6o OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 



six at the other. How long it was I do not know, 

 but from the account of its neighboring plots, and its 

 location, it could not have been more than a hun- 

 dred or a hundred and fifty feet. Pieter did not 

 build him a house on it — too busy building for others, 

 perhaps — ^but he did set out cherry trees, and peaches 

 and pears, and these were bearing there in 1651. 

 Kip, the tailor, had his house 'In a garden" which 

 was sixty-five feet along its front; but this was excep- 

 tional, and few houses did not occupy the entire front- 

 age of the plots whereon they stood. Roelantsen, the 

 schoolmaster, had a garden in one place about fifty by 

 one hundred feet; his house was elsewhere, however. 

 The earliest private deed recorded, dated 1643, gives 

 the dimensions of the plot which it transferred as 

 thirty by one hundred and ten feet. 



Under the extravagant, domineering Director-Gen- 

 eral Kieft, who took it upon himself to make amends 

 for flagrant offenses against the people — or to try to 

 make amends for them, perhaps — ^by indulging them, 

 at the Company's expense, in certain requests and per- 

 haps only half framed wishes, a row of five houses 

 was built, of stone or brick, facing the row of Com- 

 pany offices and shops, and lying between these and 

 the Fort. For some residents had grown timid after 

 the Indian troubles of 1643 — those troubles that had 

 been occasioned by Kieft's wanton cruelty and fero- 



