“Come and help you, Alice? I shall be gay and glad to do it, dear, just as soon as Betty is in her cradle, and I have told Mary-à-Becket what to do about the noon-meat. John, you and Jo run up the hill to the captain’s, and ask Mistress Standish if Alick and Myles may come down and play with you in front of the governor’s house so I may keep an eye on you.” “Two fine boys, those of Barbara’s,” said the governor’s wife, and then affectionately, “yet no finer than your sturdy little knaves.” “Oh, ours are well enough for little yeomen, but the captain says his Alick is heir to a great estate, and is a gentleman born!” And the two young women laughed good-naturedly, while Priscilla laid her baby in the cradle, and Alice turned toward the door saying, “Well, I must be at home to mind the maids.” “And I’ll be there anon. I trust you’ve good store of milk and cream. We did well enow without it for four years, but now we’ve had it for a while, one might as well be dead as lack it.” “I’ve plenty, and butter beside, both Dutch and fresh,” replied Alice from outside the door, and in another ten minutes the wide kitchen recently added to William Bradford’s house on the corner of Leyden Street and the King’s Highway, now called Main Street, hummed again with the merry sounds of youthful voices, of the whisking of eggs, and grinding of spices, and stirring of golden compounds in wooden bowls, and chopping suet, and stoning raisins, and slicing citron, and the clatter of pewter dishes, which, by the way, with wooden ware were nearly all the “pottery” the Pilgrims possessed, hypothetical teapots and china cups to the contrary; for, since we all know that tea and coffee were never heard of in England until about the year 1666, and the former herb was sold for many years after at from ten to fifteen dollars per pound (Pepys in 1671 mentions it as a strange and barbaric beverage just introduced), it is improbable that either tea, teapot, or teacups ever reached America until after Mary Allerton, the last survivor of the Mayflower, rested upon Burying Hill. All that day and part of the next the battle raged in the Bradford kitchen, for delicate appetites were in those times rather a defect than a grace, and hospitality largely consisted in first providing great quantities and many varieties of food, and then over-pressing the guests to partake of it. An “afternoon tea” with diaphanous bread and butter, wafer cakes, and Cambridge salts, as the only solid refreshment, would have seemed to Alice Bradford and her guests either a comic pretense or a niggardly insult, and very different was the feast to which as many as could sat down at a very early hour of the evening of the second day.