Colonial days in old New York

								

tiresome and tedious that it is wearying even to read of it,--cleaning,
washing, dyeing, carding, greasing, rolling, spinning, winding,
rinsing, knotting,--truly might the light, tidy, easy knitting seem a
pastime.
The endless round of “domesticall kind of drudgeries that women are
put to,” as Howell says, would prove a very full list when made out
from the life of one of these colonial housewives. It seems to us, of
modern labor-saved and drudgery-void days, a truly overwhelming list;
but the Dutch huys-vrouw did not stagger under the burden, nor shrink
from it, nor, indeed, did she deem any of her daily work drudgery. The
sense of thrift, of plenty, of capability, of satisfaction, was so
strong as to overcome the distaste to the labor of production.
She had as a recreation, a delight, the care of



    “A garden through whose latticed gates

      The imprisoned pinks and tulips gazed,”
a trim, stiff little garden, which often graced the narrow front
dooryard; a garden perhaps of a single flower-bed surrounded by
aromatic herbs for medicinal and culinary use, but homelike and
beloved as such gardens ever are, and specially beloved as such
gardens are by the Dutch. Many were the tulip bulbs and “coronation”
pink roots that had been brought or sent over from Holland, and were
affectionately cherished as reminders of the far-away Fatherland. The
enthusiastic traveller Van der Donck wrote that by 1653 Netherlanders
had already blooming in their American garden-borders “white and
red roses, stock roses, cornelian roses, eglantine, jenoffelins,
gillyflowers, different varieties of fine tulips, crown-imperials,
white lilies, anemones, bare-dames, violets, marigolds, summer-sots,
clove-trees.” Garden-flowers of native growth were “sunflowers, red and
yellow lilies, morning-stars, bell-flowers, red and white and yellow
maritoffles.” I do not know what all these “flower-gentles” were,
but surely it was no dull array of blossoms; nor were their glories
dimmed because they opened ever by the side of the homely cabbages and
lettuce, the humble cucumbers and beans, that were equally beloved and
tended by the garden-maker.
And the housewife had her beloved and homelike poultry. Flocks of
snowy geese went waddling slowly down the town streets, seeking the
water-side; giving rich promise of fat holiday dinners and plumper
and more plentiful feather-beds; comfortable and thriving looking as
geese always are, and ever indicative of prosperous, thrifty homes,
they comported well with the pipe-smoking burgher and his knitting
huys-vrouw and their homelike dwelling.
There was one element of beauty and picturesqueness which idealized
the little town and gave it an added element of life,--



            “Over all and everywhere

    The sails of windmills sink and soar

    Like wings of sea-gulls on the shore.”
The beauty of the windmills probably was not so endearing to the