For as much more, they could be furnished with all that was needful for housekeeping in the way of furniture, etc.; the wife, as a general thing, providing beds, bedding and such carpets as she had been able to manufacture as the fruit of her own handiwork and industry ; so that the entire outlay, in cash, for the first year, over and above what was provided by the pareuts, would not, perhaps, exceed one hundred dollars, rent included. These facts refer, of course, to succes-sful marriages -- that is, to the great majority. For the few failures, want of suflicient previous acquaintance of the parties (a thing Ijy no means so common then as now) or improvident habits were chiefly accountable. The state of society I have been attempting to describe was that which existed in New Rochelle and Pelham from seventy-five to one hundred years ago ; and, indeed, much earlier, for the habits and customs of the generation which preceded the War of the Revolution were substantially the same with those of their immediate descendants."
Settling in a country where water-courses were so numerous, the early Dutch did most of their traveling on the North River or the Sound and its tributary streams. The periauger was in constant use for water transportation. Charlevoix calls it pirogue, a canoe formed of the trunk of a tree, while Cooper, in the "Water Witch," says: "It partook of a European and an American character ; it possessed the length, narrowness and clean bow of the canoe,