mouth, to hold her mask firmly in place. The “nagg” upon which Madam rode was without doubt a pacer, as were all good saddle-horses at that date. No one making any pretension to fashion or good style would ride upon a trotting-horse, nor indeed until Revolutionary times was a trotter regarded as of any account or worth. I do not think Madam Knight had a Narragansett pacer, for as soon as they were raised in any numbers they were sent at once to the West Indies for the use of the wives and daughters of the wealthy sugar-planters, and few New England people could afford to own them. The “horse furniture” of which she speaks included, of course, her side-saddle and saddle-bag, which held her travelling-wardrobe and her precious journal. Madam Sarah Knight did not end her days in Boston. She removed to Norwich, Conn., and in 1717 it is recorded that she gave a silver cup for the communion-service of the church there. The town in gratitude, by vote, gave her liberty to “sitt in the pue where she was used to sitt in ye meeting house.” She also kept an inn on the Livingston Farm near New London, and I doubt not a woman of her large experience kept a good ordinary. No rustling beds, no sad-colored pillow-bears, no saucy maids, no noisy midnight topers, no doubtful fricassees, no pumpkin-bread, and, above all, no bare-legged punch in her house. It is painful to record, however, that in 1718 the teacher of Benjamin Franklin and friend of Cotton Mather was indicted and fined for “selling strong liquor to Indians.” Altogether, Madam Knight was far ahead of the time in which she lived. She was a woman of great energy and talent. She kept a school when a woman-teacher was almost unheard of. She ran a tavern, a shop. She wrote poetry and a diary. She cultivated a farm, and owned mills, and speculated largely in Indian lands, and was altogether a sharp business-woman; and she must have been counted an extraordinary character in those early days. CHAPTER VI. TWO COLONIAL ADVENTURESSES. A “strange true story of Louisiana” so furnished with every attractive element of romance, so calculated to satisfy every exaction of literary art, that it seems marvellous it has not been eagerly seized upon and frequently utilized by dramatists and novelists, is that of a Louisiana princess--or pretender--whose death in a Parisian convent in 1771 furnished a fruitful topic of speculation and conversation in the courts of France, Austria, Russia, and Prussia. This Louisiana princess (were she no pretender) was the daughter-in-law of Peter the Great of Russia, wife of the Grand Duke Alexis, and mother of Peter II. of Russia. The story, as gathered from a few European authorities and some old French chronicles and histories of Louisiana, is this.