CHAP. IV.

How Peter Stuyvesant was horribly belied by his adversaries the Moss Troopers-and his conduct thereupon.

Ir my pains-taking reader, whose perception, it is a hundred to one, is as obtuse as a beetle's, is not somewhat perplexed, in the course of the fatiocination of my last chapter; he will doubtless, at one glance perceive, that the great Peter, in concluding a treaty with his eastern neighbours, was guilty of a most notable error and heterodoxy in politics. To this unlucky agreement may justly be ascribed a world of little infringements, altercations, negociations and bickerings, which afterwards took place between the irreproachable Stuyvesant, and the evil disposed council of amphyctions; in all which, with the impartial justice of an historian, I pronounce the latter to have been invariably in the wrong. All these did not a little disturb the constitutional serenity of the good and substantial burghers of Mannahata-otherwise called Manhattoes, but more vulgarly known by the name of Manhattan. But in sooth they were so very scurvy and pitiful in their nature and effects, that a grave historian like me, who grudges the time spent in any thing less than recording the fall of empires,

and the revolution of worlds, would think them unworthy to be recorded in his sacred page.

The reader is therefore to take it for granted, though I scorn to waste in the detail, that time, which my furrowed brow and trembling hand, inform me is invaluable, that all the while the great Peter was occupied in those tremendous and bloody contests, that I shall shortly rehearse, there was a continued series of little, dirty, snivelling, pettifogging skirmishes, scourings, broils and maraudings made on the eastern frontiers, by the notorious moss troopers of Connecticut. But like that mirror of chivalry, the sage and valourous Don Quixote, I leave these petty contests for some future Sancho Panza of an historian, while I reserve my prowess and my pen for achievements of higher dignity.

Now did the great Peter conclude, that his labours had come to a close in the east, and that he had nothing to do but apply himself to the internal prosperity of his beloved Manhattoes. Though a man of great modesty, he could not help boasting that he had at length shut the temple of Janus, and that, were all rulers like a certain person who should be nameless, it would never be opened again. But the exultation of the worthy governor was put to a speedy check, for scarce was the treaty concluded, and hardly was the ink dried on the paper, before the crafty and discourteous council of the league

sought a new pretence for reilluming the flames of discord.

In the year 1651, with a flagitious hardihood that makes my gorge to rise while I write, they accused the immaculate Peter--the soul of honour and heart of steel that by divers gifts and promises he had been secretly endeavouring to instigate, the Narrohigansett (or Narraganset) Mohaque and Pequot Indians, to surprize and massacre the English settlements. For, as the council maliciously observed, "the Indians round about for divers hundred miles cercute, seeme to have drunke deep of an intoxicating cupp, att or from the Monhatoes against the English, whoe have sought there good, both in bodily and sperituall respects." To support their most unrighteous accusation, they examined divers Indians, who all swore to the fact as sturdily as if they had been so many christian troopers. And to be more suré of their veracity, the knowing council previously made every mother's son of them devoutly drunk, remembering the old proverb-In vino veritas.

Though descended from a family which suffered much injury from the losel Yankees of those times; my great grandfather having had a yoke of oxen and his best pacer stolen, and having received a pair of black eyes and a bloody nose, in one of these border wars; and my grandfather, when a very little boy tending the pigs, having been kid

napped and severely flogged by a long sided Con necticut schoolmaster-Yet I should have passed over all these wrongs with forgiveness and oblivion -I could even have suffered them to have broken Evert Ducking's head, to have kicked the doughty Jacobus Van Curlet and his ragged regiment out of doors, carried every hog into captivity, and depopulated every hen roost, on the face of the earth with perfect impunity-But this wanton, wicked and unparalleled attack, upon one of the most gallant and irreproachable heroes of modern times, is too much even for me to digest, and has overset, with a single puff, the patience of the historian and the forbearance of the Dutchman.

Oh reader it was false !-I swear to thee it was false-if thou hast any respect for my wordif the undeviating and unimpeached character for veracity, which I have hitherto borne throughout this work, has its due weight with thee, thou wilt not give thy faith to this tale of slander; for I pledge my honour and my immortal fame to thee, that the gallant Peter Stuyvesant, was not only innocent of this foul conspiracy, but would have suffered his right arm, or even his wooden leg to consume with slow and everlasting flames, rather than attempt to destroy his enemies in any other way, than open generous warfare-Beshrew those caitiff scouts, that conspired to sully his honest name by such an imputation!

Peter Stuyvesant, though he perhaps had never heard of a Knight Errant; yet had he as true a heart of chivalry as ever beat at the round table of King Arthur. There was a spirit of native gallantry, a noble and generous hardihood diffused. through his rugged manners, which altogether gave unquestionable tokens of an heroic mind. He was, in truth, a hero of chivalry struck off by the hand of nature at a single heat, and though she had taken no further care to polish and refine her workmanship, he stood forth a miracle of her skill.

But not to be figurative, (a fault in historic writing which I particularly) eschew the great Peter possessed in an eminent degree, the seven renowned and noble virtues of knighthood; which, as he had never consulted authors, in the disciplining and cultivating of his mind, I verily believe must have been stowed away in a corner of his heart by dame nature herself-where they flourished, among his hardy qualities, like so many sweet wild flowers, shooting forth and thriving with redundant luxuriance among stubborn rocks. Such was the mind of Peter the Headstrong, and if my admiration for it, has on this occasion, transported my style beyond the sober gravity which becomes the laborious scribe of historic events, I can plead as an apology, that though a little, grey headed Dutchman, arrived almost at the bottom of the down-hill of life, I still retain some portion of that celestial fire, which