The likeness of Pocahontas (here) is dated 1616. It is in the dress of a well-to-do Englishwoman, a woman of importance and means. This portrait has been a shock to many who idealized the Indian princess as “that sweet American girl” as Thackeray called her. Especially is it disagreeable in many of the common prints from it. One flippant young friend, the wife of an army officer, who had been stationed in the far West, said of it, in disgust, remembering her frontier residence, “With a man’s hat on! just like every old Indian squaw!” This hat is certainly displeasing, but it was not worn through Indian taste; it was an English fashion, seen on women of wealth as well as of the plainer sort. I have a score of prints and photographs of English portraits, wherein this mannish hat is shown. In the original of this portrait of Pocahontas, the heavy, sombre effect is much lightened by the gold hatband. These rich hatbands were one of the articles of dress prohibited as vain and extravagant by the Massachusetts magistrates. They were costly luxuries. We find them named and valued in many inventories in all the colonies, and John Pory, secretary of the Virginia colony, wrote about that time to a friend in England a sentence which has given, I think to all who read it, an exaggerated notion of the dress of Virginians:— “Our cowekeeper here of James citty on Sundays goes accoutred all in ffreshe fflaminge silke, and a wife of one that had in England professed the blacke arte not of a Scholler but of a Collier weares her rough beaver hatt with a faire perle hatband, and a silken sute there to correspond.” Corroborative evidence of the richness and great cost of these hatbands is found in a letter of Susan Moseley to Governor Yardley of Virginia, telling of the exchange of a hatband and jewel for four young cows, one older cow and four oxen, on account of her “great want of cattle.” She writes on “this Last July 1650, at Elizabeth River in Virginia”:— “I had rayther your wife should weare them then any gentle woman I yet know in ye country; but good Sir have _no_ scruple concerninge their rightnesse, for I went my selfe from Rotterdam to ye haugh (The Hague) to inquire of ye gould smiths and found y’t they weare all Right, therefore thats without question, and for ye hat band y’t alone coste five hundred gilders as my husband knows verry well and will tell you soe when he sees you; for ye Juell and ye ringe they weare made for me at Rotterdam and I paid in good rex dollars sixty gilders for ye Juell and fivety and two gilders for ye ringe, which comes to in English monny eleaven poundes fower shillings. I have sent the sute and Ringe by your servant, and I wish Mrs. Yeardley health and prosperity to weare them in, and give you both thanks for your kind token. When my husband comes home we will see to gett ye Cattell home, in ye meantime I present my Love and service to your selfe &; wife, and commit you all to God, and remaine,