Experiencing the dread effects of small-pox, she established a small-pox hospital, and introduced inoculation in her kingdom. She paid great attention to the purity of her coinage, and so strong was the faith of her subjects in the money coined under her supervision, that as late as 1830, the workmen at the mint at Milan were coining dollars with the head of the empress-queen and the date 1780. “These dollars were intended for the Levant trade; the people of the Greek Islands, being accustomed to trust in the purity of the coinage bearing the effigy of Maria Theresa, took it in exchange more readily than that of any other potentate.” The alliance of Maria Theresa with France was productive of dire evils to her family in after-years, as the fate of the beautiful Marie Antoinette, the youngest daughter of Maria Theresa, fully exemplifies. Regarding her other children, several of them were distinguished in after-life. Besides her eldest son, the Emperor Joseph II., Leopold, another son, was Grand-Duke of Tuscany for twenty-five years, when he succeeded to the Empire in 1790. Ferdinand, her third son, married the heiress of the House of Modena, and became Duke of Modena. Maximilian became Elector of Cologne. All of her daughters were beautiful and accomplished. The archduchesses Marianna and Elizabeth remained unmarried. The Archduchess Christina, her mother’s favorite, married Prince Albert of Saxony, which union, like that of her mother’s, was for love rather than political expediency. Christina exercised great influence over her younger sisters, Marie Antoinette, queen of France, and Caroline, queen of Naples. The Archduchess Amelia, another beautiful princess, married the Duke of Parma. Two other sisters, Joanna, and the lamented Josepha, died with small-pox in their early womanhood. The death of the Archduchess Josepha was particularly harrowing, as she contracted the dread disease by obeying her mother’s wishes that she should enter the family burial vault, previous to her departure for Naples, as she was then betrothed to the king of Naples, and go through with certain religious ceremonies which Maria Theresa considered to be binding upon a member of this illustrious family. The lovely Josepha expressed great alarm regarding this exposure to contagion, as her sister had lately died from small-pox; but for once, Maria Theresa allowed her religious bigotry to supplant her better reason, and the sad and tragic result of this filial obedience wrung the mother’s heart with anguish, all the more bitter, as her own commands had doubtless occasioned the death of her idolized child. A third daughter, Caroline, was then betrothed to the King of Naples, in place of her two sisters, whose successive deaths had prevented the contemplated union with the royal family of Naples, both of them having been affianced one after the other, to King Ferdinand.