The bedrooms.

"One room in the greater house was open for the reception of company; the rest were bed-chambers for their accommodation, while the domestic friends of the family occupied neat little bedrooms in the attics, or in the winter house. This house contained no drawingroom; that was an unheard-of luxury. The winter rooms had carpets; the lobby had oil-cloth painted in lozenges, to imitate blue and white marble. The best bedroom was hung with family portraits, some of which were admirably executed; and in the eating-room were some fine scripture paintings.

"The house fronted the river, on the brink of which, under shades of elm and sycamore, ran the great road towards Saratoga, Stillwater, and the northern lakes. A little simple avenue of morella cherry trees, enclosed with a white rail, led to the road and river, not three hundred yards distant. Adjoining to this, on the south side, was an enclosure subdivided into three parts, of which the first was a small hayfield, opposite the south end of the house; the next, not so long, a garden; and the third, by far the largest, an orchard. These were surrounded by simple deal fences.

The approaches.

66

Adjoining to the orchard was the most spacious barn I ever beheld, . . . at least a hundred feet long and sixty wide. The roof rose to a great height in the midst, and sloped down till The barn. it came within ten feet of the ground, when the walls commenced; which, like the whole of this vast fabric, were formed of wood. It was

raised three feet from the ground by beams resting on stone; and on these beams was laid a massive oak floor. Before the door was a large sill, sloping downwards, of the same materials. About twelve feet in breadth, on each side of this capacious building were divided off for cattle; on one side ran a manger, at the above-mentioned distance from the wall, the whole length of the building, with a rack above it; on the others were stalls for the other cattle. . . . The cattle and horses stood with their hinder parts to the wall, and their heads projecting towards the threshing floor. There was a prodigious large box or open chest in one side built up, for holding the corn after it was thrashed; and the roof, which was very lofty and spacious, was supported by large cross-beams; from one to the other of these was stretched a great number of long poles, so as to form a sort of open loft, on which the whole rich crop was laid up. The floor of those parts of the barn, which answered the purposes of a stable and cow-house, was made of thick slab deals, laid loosely over the supporting beams. And the mode of cleaning those places was by turning the boards and permitting the dung and litter to fall into the receptacles left open below for the purpose. In the front of this vast edifice there were prodigious folding doors, and two others that opened behind." 1

...

Mrs. Grant's description of Albany is too much to our present purpose to be omitted: "One very wide and long street lay parallel to the river,

1 Memoirs of an American Lady, i. 142, 143, 147, 164–168, 171– 173, 176-178.

the intermediate space between it and the shore being occupied by gardens. A small, steep hill rose above the centre of the town, on

The town of Albany.

ill

which stood a fort, intended (but very adapted) for the defence of the place and of the neighbouring country. From the foot of this hill another street was built, sloping pretty rapidly down till it joined the one before mentioned.

This street was still wider than the other; it was only paved on each side, the middle being occupied by public edifices. These consisted of a market-place, a guard-house, a town hall, and the English and Dutch churches. The English church, belonging to the Episcopal persuasion and in the diocese of the Bishop of London, stood at the foot of the hill, at the upper end of the street. The Dutch church was situated at the bottom of the descent where the street terminated. Two irregular streets, not so broad but equally long, ran parallel to those, and a few even ones opened between them. . . . This city was a kind of semi-rural establishment; every house had its garden, well, and a little green behind; before every door a tree was planted, rendered interesting by being coeval with some beloved member of the family; many of their trees were of a prodigious size and extraordinary beauty, but without regularity, every one planting the kind that best pleased him, or which he thought would afford the most agreeable shade to the open portico at his door, which was surrounded by seats, and ascended by a few steps. It was in these that each domestic group was seated in summer evenings to enjoy the balmy

twilight or serenely clear moonlight. Each family had a cow, fed in a common pasture at the end of the town. In the evening they returned all together, of their own accord, with their tinkling bells hung at their necks, along the wide and grassy street, to their wonted sheltering trees, to be milked. . . At one door were young matrons, at another the elders of the people, at a third the youths and maidens, gaily chatting or singing together, while the children played around the trees, or waited by the cows for the chief ingredient of their frugal supper, which they generally ate sitting on the steps in the open air.

"At the further end of the town was a fertile plain along the river, three miles in length and near a mile broad. This was all divided into lots, where every inhabitant raised Indian corn sufficient for the food of two or three slaves (the greatest number that each family ever possessed), and for his horses, pigs, and poultry; their flour and other grain they purchased from farmers in the vicinity. Above the town, a long stretch to the westward was occupied first by sandy hills, on which grew bilberries of uncommon size and flavour in prodigious quantities; beyond rise heights of a poor

hungry soil, thinly covered with stunted Picturesque

ings.

pines, or dwarf oak. Yet in this com- surroundparatively barren tract there were several wild and picturesque spots, where small brooks, running in deep and rich bottoms, nourished on their banks every vegetable beauty. There some of the . . settlers had cleared the luxuriant wood from these charming little glens, and built neat

VOL. II.

cottages for their slaves, surrounded with little gardens and orchards, sheltered from every blast, wildly picturesque and richly productive. . . . One of their sequestered vales was in my time inhabited by a hermit. He was a Frenchman, and did not seem to inspire much veneration among the Albanians. They imagined, or had heard, that he retired to that solitude in remorse for some fatal duel in which he had been engaged; and considered him an idolator because he had an image of the Virgin in his hut. I think he retired to Canada at last; but I remember being ready to worship him for the sanctity with which my imagination invested him, and being cruelly disappointed because I was not permitted to visit him."1

A Flatbush country house.

In the middle of the eighteenth century Albany was much more distinctively Dutch than the city of New York, which was so cosmopolitan. In general Dutch habits held their own with much more conservatism in towns like Esopus, or Schenectady, or Flatbush, than in the centre of travel and traffic. With some Flatbush details we may complete our sketch of the Dutch country house. Ordinarily it had not three stories, like the Schuyler mansion, but was a low and rambling affair, covering much territory but needing few stairs. It was usually built of brick. In the earlier times the front roof swept down without break from ridgepole to eaves and beyond, so as to cover a veranda, while the much longer back roof sometimes came within eight feet of the ground. Sometimes in the front were

1 Memoirs of an American Lady, i. 44-49.