York to school in New England at the latter part of the seventeenth
century. An "account of his new linen and clothes" has been preserved,
and it gives an excellent idea of the clothing of a son of wealthy
people at that time. It reads thus, in the old spelling:--

"Eleven new shirts,
4 pair laced sleves,
8 Plane Cravats,
4 Cravats with Lace,
4 Stripte Wastecoats with black buttons,
1 Flowered Wastecoat,
4 New osenbrig britches,
1 Gray hat with a black ribbon,
1 Gray hat with a blew ribbon,
1 Dousin black buttons,
1 Dousin coloured buttons,
3 Pair gold buttons,
3 Pair silver buttons,
2 Pair Fine blew Stockings,
1 Pair Fine red Stockings,
4 White Handkerchiefs,
2 Speckled Handkerchiefs,
5 Pair Gloves,
1 Stuff Coat with black buttons,
1 Cloth Coat,
1 Pair blew plush britches,
1 Pair Serge britches,
2 Combs,
1 Pair new Shooes,
Silk & Thred to mend his Cloathes."

Osenbrig was a heavy, strong linen. This would seem to be a summer
outfit, and scarcely warm enough for New England winters. Other
schoolboys at that date had deerskin breeches.

Leather was much used, especially in the form of tanned buckskin
breeches and the deerskin hunters' jackets, which have always and
deservedly been a favorite wear, since they are one of the most
appropriate, useful, comfortable, and picturesque garments ever worn by
men in any active outdoor life.

Soon in the larger cities and among wealthy folk a much more elaborate
and varied style of dress became fashionable. The dress of little girls
in families of wealth was certainly almost as formal and elegant as the
dress of their mammas, and it was a very hampering and stiff dress. They
wore vast hoop-petticoats, heavy stays, and high-heeled shoes. Their
complexions were objects of special care; they wore masks of cloth or
velvet to protect them from the tanning rays of the sun, and long-armed
gloves. Little Dolly Payne, who afterwards became the wife of President
Madison, went to school wearing "a white linen mask to keep every ray of
sunshine from the complexion, a sunbonnet sewed on her head every
morning by her careful mother, and long gloves covering the hands and
arms." Our present love of outdoor life, of athletic sports, and our
indifference to being sunburned, makes such painstaking vanity seem most
unbearably tiresome.

In 1737 Colonel John L