Authentic portraits of American women who came in the _Mayflower_ or in the first ships to the Massachusetts Bay settlement, there are none to my knowledge. Some exist which are doubtless of that day, but cannot be certified. One preserved in Connecticut in the family of Governor Eaton shows a brown old canvas like a Rembrandt. The subject is believed to be of the Yale family, and the chief and most distinct feature of dress is the ruff. It was a time of change both of men’s and women’s neckwear. A few older women clung to the ruffs of their youth; younger women wore bands, falling-bands, falls, rebatoes, falling-whisks and whisks, the “fifty other ways” which could be counted everywhere. Carlyle says:— “There are various traceable small threads of relation, interesting reciprocities and mutabilities connecting the poor young Infant, New England, with its old Puritan mother and her affairs, which ought to be disentangled, to be made conspicuous by the Infant herself now she has grown big.” These traceable threads of relation are ever of romantic interest to me, and even when I refer to the dress of English folk I linger with pleasure with those whose lives were connected even by the smallest thread with the Infant, New England. One such thread of connection was in the life of Lady Mary Armine; so I choose to give her picture here, to illustrate the dress, if not of a New Englander, yet of one of New England’s closest friends. She was a noble, high-minded English gentlewoman, who gave “even to her dying day” to the conversion of poor tawny heathen of New England. A churchwoman by open profession, she was a Puritan in her sympathies, as were many of England’s best hearts and souls who never left the Church of England. She gave in one gift £500 to families of ministers who had been driven from their pulpits in England. The Nipmuck schools at Natick and Hassamanesit (near Grafton) were founded under her patronage. The life of this “Truly Honourable, Very Aged and Singularly Pious Lady who dyed 1675,” was written as a “pattern to Ladies.” Her long prosy epitaph, after enumerating the virtues of many of the name of Mary, concludes thus:— “The Army of such Ladies so Divine This Lady said ‘I’ll follow, they Ar-mine.’ Lady Elect! in whom there did combine So many Maries, might well say All Ar-mine.” A pun was a Puritan’s one jocularity; and he would pun even in an epitaph. It will be seen that Lady Mary Armine wears the straight collar or band, and the black French hood which was the forerunner, then the rival, and at last the survivor of the “sugar-loaf” beaver or felt hat,—a hood with a history, which will have a chapter for the telling thereof. Lady Mary wears a peaked widow’s cap under her hood; this also is a detail of much interest.