The early colonists never turned very readily to Indian meal and pumpkins--pumpions as they called them in the “times wherein old Pompion was a saint;” and Johnson, in his _Wonder-Working Providence_, reproved them for making a jest of pumpkins, since they were so good a food. Madam Knight had them offered to her very often, “pumpkin sause” and “pumpkin bred.” “We would have eat a morsell ourselves But the Pumpkin and Indian-mixt Bread had such an aspect, and the Bare-legg’d Punch so awkerd or rather Awfull a sound that we left both.” She gives a glimpse of rather awkward table-manners when she complains that in Connecticut masters permitted their slaves to sit and eat with them, “and into the dish goes the black Hoof as freely as the white hand.” Doubtless in those comparatively forkless days fingers were very freely used at the table. She tells many curious facts about Connecticut. Divorces were plentiful in that State, as they are at the present day. She writes:-- These uncomely Standaways are too much in Vogue among the English in this Indulgent Colony as their Records plentifully prove, and that on very trivial matters of which some have been told me, but are not Proper to be Related by a Female Pen. She says they will not allow harmless kissing among the young people, and she tells of a curious custom at weddings, where the bridegroom ran away and had to be chased and dragged back by force to the bride. Her descriptions of the city of New York; of the public vendues “where they give drinks;” of the Dutch houses and women; of the “sley-riding” where she “mett fifty or sixty sleys,” are all very entertaining. There were few sleighs in Boston at that date. Everything is compared with “ours in Boston,” or said to be “not like Boston,” after a fashion still somewhat followed by the Boston “Female Pen” of the present day. As New York then was only a small town of five thousand inhabitants, while Big Boston possessed ten thousand inhabitants, such comparisons were certainly justifiable. We must give her vivid and vivacious picture of a country “lubber” in a merchant’s shop:--