plainest habits, and with minds as undisguised and
artless.... At one door were young matrons, at another the elders of the
people, at a third the youths and maidens, gaily chatting or singing
together while the children played round the trees."[211]

With little learning save the knowledge of how to enjoy life, under no
necessity of pretending to enjoy a false culture, conforming to no false
values and artificialities, these simple-hearted people went their quiet
round of daily duties, took a normal amount of pleasure, and in their
old-fashioned way, probably lived more than any modern devotee of the
Wall Street they knew so well. Madam Knight in her _Journal_ comments
upon them in this fashion: "Their diversion in the winter is riding
sleighs about three or four miles out of town, where they have houses of
entertainment at a place called the Bowery, and some go to friends'
houses, who handsomely treat them. Mr. Burroughs carried his spouse and
daughter and myself out to one Madam Dowes, a gentlewoman that lived at
a farm house, who gave us a handsome entertainment of five or six
dishes, and choice beer and metheglin cider, etc., all of which she said
was the produce of her farm. I believe we met fifty or sixty sleighs;
they fly with great swiftness, and some are so furious that they will
turn out of the path for none except a loaded cart. Nor do they spare
for any diversion the place affords, and sociable to a degree, their
tables being as free to their neighbors as to themselves."

And Mrs. Grant has this to say of their love of children and
flowers--probably the most normal loves in the human soul: "Not only the
training of children, but of plants, such as needed peculiar care or
skill to rear them, was the female province.... I have so often beheld,
both in town and country, a respectable mistress of a family going out
to her garden, in an April morning, with her great calash, her little
painted basket of seeds, and her rake over her shoulder to her garden
labors.... A woman in very easy circumstances and abundantly gentle in
form and manner would sow and plant and rake incessantly. These fair
gardners were also great florists."[212]

Doubtless the whole world has heard of that other Dutch love--for good
things on the table. This epicurean trait perhaps has been exaggerated;
Mrs. Grant herself had her doubts at first; but she, like most visitors,
soon realized that a Dutchman's "tea" was a fair banquet. Hear again