worked it throughout to her own ends, persuading the girls that, having once embarked upon such an enterprise, their sole safety consisted in playing the game to its finish. Possibly she also was to some extent self-deceived; she was a descendant of the Carrs of Salisbury, who were noted as being very nervous and excitable, and she was herself of the most irritable and sanguine temperament. But it seems little probable that she was a victim rather than a ruler in the insanity which came of her fostering, for not only were her daughter and servant the most prominent members of the "Afflicted Children," but it was her personal enemies who first disappeared into the shadows of death, and it was her hand which guided the accusation that smote every victim, until the reign of terror grew beyond even her control. She stands as the female Robespierre of America, slaying for lust of power and afterward for fear of losing her own head; and she remains one of the most picturesque and yet gruesome figures that our history has produced. We shall leave this ominous figure standing on the threshold of New England as we turn southward to inquire as to the conditions existent in the other great colony of English America; but on our way it is worth while to take a passing glimpse at New York. This city had emerged from New Amsterdam; the old vrouws, with their feather beds and their multiplicity of petticoats and their scrupulously clean houses and their floors with patterns traced in sand, had passed away. They had been most picturesque in their way, though they left no enduring effect upon the type which we now know. Of the lives of the old burghers and their wives and families, their characteristics and their customs, we have a most animated account in the words of the master-writer, Washington Irving. Fine old fellows were these burghers; and companionable and merry were their wives and daughters. What a group is offered in the polite, yet firm Peter Minuit; the pleasure-loving, but vacillating and not too scrupulous Wouter Van Twiller, in frequent tilt with the irascible but honest Dominie Bogardus; the honest, but ill-adapted Wilhelm Kieft; the grand old Peter Stuyvesant, despotic, yet paternal in his rule, stubborn, but brave. Of another kind, and in a lighter vein, we have a picture of the genial and universal favorite, Antony Van Corlear, of whom Irving writes: "It was a moving sight to see the buxom lasses, how they hung about the doughty Antony Van Corlear--for he was a jolly, rosy-faced, lusty bachelor, fond of his joke, and withal a desperate rogue among women. Fain would they have kept him to comfort them while the army was away; for besides what I have said of him, it is no more than justice to add, that he was a kind-hearted soul, noted for his benevolent attentions in comforting disconsolate wives during the absence of their husbands--and this made him to be very much regarded by the honest burghers of the city."