Within a few years we have shortened the long clothes worn by youngest infants; twenty-five years ago the handsome dress of an infant, such as the christening-robe, was so long that when the child was held on the arm of its standing nurse or mother, the edge of the robe barely escaped touching the ground. Two hundred years ago, a baby’s dress was much shorter. In the family group of Charles I and Henrietta Maria and their children, in the Copley family picture, and in the picture of the Cadwalader family, we find the little baby in scarce “three-quarters length” of robe. With this exception it is astonishing to find how little infants’ dress has changed during the two centuries. In 1889, at the Stuart Exhibition, some of the infant dresses of Charles I were shown. They had been preserved in the family of Sir Thomas Coventry, Lord Keeper. And Charles II’s baby linen was on view in the New Gallery in 1901. Both sets had the dainty little shirts, slips, bibs, mitts, and all the babies’ dress of fifty years ago, and the changes since then have been few. The “barrow-coat,” a square of flannel wrapped around an infant’s body below the arms with the part below the feet turned up and pinned, was part of the old swaddling-clothes; and within ten years it has been largely abandoned for a flannel petticoat on a band or waist. The bands, or binders, have always been the same as to-day, and the bibs. The lace cuffs and lace mittens were left off before the caps. The shirt is the most important change. Nowadays a little infant wears long clothes till three, four, or even eight months old; then he is put in short dresses about as long as he is. In colonial days when a boy was taken from his swaddling-clothes, he was dressed in a short frock with petticoats and was “coated” or sometimes “short-coated.” When he left off coats, he donned breeches. In families of sentiment and affection, the “coating” of a boy was made a little festival. So was also the assumption of breeches an important event—as it really is, as we all know who have boys. One of the most charming of all grandmothers’ letters was written by a doting English grandmother to her son. Lord Chief Justice North, telling of the “leaving off of coats” of his motherless little son, Francis Guilford, then six years old. The letter is dated October 10, 1679:—