By the help of a small tin tube, it was packed in small linen bags, or casings, as they were called.

" Soap-making was an occupation of the spring. Great leach tubs standing out of doors on high frames were filled with wood ashes, on which water

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.

4G1

was slowly poured to i)roduce lye, and the work of soap-boiling began. To be perfect soft-soap, it must be ' white as snow and thick as liver.'

" Matches were not known ; so the tinder-box, with its flint and charred linen rag, did duty. When illness was in the household, or the nursery needed a light, a minute wax taper floating in a wine-glass filled with sperm oil provided a faint ilhimination. Sperm oil lamps came into use very much later."

Washington Irving brought out with fine detail many features of the old Dutch social life. In his facetious notices of New York in the early colonial days he merely made fictitious personages to move amid actual scenes. His " Knickerbocker " is made to say of the " grand parlour :" " In this sacred apartment no one was permitted to enter, excepting the mistress and her confidential maid, who visited it once a week for the purj)ose of giving it a thorough cleaning and putting things to rights, always taking the precaution of leaving their shoes at the door, and entering lightly on their stocking feet. After scrubbing the floor and sprinkling it with fine white sand, which was curiously stroked into angles and curves with a broom ; after washing the windows, rubbing and polishing the furniture, and putting a new bunch of evergreens in the fire-place, the window-shutters were again closed to keep out the flies, and the room carefully locked up, until the revolution of time brought round the weekly cleaning day.