Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/242

218 but the Presbyterian denomination also flourished.

During the summer of 1728, the weather in South Carolina proved uncommonly hot; the surface of the earth was parched, the pools of water were dried up, and the beasts of the field reduced to the greatest distress. This was followed in the autumn by a furious hurricane, which occasioned wide-spread destruction. In the same year that fearful scourge, the yellow fever, broke forth to an extent and with a malignity that swept off large numbers. Subsequently to this, the increase of wealth among the Carolinians led to a corresponding increase in expensiveness of living and its usual concomitants of display and luxurious indulgence.

At the beginning of the century, New York numbered thirty thousand persons; m 1732, this number had more than doubled, of whom about seven thousand were slaves; and in 1750, there were nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants in the province. The annual imports of this colony were reckoned at £100,000; and in 1736, two hundred and eleven vessels with cargoes entered, and two hundred and twenty-two vessels with cargoes departed from the port of New York. A taste for tea was gradually making progress: this led to considerable contraband trade on the part of the colonists, so that they might obtain tea at a less rate than that charged by the English East India Company; in fact, they did get it by this means some thirty per cent, lower. A public school was founded in New York city by the Legislature, in 1732, wherein Latin, Greek, and the mathematics were to be taught. A newspaper was first published in New York in 1725.

Some remaining influence of the Dutch manners and habits still prevailed in New York, although it was evident that English and French tastes were predominant. The citizens were lively and sociable in manners; there were weekly evening clubs; and in the winter, balls and concerts. Living was on a less expensive scale than at Boston, and the New Yorkers were at that day, as well as now, devoted to business and the gains of trade. Albany, at this date on the outskirts of civilization, retained much more of the flavor of its Dutch origin. The architecture was like that of Delft or Leyden; all the houses stood with their angular zigzag gables turned to the street, with long projecting gutter-pipes, which, like those of the towns of continental Europe at the present day, discharge their unsavory current of dirty water or melted snows upon the heads of the unwary passengers. The stoopes, or porches, were furnished with side-seats, well filled in the evening with the inmates, old and young, of both sexes, who met to gossip or to court, while the cattle wandered almost at will about the streets of the half-rustic city. In the interior of the dwellings, Dutch, cleanliness and economy were established; the women, as at the present day in Holland, were considered over-nice in scrubbing their floors, and burnishing their brass and pewter vessels into an intensity of lustre. From the dawn of day until late at night they were engaged in the