nable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might get home
before dark. The tea-table was crowned with a huge earthen dish well
stored with slices of fat pork fried brown, cut up into morsels, and
swimming in gravy. The company, being seated round the genial board and
each furnished with a fork, evinced their dexterity in launching at the
fattest pieces in this mighty dish--in much the same manner as sailors
harpoon porpoises at sea, or our Indians spear salmon in the lakes.
Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple pies or saucers full
of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast an
enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and
called doughnuts, or olykoeks--a delicious kind of cake at present
scarce known in this city, except in genuine Dutch families.

The tea was served out of a majestic delft teapot ornamented with
paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses tending pigs,
with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and
sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distinguished
themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge
copper tea-kettle which would have made the pigmy macaronies of these
degenerate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage a
lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately
nibbled and sipped with great decorum, until an improvement was
introduced by a shrewd and economic old lady, which was to suspend a
large lump directly over the tea-table by a string from the ceiling, so
that it could be swung from mouth to mouth--an ingenious expedient which
is still kept up by some families in Albany, but which prevails without
exception in Communipaw, Bergen, Flatbush, and all our uncontaminated
Dutch villages.

At these primitive tea-parties the utmost propriety and dignity of
deportment prevailed. No flirting nor coquetting; no gambling of old
ladies nor hoyden chattering and romping of young ones; no
self-satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen with their brains in
their pockets; nor amusing conceits and monkey divertisements of smart
young gentlemen with no brains at all. On the contrary, the young ladies
seated themselves demurely in their rush-bottomed chairs and knit their
own woollen stockings, nor ever opened their lips excepting to say _Yah,
Mynheer_, or _Yah ya, Vrouw_, to any question that was asked them,
behaving in all things like decent, well