Home Life in Colonial Days

by Alice Morse Earle

In rural Pennsylvania a charming and friendly custom prevailed among country folk of all nationalities—the "metzel-soup," the "taste" of sausage-making. This is the anglicized form of Metzelsuppe; metzeln means to kill and cut to pieces—especially for sausage meat. When each farmer butchered and made sausage, a great dish heaped with eight or ten pounds of the new sausages was sent to each intimate friend. The recipient would in turn send metzel-soup when his family killed and made sausage. If the metzel-soup were not returned, the minister promptly learned of it and set at work to effect a reconciliation between the offended parties. The custom is dying out, and in many towns is wholly vanished.

Sewall seemed to regard it as a duty, and doubtless it was also a pleasure, to pray for and with dying friends. His is not the only old-time diary that I have read in which those long prayers are recorded, nor are his surprised occasional records of the impatience of dying friends the only ones I have seen. A very sick man, even though he were a Puritan, might occasionally tire of the prayers of laymen.

Sewall was ever ready to signify his good will and interest in his neighbors' advancing fortunes, by driving a nail at a ship-building or a pin at a house-raising, by laying a stone in a wall or a foundation of a house, the latter, apparently, in the case of some very humble homes. He, the Judge of the Supreme Court, served on the watch, walking and guarding the streets and his neighbors' safety just as faithfully as did the humblest citizen.

CHAPTER XVII
OLD-TIME FLOWER GARDENS

Adjoining the street through which I always, in my childhood, walked slowly each Sunday, on my way to and from church, was a spot to detain lingering footsteps—a beautiful garden laid out and tenanted like the gardens of colonial days, and serene with the atmosphere of a worthy old age; a garden which had been tended for over half a century by a withered old man and his wife, whose golden wedding was spent in the house they had built, and in the garden they had planted when they were bride and groom. His back was permanently bowed with constant weeding and pruning and planting and hoeing, and his hands and face were brown as the soil he cultivated. The "hot-glowing" crimson peonies, seedlings which the wife had sown in her youth, had become great shrubs, fifteen or twenty feet in circumference. The flowering shrubs were trees. Vigorous borders of box crowded across the paths and towered on either side, till one could scarcely walk through them. There were beautiful fairy groves of fox gloves "gloriously freckled, purple, and white," and tall Canterbury bells; and at stiffly regular intervals were set flowering almonds, St. Peter's wreath, Persian lilacs, "Moses in the burning bush," which shrub was rare in our town, and "laburnums rich in streaming gold, syringas ivory pure." At the lower ends of the flower borders were rows of "honey-blob" gooseberries, and aged currant bushes, gray with years, overhung by a few patriarchal quince and crab-apple trees, in whose low-spreading gnarled branches I spent many a summer afternoon, a happy visitor, though my own home garden was just as beautiful, old-fashioned, and flower-filled.

The varying grades of city streets had gradually risen around the garden until it lay depressed several feet below the level of the adjoining streets, a pleasant valley,—like Avalon,—

"Deep-meadowed, happy, fair, with orchard lawns,
And bowery hollows crown'd with summer seas."

A flight of stone steps led down to it,—steps very steep, narrow, and slippery with green moss, and ladies'-delights that crowded and blossomed in every crack and crevice of the stones. On each side arose terraces to the street, and in the spring these terraces flushed a mass of vivid, glowing rose-color from blooming moss-pink, forming such a glory that pious church-going folk from the other end of the town did not think it wicked to walk thither, on a Sunday morn in May, to look at the rosy banks that sloped to the valleyed garden, as they had walked there in February or March to see

"Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wear on his smiling face a dream of spring,"

in the shape of the first crocuses and snowdrops that opened beside a snow-drift still lingering on a shaded bank; and to watch the first benumbed honey-bees who greeted every flower that bloomed in that cherished spot, and who buzzed in bleak March winds over the purple crocus and "blue flushing" grape-hyacinth as cheerfully as though they were sipping the scarlet poppies in sunny August.