The elegancies of the Early Victorian era—French, deportment, fine needlework, sewing and embroidery, bead and shell work, the making of wax flowers, sketching in pencil and watercolors—were taught the young ladies by private instruction. Their culture was continued in the Lyceum and Female Reading Society. Anne C. Lynch and Martin Tupper were the fashion; and they read largely literature commended in the “Lady’s Book,” to which every household with any pretension to gentility subscribed. Mr. Godey averred that his magazine should be “a shrine for the offerings of those who wish to promote the mental, moral, and religious improvement of woman. For female genius it is the appropriate sphere. It will contain a new and elegant engraving in _every number_—also, music and patterns for ladies’ muslin work and other embellishments.” The Cape Cod female mind took on with some readiness this shining veneer, but its native vigor remained unimpaired; and women conducted their domestic affairs, or their social amenities at home and in foreign ports, as became the wives of their sailor husbands. At Barnstable and thereabouts domestic service was supplied sometimes by the village girls, sometimes by the Mashpee Indians. An old lady remembers her nurse Dinah, a tall, handsome creature belonging to the clan of “Judge” Greenough, who governed his people with wisdom and good sense; and she recalls a story of the days when the mail arrived by post-rider and an old squaw held up the embarrassed carrier to beg a ride. He permitted her to mount, but, putting his horse to the canter, hoped to shake her off before he reached the town. To no end: she clung like a leech, and called out cheerily, “That’s right, massa. Go it! When I ride I love to ride!” It is easy to be diverted by such anecdotes. With all their seeming primness, the people had a rollicking humor, of which countenances hidden in coal-scuttle bonnets and chins rigid in portentous stocks were no index.