The expression, “the badge of poverty,” became a literal one when all persons receiving parochial relief had to wear a large Roman “P” with the initial of their parish set on the right sleeve of the uppermost garment in an open and visible manner. Likewise all pensioners were ordered to wear their badges “so they may be seen.” A pauper who refused to do this might be whipped and imprisoned for twenty-one days. Moreover, if the parish beadle neglected to spy out that the badge was missing from some poor pensioner, he had to pay half a crown himself. This legality was necessitated by actions like that of the English goody, who, when ordered to wear this pauper’s badge, demurely fastened it to her flannel petticoat. For this law, like all the early Virginia statutes, was simply a transcript of English laws. In New York, for some years in the eighteenth century, the parish poor—there were no paupers—were ordered to wear these badges. This mode of stigmatizing offenders as well as paupers was in force in the earlier days of all the colonies. Its existence in New England has been immortalized in _The Scarlet Letter_. I have given in my book, _Curious Punishments of By-gone Days_, many examples of the wearing of significant letters by criminals in various New England towns, in Plymouth, Salem, Taunton, Boston, Hartford, New London, also in New York. It offered a singular and striking detail of costume to see William Bacon in Boston, and Robert Coles in Roxbury, wearing “hanged about their necks on their outerd garment a D made of Ridd cloth sett on white.” A Boston woman wore a great “B,” not for Boston, but for blasphemy. John Davis wore a “V” for viciousness. Others were forced to wear for years a heavy cord around the neck, signifying that the offender lived under the shadow of the gallows and its rope. But return we to the metal badge which has caused this diversion to so gloomy a subject as crime and punishment. It was simply an oblong plate about three and one-half inches long, of humble metal—pinchbeck, or alchemy—but plated heavily with gold, therefore readily mistaken for solid gold; upon it the telltale initials “P P” had been stamped with a die, while smaller letters read “St. J. Psh.” These confirmed my immediate suspicions, for I had seen an order of relief for a stricken wanderer—an order for two weeks’ relief, where the wardens of “St. J. Psh.” ordered the sheriff to send the pauper on—to make him “move along” to some other parish. This gold badge was not unlike the metal badges worn on the left arm by “Bedlam beggars,” the licensed beggars of Bethlehem Hospital, the half-cured patients of that asylum for lunatics.