It will be noted that Madam Padishal has black lace frills about the upper portion of the sleeve, at the arm-scye. English portraits previous to the year 1660 seldom show black lace, and portraits are not many of the succeeding forty years which have black lace, so in this American portrait this detail is unusual. The wearing of black lace came into a short popularity in the year 1660, through compliment to the Spanish court upon the marriage of the young French king, Louis XIV, with the Infanta. The English court followed promptly. Pepys gloried in “our Mistress Stewart in black and white lace.” It interests me to see how quickly American women had the very latest court fashions and wore them even in uncourtlike America; such distinct novelties as black lace. Contemporary descriptions of dress are silent as to it by the year 1700, and it disappears from portraits until a century later, when we have pretty black lace collars, capes and fichus, as may be seen on the portraits of Mrs. Sedgwick, Mrs. Waldo, and others later in this book. These first black laces of 1660 are Bayeux laces, which are precisely like our Chantilly laces of to-day. This ancient piece of black lace has been carefully preserved in an old New York family. A portrait of the year 1690 has a black lace frill like the Maltese laces of to-day, with the same guipure pattern. But such laces were not made in Malta until after 1833. So it must have been a guipure lace of the kind known in England as parchment lace. This was made in the environs of Paris, but was seldom black, so this was a rare bit. It was sometimes made of gold and silver thread. Parchment lace was a favorite lace of Mary, Queen of Scots, and through her good offices was peddled in England by French lace-makers. The black moiré hoods of Italian women sometimes had a narrow edge of black lace, and a little was brought to England on French hoods, but as a whole black lace was seldom seen or known. Ancient Black Lace. Ancient Black Lace. An evidence of the widespread extent of fashions even in that day, a proof that English and French women and American women (when American women there were other than the native squaws) all dressed alike, is found in comparing portraits. An interesting one from the James Jackson Jarvis Collection is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is of an unknown woman and by an unknown artist, and is simply labelled “Of the School of Susteman.” But this unknown Frenchwoman has a dress as precisely like Madam Padishal’s and Madam Stoddard’s as are Doucet’s models of to-day like each other. All have the whisk of rich straight-edged lace, and the tiny knots of velvet ribbon. All have the sleeve knots, but the French portrait is gay in narrow red and buff ribbon.