“In spring eight or ten of one company, young men and maidens, would set out together in a canoe on a kind of rural excursion....  They went without attendants....  They arrived generally by nine or ten o’clock....  The breakfast, a very regular and cheerful one, occupied an hour or two; the young men then set out to fish or perhaps to shoot birds, and the maidens sat busily down to their work....  After the sultry hours had been thus employed, the boys brought their tribute from the river....  After dinner they all set out together to gather wild strawberries, or whatever fruit was in season; for it was accounted a reproach to come home empty-handed....”

“The young parties, or some times the elder ones, who set out on this woodland excursion had no fixed destination, ... when they were tired of going on the ordinary road, they turned into the bush, and wherever they saw an inhabited spot ... they went into it with all the ease of intimacy....  The good people, not in the least surprised at this intrusion, very calmly opened the reserved apartments....  After sharing with each other their food, dancing or any other amusement that struck their fancy succeeded.  They sauntered about the bounds in the evening, and returned by moonlight....”

“In winter the river ... formed the principal road through the country, and was the scene of all these amusements of skating and sledge races common to the north of Europe.  They used in great parties to visit their friends at a distance, and having an excellent and hearty breed of horses, flew from place to place over the snow or ice in these sledges with incredible rapidity, stopping a little while at every house they came to, where they were always well received, whether acquainted with the owners or not.  The night never impeded these travellers, for the atmosphere was so pure and serene, and the snow so reflected the moon and starlight, that the nights exceeded the days in beauty."[215]

All this meant so much more for the growth of normal children and the creation of a cheerful people than did the Puritan attendance at executions and funerals.  Those quaint old-time Dutch probably did not love children any more dearly than did the New Englanders; but they undoubtedly made more display of it than did the Puritans.  “Orphans were never neglected....  You never entered a house without meeting children.  Maidens, bachelors, and childless married people all adopted orphans, and all treated them as if they were their own."[216]

Since we have mentioned such subjects as funerals and orphans, perhaps it would not be out of place to notice the peculiar funeral customs among the Dutch.  Even a burial was not so dreary an affair with them.  The following bill of 1763, found among the Schuyler papers, gives a hint of the manner in which the service was conducted, and perhaps explains why the women scarcely ever attended the funeral in the “dead room,” as it was called, but remained in an upper room, where they could at least hear what was said, if they could not “partake” of the occasion.