THE BURGHERS 111

clearing where the pioneers were making a home
for themselves and their children.

When the babies' eyelids unclosed in the morn-
ing they opened on a busy scene, for whatever
anxious vigils the father and mother might have
kept through the night, toil began with the dawn.
The boys were set to gathering firewood and draw-
ing water, while the goede vrouw was busily prepar-
ing a substantial morning meal of suppawn and
sausage before her husband began the day's work
of loading beaver-skins or tilling the ground or
hewing timber. A pioneer life means hard work
for children as well as for their elders, and in the
early years there was little time for play on the
part of the youthful New Netherlanders. As
prosperity advanced and as negro servants were
introduced, the privileges of childhood were ex-
tended and we find accounts of their sliding on
their slees or sleds down the hills of Fort Orange
and skating at New Amsterdam on the Collect
Pond, which took its name from the Dutch Jcalk,
or lime, and was so called from the heaps of oyster-
shells accumulated by the Indians. The skates
were of the type used in Holland, very long with
curves at the front and rear, and, when metal
could not be obtained, formed of ox-bone.