famous--long infamous--Captain Kidd. Now, passing by the growing towns of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Annapolis, and the fading one of Saint Mary's, let us seek the Old Dominion and learn the conditions which there obtained in the days prior to the coming of the Revolution. The influx of Cavaliers during the later portion of the seventeenth century had had its effect upon Virginia society, already prone to graft the lighter of English manners and customs upon those proper to the colonial conditions. In Virginia the women were free, untrammelled by public sentiment, to indulge their taste for gay apparel, to trick themselves off with all the gauds and gewgaws that fashion could invent. The towering heads of hair which were such an offence in the eyes of our Puritan forefathers were tolerated, if not admired, by our grandsires of Virginia; the brocade skirt, the exposed bosom, the embroidered jupe, straight corset, and gay farthingale were entirely congenial to the theories of the Virginia colonists, men as well as women. The gaiety in dress was answered by gaiety of life. With a rapidity that seemed strange in the face of the preference for the life of the country, the towns had become more populous and accessible; and they served as _foci_ for the social functions and life. Yet, even though there was such rout and revel at Williamsburg and kindred towns, it was in the houses of the great planters that one saw the true Virginia social existence, that one found the Virginia woman of the time in her truest apparition. Under the influences of the coming of the Cavaliers and the Huguenots--for the descendants of the latter perpetuated the restless gaiety of their forsaken land rather than the austerities of the faith which had been the cause of their exile--there had arisen in Virginia something of a cult of the social function. The court of Sir William Berkeley had been a miniature reproduction of that of his king, and though some of the traditions of his time passed away with the old governor, the main spirit survived in the ideals of Virginia society. As in all such cases there must be, there was a certain amount of discernible hollowness; but, as a rule, there were to be found in the best and most typical houses of Virginia the graces of the society of the Restoration without its vices, its courtesy without its affectations. An aristocracy was growing where none had been before, or at least where there had been but a feeble and ineffectual leaven of one. At this period, the woman of Virginia was the typical and representative lady of English America.