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 imaginations
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 into 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 the corner of a
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 averse to giving dinners, yet they kept up the social bands of
intimacy by occasional banquettings, 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 waggons. The company commonly assembled at three o'clock, and went
away about six, unless it was in winter time, when the fashionable 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 ap