Customs and Fashions
IN
OLD NEW ENGLAND
BY
ALICE MORSE EARLE
"Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and
let each successive generation thank him not less fervently,
for being one step further from them in the march of ages."
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1894
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
CHINA COLLECTING IN AMERICA. With
75 Illustrations. Square 8vo, $3.00.
THE SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND.
12mo, $1.25.
To the Memory of my Father
CONTENTS
- Child Life
- Courtship and Marriage Customs
- Domestic Service
- Home Interiors
- Table Plenishings
- Supplies of the Larder
- Old Colonial Drinks and Drinkers
- Travel, Tavern, and Turnpike
- Holidays and Festivals
- Sports and Diversions
- Books and Book-Makers
- "Artifices of Handsomeness"
- Raiment and Vesture
- Doctors and Patients
- Funeral and Burial Customs
[Pg 1]I
CHILD LIFE
From the hour when the Puritan baby opened his eyes in bleak New Englandhe had a Spartan struggle for life. In summer-time he faredcomparatively well, but in winter the ill-heated houses of the colonistsgave to him a most chilling and benumbing welcome. Within the great openfireplace, when fairly scorched in the face by the glowing flames of theroaring wood fire, he might be bathed and dressed, and he might becuddled and nursed in warmth and comfort; but all his baby hours couldnot be spent in the ingleside, and were he carried four feet away fromthe chimney on a raw winter's day he found in his new home a temperaturethat would make a modern infant scream with indignant discomfort, or liestupefied with cold.
Nor was he permitted even in the first dismal days of his life to staypeacefully within-doors. On the Sunday following his birth he wascarried to the meeting-house to be baptized. When we consider the chilland gloom of those unheated, freezing[Pg 2] churches, growing colder anddamper and deadlier with every wintry blast—we wonder that grownpersons even could bear the exposure. Still more do we marvel thattender babes ever lived through their cruel winter christenings when itis recorded that the ice had to be broken in the christening bowl. Invillages and towns where the houses were all clustered around themeeting-house the baby Puritans did not have to be carried far to bebaptized; but in country