“Two fine boys, those of Barbara’s,” said the governor’s wife, and then affectionately, “yet no finer than your sturdy little knaves.”
“Oh, ours are well enough for little yeomen, but the captain says his Alick is heir to a great estate, and is a gentleman born!” And the two young women laughed good-naturedly, while Priscilla laid her baby in the cradle, and Alice turned toward the door saying, “Well, I must be at home to mind the maids.”
“And I’ll be there anon. I trust you’ve good store of milk and cream. We did well enow without it for four years, but now we’ve had it for a while, one might as well be dead as lack it.”
“I’ve plenty, and butter beside, both Dutch and fresh,” replied Alice from outside the door, and in another ten minutes the wide kitchen recently added to William Bradford’s house on the corner of Leyden Street and the King’s Highway, now called Main Street, hummed again with the merry sounds of youthful voices, of the whisking of eggs, and grinding of spices, and stirring of golden compounds in wooden bowls, and chopping suet, and stoning raisins, and slicing citron, and the clatter of pewter dishes, which, by the way, with wooden ware were nearly all the “pottery” the Pilgrims possessed, hypothetical teapots and china cups to the contrary; for, since we all know that tea and coffee were never heard of in England until about the year 1666, and the former herb was sold for many years after at from ten to fifteen dollars per pound (Pepys in 1671 mentions it as a strange and barbaric beverage just introduced), it is improbable that either tea, teapot, or teacups ever reached America until after Mary Allerton, the last survivor of the Mayflower, rested upon Burying Hill.
All that day and part of the next the battle raged in the Bradford kitchen, for delicate appetites were in those times rather a defect than a grace, and hospitality largely consisted in first providing great quantities and many varieties of food, and then over-pressing the guests to partake of it. An “afternoon tea” with diaphanous bread and butter, wafer cakes, and Cambridge salts, as the only solid refreshment, would have seemed to Alice Bradford and her guests either a comic pretense or a niggardly insult, and very different was the feast to which as many as could sat down at a very early hour of the evening of the second day.
The company was large, for in the good Old Colony fashion it included both married and single persons, and would, if possible, have made no distinctions of age or position, but this catholicity had in the growth of the colony become impossible, and Mistress Bradford’s invitations were, with much searching of spirit and desire to avoid offense, confined principally to young persons, married and unmarried, likely to become associates of her sister Priscilla, a fair-haired, sweet-lipped, and daintily colored lass, reproducing Dame Alice’s own early charms.
“The Brewster girls must come, although I cannot yet be reconciled to Fear’s having married Isaac Allerton, and calling herself mother to Bart, and Mary and Remember—great grown girls!” exclaimed the hostess in consultation with her husband, and he pleasantly replied,—
“Oh, well, dame, we must not hope to guide all the world by our own wisdom; and certes, if Fear’s marriage is a little incongruous, her sister Patience is well and fitly mated with Thomas Prence. It does one good to see such a comely and contented pair of wedded sweethearts.”