Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete

movement of Peter Stuyvesant against the crafty men of the East Country, I would observe that, during his campaigns on the South River, and in the enchanted regions of the Catskill Mountains, thetwelve tribes of the East had been more than usually active in prosecuting their subtle scheme for the subjugation of the Nieuw Nederlands.
    Independent of the incessant maraudings among hen-roosts and squattings along the border, invading armies would penetrate, from time to time, into the very heart of the country. As their prototypes of yore went forth into the land of Canaan, with their wives and their children, their men-servants and their maid-servants, their flocks and herds, to settle themselves down in the land and possess it; so these chosen people of modern days would progress through the country in patriarchal style, conducting carts and waggons laden with household furniture, with women and children piled on top, and pots and kettles dangling beneath. At the tail of these vehicles would stalk a crew of long-limbed, lank-sided varlets with axes on their shoulders, and packs on their backs, resolutely bent upon “locating” themselves, as they termed it, and improving the country. These were the most dangerous kind of invaders. It is true they were guilty of no overt acts of hostility; but it was notorious that, wherever they got a footing, the honest Dutchmen gradually disappeared, retiring slowly as do the Indians before the white men; being in some way or other talked and chaffered, and bargained and swapped, and, in plain English, elbowed out of all those rich bottoms and fertile nooks in which our Dutch yeomanry are prone to nestle themselves.
    Peter Stuyvesant was at length roused to this kind of war in disguise, by which the Yankees were craftily aiming to subjugate his dominions.
    He was a man easily taken in, it is true, as all great-hearted men are apt to be; but if he once found it out, his wrath was terrible. He now threw diplomacy to the dogs, determined to appear no more by ambassadors, but to repair in person to the great council of the Amphictyons, bearing the sword in one hand and the olive-branch in theother, and giving them their choice of sincere and honest peace, or open and iron war.
    His privy council were astonished and dismayed when he announced his determination. For once they ventured to remonstrate, setting forth the rashness of venturing his sacred person in the midst of a strange and barbarous people. They might as well have tried to turn a rusty weathercock with a broken-winded bellows. In the fiery heart of the iron-headed Peter sat enthroned the five kinds of courage described by Aristotle, and had the philosopher enumerated five hundred more, I verily believed he would have possessed them all. As to that better part of valor called discretion, it was too cold-blooded a virtue for his tropical temperament.
    Summoning, therefore, to his presence his trusty follower, Antony Van Corlear, he commanded him to hold himself in readiness to accompany him the following morning on this his hazardous enterprise.
    Now Antony the Trumpeter was by this time a little stricken in years, yet by dint of keeping up a good heart, and having never known care or sorrow (having never been married), he was still a hearty, jocund, rubicund, gamesome wag, and of great capacity in the doublet. This last was ascribed to his living a jolly life on those domains at the Hook, which Peter Stuyvesant had granted to him for his gallantry at Fort Casimir.
    Be this as it may, there was nothing that more delighted Antony than this command of the great Peter, for he could have followed the stout-hearted old governor to the world’s end, with love and loyalty—and he moreover still remembered the frolicing, and dancing, and bundling, and other disports of the east country, and entertained dainty recollections of numerous kind and buxom lasses, whom he longed exceedingly again to encounter.
    Thus then did this mirror of hardihood set forth, with no other attendant but his trumpeter, upon oneof the most perilous enterprises ever recorded in the annals of knight-errantry. For a single warrior to venture openly among a whole nation of foes—but, above all, for a plain, downright Dutchman to think of negotiating with the whole council of New England!—never was there known a more desperate undertaking! Ever since I have entered upon the chronicles of this peerless, but hitherto uncelebrated, chieftain, has he kept me in