day should promote Margaret Brent to the position of their patron saint and protomartyr. Let us resume the journey to Virginia and study as best we may the aspects of feminine culture as found in the great Southern colony. Unfortunately, even in general matters there is great dearth of authoritative record of Virginia colonial days, and in the matter of the doings of individual women, or even of the sex generally, we find but little of interest. We can only gather up the fragments and judge from them of the feast of which they tell. Though Maryland may be considered a southern colony, and was indeed so regarded, we must not take Margaret Brent as representative of the feminine status or spirit in the South. The women of Virginia in the early colonial days were less independent, less assertive, than their sisters of New England, where women, as we have seen, occasionally took the lead in matters of public import. It was not so in Virginia. There women were held in less account, though not in less respect, than in the northern colonies. This was caused by a multiplicity of reasons, chief among which is the fact that in Virginia there was far greater difference of rank and station than in the North. The consequence of this was that, while in New England the woman was a needful and recognized adjunct of the home, that unit on which was based the civilization of the North, in Virginia she was more of ornament than necessity. Hence, while in the councils of New England woman had made herself felt and recognized as a power and thus had come to be held in mental esteem as a sex, though not always overtly, as we have seen, she was in Virginia still the lady, the almsgiver, the comforter and inspirer, but not the fellow-laborer, the equal in danger and toil and therefore in counsel. For it cannot be denied, save by him who has studied history with blind eyes, that in the matter of descent the colonists of Virginia were far superior to those who made to blossom the bleak shores of Massachusetts Bay. On both records there are too many blots of birth to make it safe for the ancestral tuft-hunter to delve very deep into the past in his search on American soil; but the balance of rank is with the Virginian. Therefore it is that, while we instinctively regard the early New England woman, taken collectively, as a worker, a true colonist, we turn to the representative Virginia woman of the same day with the expectation of seeing a dame dressed in a short skirt of divers colors, with huge ruff and high-heeled shoes, with mincing gait and some pretty little affectations of speech and bearing, and we are not disappointed in the expectation.