day
or on any other. So, with those inside the church looking on in
silence and the people outside keeping up an incessant din and
clatter, the poet of the rich was married to Tryntie Croegers by the
good Dominie Megapolensis.

[Illustration: A Woman's Costume

New Amsterdam]

But for all such a fair starting off this married life had an untimely
ending. Though Nicasius De Sille might win a wife by his poetry, it
seemed that he could not hold one. There were no poetic readings in
the house by the canal after the marriage, and the literature of the
town which had started out so bravely fell into a decline with the
languishing of De Sille's connubial bliss. Before the third year had
gone by, a commission of their friends was trying to tell the pair how
happy their lives should have been. But all the reasoning had no
effect, and the friends were forced to give it up and submit to a
decision, in very quaint wording, the tenor of which was that it was
acknowledged that there was no love between the two, and that the only
recommendation that could be made was that the property should be
divided equally and they go their several ways,--which they did. But
the earlier readings of poetry had sown the seed of still another
marriage. For at those readings, Anna, the youngest daughter of the
poet, had sat by her father's side, and young Hendrick Kip had sat by
his father's side, and about the time the commission of friends was
announcing its failure to patch up matters, Anna De Sille and Hendrick
Kip, all undismayed by the bad example, had decided to sit side by
side through the remainder of their lives.

[Illustration: Stuyvesant's Bouwerie House]

All this time De Sille was growing more and more rich, when there
came a great change. Of a sudden one day the English ship sailed into
the bay, and the English soldiers took possession of the town, and the
rule of the Dutch in New Amsterdam had passed, and the English became
governors of their province of New York. Then Stuyvesant went to live
in a little settlement he had built up and called Bouwerie Village,
which was far out on the Bouwerie Road, and Nicasius De Sille settled
down as a merchant, and little more was heard of him as a poet.

It was a simple enough thing to rename the town and call it after the
brother of an English king, but that made but little change in the
customs of the people. For many a long year it was to remain the
quaint, slow-going town it had been.