“Edith, it was clever of you to remember,” now interposed the Governor’s lady, “and your get-up too, is very good.” She gazed with keen eyes at the girl’s deerskin robe, fringed at the sides, with its embroidered bodice, and the rows of colored beads that decorated her neck and her brown bedaubed arms. “But Edith,” she continued, “can’t you tell us something about these squaws?”
The girl looked somewhat dismayed for a moment; perhaps the sudden recollection of the last time she had faced her companions, the shame she had felt, and the punishment that had been meted out to her, caused the flush that showed even beneath her paint and grease.
“Why—I—oh, I don’t think there is much to tell,” she faltered. But encouraged by a nod from Mrs. Morrow she continued, “Lillie Bell lent me Washington Irving’s History of New York. It tells how Peter Minuit purchased the island from the Indians—the Dutch people called them Wilden—and where the bargain was made. It was close to a little block house inside a palisade of red cedars very near the traders’ hut in a place called Capsey, the place of safe landing. Washington Irving claimed that the name, ‘Manhattan,’ came from a tribe of Indians whose squaws always wore their husband’s hats, but I never knew that Indians wore hats, so I suppose it is just one of his jokes.”
There was a general laugh at Edith’s sally, and then the girls broke into loud applause. Perhaps they, too, were doing a little thinking and were anxious to show Edith that the deeds of the past were forgotten in her well-doing.
Annetje, after marshaling her forces, now led the girls through the quaint Dutch room to show them the many relics of past days. The wide-throated fireplace with its gay-colored tiles—still in a state of good preservation—with their queer scriptural figures, each picture with the number of the text in the Bible that told its story, awakened great interest.
Mahogany tables, queer little sideboards, and curiously carved chairs next claimed their attention, while the slaap-bauck, a funny little closet built in the side walls of the room, its shelf covered with a mattress, and with folding doors to open at night for a guest bed, won special favor.
A flowered tabby cloth, a foot-warmer, and an old chest called a kos, and which Nathalie declared was similar to the one that the industrious Marie de Peyster had filled with linen, was regarded with much awe. A nutwood case, a wardrobe called a kasten—filled with old Dutch costumes, grimy and moth-eaten—divided honors with a beautiful old cupboard with glass doors, displaying rare old blue and white Delft, said to have come from Holland years and years ago.
But curios pall in time, and so the girls were not at all reluctant to follow their hostesses into the quaint old kitchen, gayly decorated with the orange and blue of the Dutch Republic. Here, many exclamations of admiration escaped them when they saw the long table in the center of the room, with its bloom of hyacinths, gillyflowers, narcissus, daffodils, and tulips, all reminders of the little beau-pots that adorned the window sills, or peeped from the flower patches in front of the gable-roofed houses in the days of the first settlers.
Embowered in this floral display was a huge silver bowl hung with tiny silver spoons. This was the caudle dish, the inseparable accompaniment of feast gatherings or when the kinder were christened. From the hot, spicy odor that emanated from this relic of Dutch festivity the girls knew it held something good.
But there was no more time to admire, for it was now discovered that a flower was tied with daintily colored ribbon to the back of each chair. Recognizing that they were intended for place-cards, the girls flew hurriedly around the table trying to find the flower that matched the one on the cards they had received from the windmill.