their shoes at the door and entering devoutly in their stocking
feet. After scrubbing the floor, sprinkling it with fine white sand,
which was curiously stroked into angles, and curves, and rhomboids with
a broom--after washing the windows, rubbing and polishing the
furniture, and putting a new bunch of evergreen in the fireplace--the
window shutters were again closed to keep out the flies, and the room
carefully locked up until the revolution of time brought round the
weekly cleaning day.

As to the family, they always entered in at the gate, and most generally
lived in the kitchen. To have seen a numerous household assembled round
the fire one would have imagined that he was transported back to those
happy days of primeval simplicity which float before our imagination
like golden visions. The fireplaces were of a truly patriarchal
magnitude, where the whole family, old and young, master and servant,
black and white--nay, even the very cat and dog--enjoyed a community of
privilege and had each a right to a corner. Here the old burgher would
sit in perfect silence, puffing his pipe, looking in the fire with
half-shut eyes, and thinking of nothing for hours together; the goede
vrouw on the opposite side would employ herself diligently in spinning
yarn or knitting stockings. The young folks would crowd around the
hearth, listening with breathless attention to some old crone of a negro
who was the oracle of the family, and who, perched like a raven in a
corner of the chimney, would croak forth for a long winter afternoon a
string of incredible stories about New England witches, grisly ghosts,
horses without heads, and hair-breadth escapes and bloody encounters
among the Indians.

In those happy days a well-regulated family always rose with the dawn,
dined at eleven, and went to bed at sunset. Dinner was invariably a
private meal, and the fat old burghers showed incontestable signs of
disapprobation and uneasiness at being surprised by a visit from a
neighbor on such occasions. But, though our worthy ancestors were thus
singularly adverse to giving dinners, yet they kept up the social bonds
of intimacy by occasional banquetings called tea-parties.

These fashionable parties were generally confined to the higher
classes--or noblesse--that is to say, such as kept their own cows and
drove their own wagons. The company commonly assembled at three o'clock
and went away about six, unless it was in winter time, when the
fashio