Women curst with a shrewish tongue were often punished in Puritan colonies. In 1647 it was ordered that “common scoulds” be punished in Rhode Island by ducking, but I find no records of the punishment being given. In 1649 several women were prosecuted in Salem, Mass., for scolding; and on May 15, 1672, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered that scolds and railers should be gagged or “set in a ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times,” but I do not believe that this law was ever executed in Massachusetts. Nor was it in Maine, though in 1664 a dozen towns were fined forty shillings each for having no “coucking-stool.” Equally severe punishments were inflicted for other crimes. Katharine Ainis, of Plymouth, was publicly whipped on training day, and ordered to wear a large B cut in red cloth “sewed to her vper garment.” In 1637 Dorothy Talbye, a Salem dame, for beating her husband was ordered to be bound and chained to a post. At a later date she was whipped, and then was hanged for killing her child, who bore the strange name of Difficulty. No one but a Puritan magistrate could doubt, from Winthrop’s account of her, that she was insane. Another “audatious” Plymouth shrew, for various “vncivill carriages” to her husband, was sentenced to the pillory; and if half that was told of her was true, she richly deserved her sentence; but, as she displayed “greate pensiveness and sorrow” before the simple Pilgrim magistrates, she escaped temporarily, to be punished at a later date for a greater sin. The magistrates firmly asserted in court and out that “meekness is ye chojsest orniment for a woman.” Joane Andrews sold in York, Maine, in 1676, two stones in a firkin of butter. For this cheatery she “stood in towne meeting at York and at towne meeting at Kittery till 2 hours bee expended, with her offense written upon a paper in capitall letters on her forehead.” The court record of one woman delinquent in Plymouth, in 1683, is grimly comic. It seems that Mary Rosse exercised what was called by the “painful” court chronicler in a triumph of orthographical and nomenclatory art, an “inthewsiastickall power” over one Shingleterry, a married man, who cringingly pleaded, as did our first father Adam, that “hee must doo what shee bade him”--or, in modern phrase, that she hypnotized him. Mary Rosse and her uncanny power did not receive the consideration that similar witches and works do nowadays. She was publicly whipped and sent home to her mother, while her hypnotic subject was also whipped, and I presume sent home to his wife.