With little learning save the knowledge of how to enjoy life, under no necessity of pretending to enjoy a false culture, conforming to no false values and artificialities, these simple-hearted people went their quiet round of daily duties, took a normal amount of pleasure, and in their old-fashioned way, probably lived more than any modern devotee of the Wall Street they knew so well. Madam Knight in her _Journal_ comments upon them in this fashion: "Their diversion in the winter is riding sleighs about three or four miles out of town, where they have houses of entertainment at a place called the Bowery, and some go to friends' houses, who handsomely treat them. Mr. Burroughs carried his spouse and daughter and myself out to one Madam Dowes, a gentlewoman that lived at a farm house, who gave us a handsome entertainment of five or six dishes, and choice beer and metheglin cider, etc., all of which she said was the produce of her farm. I believe we met fifty or sixty sleighs; they fly with great swiftness, and some are so furious that they will turn out of the path for none except a loaded cart. Nor do they spare for any diversion the place affords, and sociable to a degree, their tables being as free to their neighbors as to themselves." And Mrs. Grant has this to say of their love of children and flowers--probably the most normal loves in the human soul: "Not only the training of children, but of plants, such as needed peculiar care or skill to rear them, was the female province.... I have so often beheld, both in town and country, a respectable mistress of a family going out to her garden, in an April morning, with her great calash, her little painted basket of seeds, and her rake over her shoulder to her garden labors.... A woman in very easy circumstances and abundantly gentle in form and manner would sow and plant and rake incessantly. These fair gardners were also great florists."[212] Doubtless the whole world has heard of that other Dutch love--for good things on the table. This epicurean trait perhaps has been exaggerated; Mrs. Grant herself had her doubts at first; but she, like most visitors, soon realized that a Dutchman's "tea" was a fair banquet. Hear again her own words: "They were exceedingly social, and visited each other frequently, besides the regular assembling together in their porches every evening.