worth
while to take a passing glimpse at New York. This city had emerged from
New Amsterdam; the old vrouws, with their feather beds and their
multiplicity of petticoats and their scrupulously clean houses and their
floors with patterns traced in sand, had passed away. They had been most
picturesque in their way, though they left no enduring effect upon the
type which we now know.

Of the lives of the old burghers and their wives and families, their
characteristics and their customs, we have a most animated account in
the words of the master-writer, Washington Irving. Fine old fellows were
these burghers; and companionable and merry were their wives and
daughters. What a group is offered in the polite, yet firm Peter Minuit;
the pleasure-loving, but vacillating and not too scrupulous Wouter Van
Twiller, in frequent tilt with the irascible but honest Dominie
Bogardus; the honest, but ill-adapted Wilhelm Kieft; the grand old Peter
Stuyvesant, despotic, yet paternal in his rule, stubborn, but brave. Of
another kind, and in a lighter vein, we have a picture of the genial and
universal favorite, Antony Van Corlear, of whom Irving writes:

"It was a moving sight to see the buxom lasses, how they hung about the
doughty Antony Van Corlear--for he was a jolly, rosy-faced, lusty
bachelor, fond of his joke, and withal a desperate rogue among women.
Fain would they have kept him to comfort them while the army was away;
for besides what I have said of him, it is no more than justice to add,
that he was a kind-hearted soul, noted for his benevolent attentions in
comforting disconsolate wives during the absence of their husbands--and
this made him to be very much regarded by the honest burghers of the
city."

The vrouws were comfortable persons, not given to vivacity, yet in their
way individual, and that sometimes in a manner not altogether
commendable. We are told in the court records of Brooklyn that two
ladies, Mistress Jonica Schampf and Widow Rachel Luguer by name,
actually assaulted one Peter Praa, captain of militia, when he was
proudly leading his troops on training day, and so dealt with him in
"ivill inormities"--which included beating, hair-pulling, and other like
amenities--that his life was for a time thought to be forfeit. In the
matter of legal quarrels, too, there was vigor as well as characteristic
type among the vrouws; we are told that Dominie Bogardus and Anneke, his
wife, sued a female neighbor because the lat