her degenerate nineteenth-century sister with her long dentist's bill.

If we can believe Josselyn, writing in 1684, New England women, then as
now, lost their teeth at an early age. He speaks of them as "pitifully
Tooth shaken." He recommended to relieve their misery a compound of
brimstone, gunpowder, and butter, to be "rubbed on the mandible." This
colonial remedy is still employed on New England farms. Burnaby, writing
in 1759, said that New England dames had universally and even
proverbially very indifferent teeth. The Abbe Robin says they were
toothless at eighteen or twenty years of age, and attributes this
premature disfigurement to tea-drinking and the eating of warm bread.

When we read the composition of the tooth-powders and dentifrices used
in early colonial days, we wonder that they had any teeth left to scour.
Here is Mr. Ferene's "rare Dentifrice:"

"First take eight ounces of Irios roots, also four ounces of
Pomistone, and eight ounces of Cutel Bone, also eight ounces of
Mother of Pearl, and eight ounces of Coral, and a pound of Brown
Sugar Candy, and a pound of Brick if you desire to make them red;
but he did oftener make them white, and then instead of the Brick
did take a pound of fine Alabaster; all this being thoroughly
beaten and sifted through a fine searse the powder is then ready
prepar'd to make up in a past which must be done as follows:

To make the Said Powders into a past.

Take a little Gum Dragant and lay it in steep twelve hours, in
Orange flower water or Damask Rose Water; and when it is dissolved
take the sweet Gum and grind it on a Marble Stone with the
aforesaid Powder, and mixing some crums of white bread it will come
into a past, the which you may make Dentifrices, of what shape or
fashion you please, but long rowles is the most commodious for your
use."

Just fancy scouring your teeth with a commodious roll of cuttle-bone,
brick-dust, and pumice-stone!

Another tooth-powder was composed of coral, Portugal snuff, Armenian
bole, "ashes of good tobacco which has been burnt," and gum myrrh; and
ground up "broken pans"--coarse earthenware might be substituted for the
coral.

A very popular and much advertised tooth-wash was called "Dentium
Conservator." It was made and sold in New England by the manufacturer
and vendor of Bryson's Famous Bug Liquid--not an alluring companionship.
This person als