For a time these words “pudding and pinner” were a puzzle; and long after pinner was defined we could not even guess at a pudding. But now I know two uses of the word “pudding” which are in no dictionary. One is the stuffing of a man’s great neck-cloth in front, under the chin. The other is a thick roll or cushion stuffed with wool or some soft filling and furnished with strings. This pudding was tied round the head of a little child while it was learning to walk. The head was thus protected from serious bruises or injury. Nollekens noted with satisfaction such a pudding on the head of an infant, and said: “That is right. I always wore a pudding, and all children should.” I saw one upon a child’s head last summer in a New England town; I asked the mother what it was, and she answered, “A pudding-cap”; that it made children soft (idiotic) to bump the head frequently. The word “pinner” has two meanings. The earlier use was precisely that of pinafore, or pincurtle, or pincloth—a child’s apron. Thus we read in the Harvard College records, of the expenses of the year 1677, of “Linnen Cloth for Table Pinners,” which makes us suspect that Harvard students of that day had to wear bibs at commons. All children wore aprons, which might be called pinners; these were aprons with pinned-up bibs; or they might be tiers, which were sleeved aprons covering the whole waist, sleeves, and skirt, an outer slip, buttoned in the back. A severe and ancient moralist looked forth from her window in Worcester, one day last spring, at a band of New England children running to their morning school. She gazed over her glasses reprovingly, and turned to me with bitterness: “There they go! _Such_ mothers as they must have! Not a pinner nor a sleeved tier among ’em.” The sleeved tier occupied a singular place in childish opinion in my youth; and I find the same feeling anent it had existed for many generations. It was hated by all children, regarded as something to be escaped from at the earliest possible date. You had to wear sleeved tiers as you had to have the mumps. It was a thing to endure with what childish patience and fortitude you could command for a short time; but thoughtful, tender parents would not make you suffer it long. There were aprons, and aprons. Pinners and tiers were for use, but there were elegant aprons for ornament. Did not Queen Anne wear one? Even babies wore them. The little Padishal child has one richly laced. I have seen a beautiful apron for a little child of three. It was edged with a straight insertion of Venetian point like that pictured here. It had been made in 1690. Tender affection for a beloved and beautiful little child preserved it in one trunk in the same attic for sixty-five years; and a beautiful sympathy for that mother’s long sorrow kept the apron untouched by young lace-lovers. This lace has white horsehair woven into the edge.