t
their hair, and wear their false locks, their borders, and towers like
comets about their heads?" These queries suggest decided lengths in head
adornment, probably even to the adoption of the "heart-breakers" worn in
1670, which are described as "False locks set on wyers to make them
stand at a distance from the head." One would think that such frank
admission of falsity might plead its own excuse; but one Puritan
minister describes the women of that time as "Apes of Fancy, friziling
and curyling of their hayr."

Enough of dress and fashion! Yet some record thereof is pertinent here,
for it shows us the gradual change which was being worked in the customs
and ideas of New England. The colonies were becoming conventional; when
modishness comes in at the door, individuality flies out at the window.
The ideal of the home was being modified, not to say altered. There had
always been among a certain element a love for the gauds and fripperies
of the world, but it was not until the opening of the second colonial
period that this element grew to the ascendency in New England. The old
primitive simplicity as a national attribute was beginning to fail, and
in its stead was being imported the conventional complexity of life in
the mother country. New England was becoming more deserving of her name;
she was growing to be a lesser England instead of a new civilization.
She was fast falling into the errors that were undermining the true
American spirit in the southern colonies.

We have seen the wardrobe of a New England woman, presumably one of
fashion, yet not of notable rank. Here was a great change from the era
when the majority of women wore homespun and furnished themselves with
the material which they wore as well as fashioned the garments with
their own hands. Of course there was still, and long continued to be, an
element that preserved the household traditions of the earlier settlers,
and thus the individuality of the life; but it had come to be in the
minority. The New England woman, taken from the representative class, no
longer whirled her spinning wheel and wove the garments for her wearing
and that of her family; she looked to her goodman to import these things
from England in the vessels which were now regularly arriving in the
home ports.

Another sign of the changed conditions of the New England home was the
matter of domestic service. In 1687, according to the writer of _The
Diary of a French Refugee_ in Bost