Until mid-November did the morning cow-horn waken the burghers and their vrouws at sunrise; and when with cold winter the horn lay silent, they must have sorely missed their unfailing eye-opener.
Scarce had the last cow departed in the early morn from her master’s dooryard, before there rose in the gray light from each vast-throated chimney throughout the little town a faint line of pale, wavering smoke blown up in increasing puffs with skilful bellows from last night’s brands upon the hearth. And quickly the slender line of smoke grew and grew to a great cloud over each steep-roofed house, and soon with the smell of the burning brush and light pine that were coaxing into hot flames the sturdy oak back and fore logs, were borne forth also appetizing odors of breakfast to greet the early morn, telling of each thrifty huys-vrouw who within the walls of her cheerful kitchen was cooking a good solid Dutch breakfast for her mann.
Cans of buttermilk or good beer, brewed perhaps by the patroon, washed down this breakfast of suppawn and rye-bread and grated cheese and sausage or head-cheese; beer there was in plenty, in ankers, even in tuns, in every household. Soon mynheer filled his long pipe with native tobacco, and departed with much deliberation of movement; a sturdy, honest figure, of decent carriage, neatly and soberly and warmly clad, with thrift and prosperity and contentment showing in every curve of his too-well-rounded figure. Adown the narrow street he paused to trade in peltries or lumber, if he were middle-aged and well-to-do; and were he sturdy and young, he threshed grain on the barn-floor, or ground corn at the windmill, or felled wood on the hillside; or perchance, were he old or young, he fished in the river all day long,—a truly dignified day’s work, meet for any sober citizen, one requiring much judgment and skill and reflection.
And as he fished, again he smoked, and ever he smoked. “The Dutch are obstinate and incessant smokers,” chronicles the English clergyman Wolley, Chaplain of Fort James, New York, in 1678, “whose diet, especially of the boorish sort, being sallets and brawn and very often picked buttermilk, require the use of that herb to keep their phlegm from coagulating and curdling.” The word “boorish” was not a term of reproach, nor was the frequent appellation “Dutch bore,” over which some historians of the colony have seen fit to make merry, both boor and bore meaning simply boer, or farmer. “Knave meant once no more than lad; villain than peasant; a boor was only a farmer; a varlet was but a serving-man; a churl but a strong fellow.”
What fishing was to the goodman of the house, knitting was to the goodwife,—a soothing, monotonous occupation, ever at hand, ever welcome, ever useful. Why, the family could scarce be clothed in comfort without these clicking needles! A goodly supply of well-knit, carefully dyed stockings was the housekeeper’s pride; and well they might be, for little were they hidden. The full knee-breeches of father and son displayed above the buckled shoes a long expanse of sturdy hosiery, and the short petticoats of mother and daughter did not hide the scarlet clocks of their own making. From the moment when the farmer gave the fleece of the sheep into the hands of his women-kind, every step of its transformation into stockings (except the knitting) was so 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.