out late, as for instance a-courting, his return home
wakened the geese throughout the village, who sounded the unseasonable
hour with a terrible clamor. They made so much noise on summer Sundays
that they seriously disturbed church services; and became such nuisances
that at last the boys killed whole flocks.

Goose-picking was cruel work. Three or four times a year were the
feathers stripped from the live birds. A stocking was pulled over the
bird's head to keep it from biting. Sometimes the head was thrust into a
goose basket. The pickers had to wear old clothes and tie covers over
the hair, as the down flew everywhere. The quills, used for pens, were
never pulled but once from a goose. Palladius, _On Husbondrie_, written
in the fourth century, and Englished in the fifteenth century, tells of
goose-picking:--

"Twice a yere deplumed may they be,
In spryngen tyme and harvest tyme."

The old Latin and English times for picking were followed in the New
World. Among the Dutch, geese were everywhere raised; for feather-beds
were, if possible, more desired by the Dutch than the English.

In a work entitled _Good Order established in Pennsylvania and New
Jersey_, written by a Quaker in 1685, he urges that schools be provided
where girls could be instructed in "the spinning of flax, sewing, and
making all sorts of useful needle work, knitting of gloves and
stockings, making of straw-works, as hats, baskets, etc., or any other
useful art or mystery." It was a century before his "making of
straw-works" was carried out, not till larger importations of straw hats
and bonnets came to this country.

When the beautiful and intricate straw bonnets of Italian braid,
Genoese, Leghorn, and others, were brought here, they were too costly
for many to purchase; and many attempts, especially by country-bred
girls, were made to plait at home straw braids to imitate these envied
bonnets. Many towns claim the first American straw bonnet; in fact, the
attempts were almost simultaneous. To Betsey Metcalf of Providence,
Rhode Island, is usually accorded the honor of starting the straw-hat
business in America. The earliest recorded effort to manufacture straw
head-wear is shown in a patent given to Mrs. Sibylla Masters of
Philadelphia, for using palmetto and straw for hats. This Mrs. Masters
was the first American, man or woman, ever awarded a patent in England.
The first patent issued by the United States to a woman was also for an