In the house of the tapster, or innkeeper, he would probably stay all night. He would find the Street of the Martyrs (so named after the massacre of 1690), and of the Traders, together with Front, Ferry, Church, and Niskayuna Streets, lined with comfortable, one-storied, many-gabled dwellings, with here and there neat houses, all or partly of brick. Each house stood with its cosey bivalve door, shut at the bottom to keep out pigs and chickens and to keep in the babes, and open at the top to admit light and air. The scrupulously neat floors spoke of the hereditary Dutch virtue of cleanliness. On the table could be seen a wealth of plain but wholesome food, such as few farmer-folk in the old countries of Europe could boast of. The bill of fare would include the well-cured hams for which “the Dorp” was famous, all kinds of savoury products of the hog, besides every sort of bread, pie, cake, and plain pastry, baked to a shining brown in the ample ovens of stone or brick, which swelled like domes outside of the houses, at the rear of the kitchens. Savoury and toothsome were the rich “crullers” which Captain Croll, the good church-elder and garrison-commander of Rensselaerwyck, had invented during a winter-season of meat-famine. On many a house veered iron weathercocks, especially on the few brick fronts monogrammed with dates in anchors of iron; while on the new church, only four years old, but the third in the history of the growing town, glittered the cock of Saint Nicholas in gilt. It rested over a belfry which held a most melodious bell, cast at Amsterdam, in dear old “Patria,” in the rim of which, as well-founded tradition insisted, many a silver guilder, spoon, and trinket had been melted. Perhaps Johnson, like many a European and even New England militiaman, did not understand why the Dutch built their stone fortress-like churches at the intersection of two streets. Some even hinted at stupidity; but the Dutchmen, for the same reason that they loop-holed the walls, so located their chief public buildings at the centre of the village as to be able to sweep the cross streets with their gun-fire in case of an attack by French or Indians, or both.