Being asked to tea in our New England in the year 17— meant something very different from the same invitation in our more sophisticated days. In those times, people held to the singular opinion, that the night was made to sleep in; they inferred it from a general confidence they had in the wisdom of Mother Nature, supposing that she did not put out her lights and draw her bed-curtains, and hush all noise in her great world-house without strongly intending that her children should go to sleep; and the consequence was, that very soon after sunset, the whole community very generally set their faces bedward, and the tolling of the nine-o’clock evening-bell had an awful solemnity in it, sounding to the full. Good society in New England in those days very generally took its breakfast at six, its dinner at twelve, and its tea at six. ‘Company tea,’ however, among thrifty, industrious folk, was often taken an hour earlier, because each of the inviteés had children to put to bed, or other domestic cares at home, and as in those simple times people were invited because you wanted to see them, a tea-party assembled themselves at three and held session till sundown, when each matron rolled up her knitting-work and wended soberly home.

Though Newport, even in those early times, was not without its families which affected state and splendour, rolled about in carriages with armorial emblazonments, and had servants in[10] abundance to every turn within-doors, yet there, as elsewhere in New England, the majority of the people lived with the wholesome, thrifty simplicity of the olden time, when labour and intelligence went hand in hand in perhaps a greater harmony than the world has ever seen.

[10]

Our scene opens in the great old-fashioned kitchen, which, on ordinary occasions, is the family dining and sitting room of the Scudder family. I know fastidious moderns think that the working-room, wherein are carried on the culinary operations of a large family, must necessarily be an untidy and comfortless sitting-place; but it is only because they are ignorant of the marvellous workings which pertain to the organ of ‘faculty,’ on which we have before insisted. The kitchen of a New England matron was her throne-room, her pride; it was the habit of her life to produce the greatest possible results there with the slightest possible discomposure; and what any woman could do, Mrs. Katy Scudder could do par excellence. Everything there seemed to be always done, and never doing. Washing and baking, those formidable disturbers of the composure of families, were all over within those two or three morning-hours when we are composing 

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