l."

The "towers like comets" were doubtless commodes, which were in high
fashion in Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century until about
the year 1711, though I have never found that the word commode was used
in America. These commodes were enormously high frames of wire covered
with thin silk, or plaitings of muslin or lace, or frills of ribbon--and
sadly belied their name.

A simpler form of hair-dressing succeeded the commode; portraits painted
during the following half-century, such as those of Copley, Smibert, and
Blackburn, show an elegant and graceful form of coiffure, the hair
brushed back and raised slightly from the forehead, and sometimes curled
loosely behind the ears. At a later date the curls were almost
universally surmounted by a lace cap. Pomatum began to be used by the
middle of the century. In the _Boston News Letter_ of 1768, we read of
"Black White and Yellow Pomatum from six Coppers to Two Shillings per
Roll." The hair was frequently powdered. Hair-dressers sold powdering
puffs and powdering bags and powdering machines, and a dozen different
varieties of hair-powder--brown, marechal, scented, plain, and blue. By
Revolutionary times a new tower, or "talematongue," had arisen; the
front hair was pulled up over a stuffed cushion or roll, and mixed with
powder and grease; the back hair was strained up in loops or short
curls, surrounded and surmounted with ribbons, pompons, aigrettes,
jewels, gauze, and flowers and feathers, till the structure was half a
yard in height. This fashion was much admired by some; a young lover of
the day wrote thus sentimentally of a fair Hartford girl: "Her hair
covered her cushion as a plate of the most beautiful enamel frosted with
silver." A Revolutionary soldier wrote a poem, however, which regarded
from a different point of view this elaborate headgear in such a time of
national depression. His rhymes began thus:

"Ladies you had better leave off your high rolls
Lest by extravagance you lose your poor souls
Then haul out the wool, and likewise the tow
'Twill clothe our whole army we very well know."

The "Dress-a-la-Independance" was a style of hair-dressing with thirteen
curls at the neck, thus to honor the thirteen new States.

In the year 1771 Anna Green Winslow wrote in her diary an account of one
of these elaborate hair-dressings which she then saw. She ends her
description thus:

"How long she was under his opperation I k