Madam Davenport also furnished the rooms with tables and “chayres,” and “took care of yor apples that they may be kept safe from the frost that Mrs. Winthrop may have the benefit of them,” and arranged to send horses to meet them; so it is not strange to learn in a postscript that the hospitable kindly soul, who thus cheerfully worked to “redd the house,” had a “paine in the soles of her feet, especially in the evening;” and a little later on to know she was “valetudinarious, faint, thirsty, of little appetite _yet cheerful_.” All these examples, and many others help to correct one very popular mistake. It seems to be universally believed that the “business woman” is wholly a product of the nineteenth century. Most emphatically may it be affirmed that such is not the case. I have seen advertisements dating from 1720 to 1800, chiefly in New England newspapers, of women teachers, embroiderers, jelly-makers, cooks, wax-workers, japanners, mantua-makers,--all truly feminine employments; and also of women dealers in crockery, musical instruments, hardware, farm products, groceries, drugs, wines, and spirits, while Hawthorne noted one colonial dame who carried on a blacksmith-shop. Peter Faneuil’s account books show that he had accounts in small English wares with many Boston tradeswomen, some of whom bought many thousand pounds’ worth of imported goods in a year. Alice Quick had fifteen hundred pounds in three months; and I am glad to say that the women were very prompt in payment, as well as active in business. By Stamp Act times, the names of five women merchants appear on the Salem list of traders who banded together to oppose taxation. It is claimed by many that the “newspaper-woman” is a growth of modern times. I give examples to prove the fallacy of this statement. Newspapers of colonial times can scarcely be said to have been edited, they were simply printed or published, and all that men did as newspaper-publishers, women did also, and did well. It cannot be asserted that these women often voluntarily or primarily started a newspaper; they usually assumed the care after the death of an editor husband, or brother, or son, or sometimes to assist while a male relative, through sickness or multiplicity of affairs, could not attend to his editorial or publishing work.