"... Now Mamma what do you think I am going to ask for? A WIG. Eleanor Coffin has got a new one just like my hair and only 5 dollars. I must either cut my hair or have one. I cannot dress it at all _stylish_. Mrs. Coffin bought Eleanor's and says that she will write to Mrs. Sumner to get me one just like it. How much time it will save--in one year! We could save it in pins and paper, besides the _trouble_. At the Assembly I was quite ashamed of my head, for nobody had long hair. If you will consent to my having one do send me over a 5 dollar bill by the post immediately after you receive this, for I am in hopes to have it for the next Assembly--do send me word immediately if you can let me have one." This persuasive appeal was successful, for frequent references to the wig appear in later letters. Though false teeth and the fashion of filling the teeth were known even by the ancient Egyptians, the science of dentistry is a modern one. But little care of the teeth was taken in early colonial days, and the advice given for their preservation was very simple: "If you will keep your teeth from rot, plug, or aking, wash the mouth continually with Juyce of Lemons, and afterwards rub your teeth with a Sage Leaf and Wash your teeth after meat with faire water. To cure Tooth Ach. 1. Take Mastick and chew it in your mouth until it is as soft as Wax, then stop your teeth with it, if hollow, there remaining till it's consumed, and it wil certainly cure you. 2. The tooth of a dead man carried about a man presently suppresses the pains of the Teeth." I suppose this latter ghoulish cure would not affect the teeth of a woman; if, however, a seventeenth or eighteenth century dame could cure the toothache simply with a plug of mastic, she was much to be envied by her degenerate nineteenth-century sister with her long dentist's bill. If we can believe Josselyn, writing in 1684, New England women, then as now, lost their teeth at an early age. He speaks of them as "pitifully Tooth shaken." He recommended to relieve their misery a compound of brimstone, gunpowder, and butter, to be "rubbed on the mandible." This colonial remedy is still employed on New England farms. Burnaby, writing in 1759, said that New England dames had universally and even proverbially very indifferent teeth. The Abbe Robin says they were toothless at eighteen or twenty years of age, and attributes this premature disfigurement to tea-drinking and the eating of warm bread. When we read the composition of the tooth-powders and dentifrices used in early colonial days, we wonder that they had any teeth left to scour. Here is Mr. Ferene's "rare Dentifrice:"