As it took vessels at that period several months to come from France, the settlers were somewhat late in their knowledge of the foreign modes; but as the styles were the latest known, it was all the same in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Boston. That rotatory machine which now turns out fashions semiannually, now clipping a yard or so from the top of a dress and adding it to the bottom, here expanding a bonnet to the size of a parasol, then contracting it to dimensions less than the milliner’s bill for it; at one time running a flat iron down in front, and at another tacking a donkey’s load on behind, had not yet been invented. Paterfamilias recognized his own children, day after day, and even year after year, in the same modes and garments; the serviceable gray or serge, during week-days, and the decent, plain, unarresting, and unstunning habiliments, reverently donned for Sunday. The girls were not fast, although the colors of their calicoes were. Their bright carnations they wore all the time, only a little more so on Sunday evenings when the sparks lit them up, especially if a match was near. In general a homespun candor quaintly marked family and neighborhood intercourse, and homespun honesty, integrity, and good sense, public and private actions. Of course all ages have common types of roguery. Each, too, has its own special representatives who commit crimes according to a prevailing mode, and who might easily be put into the fashion-plates of the Old Bailey or Sing-Sing. In these respects the times whereof we speak kept company, to some extent, with their predecessors. But among the sparse settlements, the appropriators and spoilers of others’ property and rights had such a hard time to do a thriving business, and found that honest work laid up so much more at the year’s end, that after a little while they learned to prefer the ways of the virtuous, not from principle, but from interest, and left off courses that led to the poor-house, if they missed the jail. There were here and there dandies who imported their manners with their clothes; but as the girls then had the good sense to believe that these, so far from being superior to those of domestic growth, did not wear so long or well, and had a way of changing so often as to be worth less than the duty imposed to bring them in, such foreign importations gradually fell off.