Our notions of life in New Netherland have been so thoroughly shaped by Diedrich Knickerbocker’s tergiversating account thereof, that it would be difficult for us to make any marked change in the picture he has painted. Nor do we need to do so. For though the details of public and official life and characters in that day have been wilfully distorted by Irving’s keen humor, still the atmosphere of his picture is undeniably correct, and the domestic life he has shown us was the life of that colony. I find nothing, after much illumination through careful examination of old records and the contemporary accounts given by early travellers, to change in any considerable degree the estimate of every-day life in New Netherland which I gained from Irving, save in one respect,--the account of Dutch table manners, and the attributing to the Dutch burghers of lax hospitality at dinner-time, which I cannot believe. Madam Knight wrote of her New York hosts in 1704:-- “They are sociable to one another, and Curteos and Civill to Strangers, and fare well in their houses.... They are sociable to a degree, their tables being as free to their Naybours as themselves.” Mrs. Grant, writing of Albanians half a century later, gives a detailed description of their manners as hosts, which might serve as an explanation of apparent inhospitality in the time of Walter the Doubter:-- “They were exceedingly social, and visited each other very frequently, beside the regular assembling together in porches every fine evening. Of the more substantial luxuries of the table they knew little, and of the formal and ceremonious parts of good breeding still less.