Colonial Days in Old New York by Alice Morse Earle

At the first break of day, every spring and summer morn, the quiet Dutch sleepers in the old colonial town of Albany were roused by three loud blasts of a horn sounded far and wide by a sturdy cow-herd; and from street and dooryard came in quick answer the jingle-jangle, the klingle-klangle of scores of loud-tongued brass and iron bells which hung from the necks of steady-going hungry Dutch cows who followed the town-herder forth each day to pastures green.

On the broad town-commons or the fertile river-meadows Uldrick Heyn and his "chosen proper youngster," his legally appointed aid, watched faithfully all day long their neighbors' cattle; and as honest herdsmen earned well their sea-want and their handsel of butter, dallying not in tavern, and drinking not of wine, as they were sternly forbidden by the _schepens_, until when early dews were falling they quit their meadow grasses mellow, for "at a quarter of an hour before the sun goes down the cattle shall be delivered at the church. " Thence the patient kine slowly wandered or were driven each to her own home-stall, her protecting cow-shed.