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 incontestible 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 bands of intimacy by occasional banquetings called teaparties.

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 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 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 woolen 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-educated damsels. As to the gentlemen, each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe and seemed lost in contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated, whereon sundry passages of Scriptures were piously portrayed: Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the whale, like Harlequin through a barrel of fire.

The parties broke up without noise and without confusion. They were carried home by their own carriages—that is to say, by the vehicles Nature had provided them-excepting such of the wealthy as could afford to keep a wagon. The gentlemen gallantly attended their fair ones to their respective abodes, and took leave of them with a hearty smack at the door, which as it was an established piece of etiquette, done in perfect simplicity and honesty of heart, occasioned no scandal at that time, nor should it at the present: if our great-grandfathers approved of the custom, it would argue a great want of reverence in their descendants to say a word against it.

In this dulcet period of my history, when the beauteous island of Manna-hata presented a scene the very counterpart of those glowing pic