Colonial Days in Old New York, By Alice Morse Earle.
(David Nutt.)—This a very careful and loving study of life and manners in Old New York in the Dutch days, evidently derived from a variety of records. The New York of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a veritable transmarine Holland. Even to this day traces of the long Dutch occupation tinge the life of New York, so conservative and so domestic and law-abiding were and are the Dutch. The authoress has felt the attraction of the simple old days, when the women were domestic and hardworking to the verge of slavery, and the men sobered down into a homely vegetable. We have a number of quaint details which bring before us the comfortable houses, the huge fire-places, the stores in the cellars, the wonderful stores of linen and silver (Captain Kidd set up house with a very respectable supply of furniture). The morals of the " New " Netherlanders were in accordance with this patriarchal life, for punishments were heavy. These charming "Colonial Days" should be read with Mrs. Vanderbilt's book.
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