do not like strong-minded women. For at that date, at the fully ripened age of fifty-seven, she appeared as heir of an estate bequeathed to her by a Maryland gentleman as a token of his love and affection, and of his constant wish to marry her. She thus vanishes out of history, in a thoroughly feminine rôle, that of a mourning sweetheart; yet standing signally out of colonial days as the most clear-cut, unusual, and forceful figure of the seventeenth century in Maryland. Another Maryland woman of force and fearlessness was Verlinda Stone. A letter from her to Lord Baltimore is still in the Maryland archives, demanding an investigation of a fight in Anne Arundel County, in which her husband was wounded. The letter is businesslike enough, but ends in a fiery postscript in which she uses some pretty strong terms. Such women as these were not to be trifled with; as Alsop wrote:-- All Complemental Courtships drest up in critical Rarities are meer Strangers to them. Plain wit comes nearest to their Genius, so that he that intends to Court a Maryland girle, must have something more than the tautologies of a long-winded speech to carry on his design. Elizabeth Haddon was another remarkable woman; she founded Haddonfield, New Jersey. Her father had become possessed of a tract of land in the New World, and she volunteered to come alone to the colony, and settle upon the land. She did so in 1701 when she was but _nineteen years old_, and conducted herself and her business with judgment, discretion, and success, and so continued throughout her long life. She married a young Quaker named Esthaugh, who may have been one of the attractions of the New World. Her idealized story has been told by L. Maria Child in her book _The Youthful Emigrant_. John Clayton, writing as early as 1688 of “Observables” in Virginia, tells of several “acute ingenious gentlewomen” who carried on thriving tobacco-plantations, draining swamps and raising cattle and buying slaves. One near Jamestown was a fig-raiser. In all the Southern colonies we find these acute gentlewomen taking up tracts of land, clearing them, and cultivating their holdings. In the settlement of Pennsylvania, Mary Tewee took two thousand five hundred acres in what is now Lancaster County. She was the widow of a French Huguenot gentleman, the friend of William Penn, and had been presented at the court of Queen Anne.