It always has seemed strange to me that, in the prodigious interest felt in England for the American Indian, an interest shown in the thronging, gaping sight-seers that surrounded every taciturn red-man who visited the Old World, no fashions of ornament or dress were copied as gay, novel, or becoming. The Indian afforded startling detail to interest the most jaded fashion-seeker. The _Works of Captain John Smith_, Strachey’s _Historie of Travaile into Virginia_, the works of Roger Williams, of John Josselyn, the letters of various missionaries, give full accounts of their brilliant attire; and many of these works were illustrated. The beautiful mantles of the Virginia squaws, made of carefully dressed skins, were tastefully fringed and embroidered with tiny white beads and minute disks of copper, like spangles, which, with the buff of the dressed skin, made a charming color-study—copper and buff—picked out with white. Sometimes small brilliant shells or feathers were added to the fringes. An Indian princess, writes one chronicler, wore a fair white deerskin with a frontal of white coral and pendants of “great but imperfect-colored and worse-drilled pearls”—our modern baroque pearls. A chain of linked copper encircled her neck; and her maid brought to her a mantle called a “puttawas” of glossy blue feathers sewed so thickly and evenly that it seemed like heavy purple satin. A traveller wrote thus of an Indian squaw and brave:— “His wife was very well favored, of medium stature and very bashful. She had on her back a long cloak of leather, with the fur side next to her body. About her forehead she had a band of white coral. In her ears she had bracelets of pearls hanging down to her waist. The rest of her women of the better sort had pendants of copper hanging in either ear, and some of the children of the King’s brother and other noblemen, had five or six in either ear. He himself had upon his head a broad plate of gold or copper, for being unpolished we knew not which metal it might be, neither would he by any means suffer us to take it off his head. His apparel was like his wife’s, only the women wear their hair long on both sides of the head, and the men on but one side. They are of color yellowish, and their hair black for the most part, and yet we saw children who had very fine auburn and chestnut colored hair.” John Josselyn wrote of tawny beauties:— “They are girt about the middle with a Zone wrought with Blue and White Beads into Pretty Works. Of these Beads they have Bracelets for the Neck and Arms, and Links to hang in their Ears, and a Fair Table curiously made up with Beads Likewise to wear before their Breast. Their Hair they combe backward, and tye it up short with a Border about two Handsfull broad, wrought in works as the Other with their Beads.”