Thus to pictures of pigs in the bean patch and cows in the clover, ducks in the water and calves in the meadow, the little ones fell peacefully to sleep, oblivious of the wild beasts and wilder men lurking in the primeval forests around the little clearing where the pioneers were making a home for themselves and their children.
When the babies' eyelids unclosed in the morning they opened on a busy scene, for whatever anxious vigils the father and mother might have kept through the night, toil began with the dawn. The boys were set to gathering firewood and drawing water, while the goede vrouw was busily preparing a substantial morning meal of suppawn and sausage before her husband began the day's work of loading beaver-skins or tilling the ground or hewing timber. A pioneer life means hard work for children as well as for their elders, and in the early years there was little time for play on the part of the youthful New Netherlander. As prosperity advanced and as negro servants were introduced, the privileges of childhood were extended and we find accounts of their sliding on their slees or sleds down the hills of Fort Orange and skating at New Amsterdam on the Collect Pond, which took its name from the Dutch kalk, or lime, and was so called from the heaps of oyster-shells accumulated by the Indians. The skates were of the type used in Holland, very long with curves at the front and rear, and, when metal could not be obtained, formed of ox-bone.
With an appetite bred of out-of-door work and play, and a breakfast hour at five or six in the morning, the children were hungry for the homely and substantial dinner when it eventually appeared at early noon. Whatever social visits were planned took place at the supper, which occurred between three o'clock and six. The tea-table, the chronicler tells us,
was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well stored with slices of fat pork and fried trout, 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 or 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.... The tea was served out of a majestic Delft tea-pot ornamented with paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses tending pigs, with boats sailing in the air and houses built in the clouds.... To sweeten the beverage a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum.
In the houses of the richer colonists, as prosperity advanced, shell-shaped silver boxes for sugar, called "bite and stir" boxes, were set on the table and, according to one authority, the lumps of sugar were of the nature of toffy with molasses added to the sugar.
The feast ended, the young folk went their homeward way lighted by the moon, or, late in the century, on dark nights by a lantern hung on a pole from every seventh house. When the curfew rang from the belfry "eight o'clock," lights were put out and all was made fast for the night, while the children's minds were set at rest by the tramp of the klopperman, who shook his rattle at each door as he passed from house to house through the dark hours, assuring the burghers that all was well and that no marauders were about.
If winter offered sports and pastimes, spring, summer, and autumn had each its own pleasures, fishing and clam digging, shooting and trapping, games with ball and slings, berry picking, and the gathering of peaches which fell so thickly that the very hogs refused them. The market days in New Amsterdam offered a long procession of delights to the young colonists. But merriest of all were the holidays which were observed in New Netherland after much the same fashion as in the old home.