larly averse to giving dinners, yet they kept up the social bands
of intimacy by occasional banquetings, called tea-parties.

These fashionable parties were generally confined to the
higher classes, or noblesse, that is to say, such as kept their
own cows, and drove their own wagons. The company com-
monly assembled at three o'clock, and went away about six,
unless it was in winter-time, when the fashionable hours were
a little earlier, that the ladies might get home before dark.
The tea-table was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well
stored with slices of fat pork, fried brown, cut up into mor-
sels, and swimming in gravy. The company being seated
around 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 and 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 -- a deli-
cious kind of cake, at present scarce known in this city, ex-
cepting in genuine Dutch families.

The tea was served out of a majestic delft tea-pot, orna-
mented with paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shep-
herdesses tending pigs -- with boats sailing in the air, and
houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch
fantasies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroit-
ness in replenishing this pot from a huge coppper tea-kettle,
which would have made the pigmy macaronies of these degene-
rate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage,
a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup -- and the company
alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum, until an
improvement was introduced by a shrewd and economic old
lady, which was to suspend a large lump directly over the tea-
table, by a string from the ceiling, so that it could be swung
from mouth to mouth -- an ingenious expedient which is still.
kept up by some families in Albany; but which prevails with-
out exception in Communipaw, Bergen, Flatbush, and all our
uncontaminated Dutch villages.

At these primitive tea-parties the utmost propriety and dig-
nity of deportment prevailed. No flirting nor coquetting -- no
gambling of old ladies, nor hoyden chattering and romping of
young ones -- no self-satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen,
with their brains in their pockets -- nor amusing conceits, and

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