As they built better houses they made or imported fine furniture for them, but the earlier equipments of the living rooms were as rude in character as scant in number. The pallet on the floor -- " the Kermis bed," as the Dutch called it -- was an occasional resort, even in good houses. The Labadist travelers in 1688 sojourned in a tavern near the Hudson that put its guests to sleep on a horse bedding of

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.

hay before the fire ; and a hundred years later Chateaubriand found an inn on the New York frontier where everybody slept about a central post that upheld the roof, heads outward and feet toward the centre. This was the manner common in England in King Alfred's day, thirteen centuries ago. Such poor people in the colonies as possessed tastes too luxurious to enjoy a deer-skin on the hearth, were accustomed to fill their bed-sacks and pillows with fibrous mistletoe, the down of the cat-tail flag, or with feathers of pigeons slaughtered from the innumerable migrating flocks. Cotton from the milk-weed, then called " silk grass," was used for pillows and cushions.

No contrast could be sharper than that between such primitive accommodations and the elegance which marked the manor-houses, which were the pride of the colony. The patroons, and indeed all the landed proprietors, gloried in the solid magnificence of their household appurtenances. Mrs. Van Cortlandt has written of these stately houses so graphically that pictures of them may be recreated in the mind's eye from her description : " The furniture of well-to-do people was massive and costly and that of the plainer classes good and made to last. Large sideboards were loaded with silver beakers, tankards, candlesticks and mugs. The latter were used at funerals to hold mulled wine.