ir
neighbors' horses; in short, who promised to be the wonder, the talk,
and abomination of the town, had not their stylish career been
unfortunately cut short by an affair of honor with a whipping-post.

Far other, however, was the truly fashionable gentleman of those days.
His dress, which served for both morning and evening, street and
drawing-room, was a linsey-woolsey coat, made, perhaps, by the fair
hands of the mistress of his affections, and gallantly bedecked with
abundance of large brass buttons; half a score of breeches heightened
the proportions of his figure; his shoes were decorated by enormous
copper buckles; a low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat overshadowed his burly
visage; and his hair dangled down his back in a queue of eel-skin.

Thus equipped, he would manfully sally forth with pipe in mouth to
besiege some fair damsel's obdurate heart--not such a pipe, good reader,
as that which Acis did sweetly tune in praise of his Galatea, but one
of true Delft manufacture and furnished with a charge of fragrant
tobacco. With this would he resolutely set himself down before the
fortress, and rarely failed, in the process of time, to smoke the fair
enemy into a surrender upon honorable terms.

Happy would it have been for New Amsterdam could it always have existed
in this state of lowly simplicity; but alas! the days of childhood are
too sweet to last! Cities, like men, grow out of them in time, and are
doomed alike to grow into the bustle, the cares, and miseries of the
world.

WILLIAM THE TESTY

Wilhelmus Kieft, who in 1634 ascended the gubernatorial chair (to borrow
a favorite though clumsy appellation of modern phraseologists), was of a
lofty descent, his father being inspector of windmills in the ancient
town of Saardam; and our hero, we are told, when a boy made very curious
investigations into the nature and operation of these machines, which
was one reason why he afterward came to be so ingenious a governor. His
name according to the most authentic etymologists, was a corruption of
Kyver--that is to say, a _wrangler_ or _scolder_--and expressed the
characteristic of his family, which for nearly two centuries had kept
the windy town of Saardam in hot water, and produced more tartars and
brimstones than any ten families in the place; and so truly did he
inherit this family peculiarity that he had not been a year in the
government of the province before he was universally denominated
William the Testy. H