r a game preserve. After a hot fight with his council, some of
whom were willing even then to submit to English rule and hoped that the
fleet might have two or three suits of tweed which by mistake were a fit
and therefore useless to the owners, and that they might succeed in
swapping furs for these, the governor yielded, and in 1664 New York
became a British possession, named as above.

The English governors, however, were not popular. They were mostly
political hacks who were pests at home and banished to New York, where
the noise of the streets soon drove them to drink. For nine years this
sort of thing went on, until one day a Dutch fleet anchored near the
Staten Island brewery and in the evening took the town.

However, in the year following, peace was restored between England and
Holland, and New Amsterdam became New York again, also subject to the
Tammany rule.

Andros was governor for a time, but was a sort of pompous tomtit, with a
short breath and a large aquiline opinion of himself. He was one of the
arrogant old pie-plants whose growth was fostered by the beetle-bellied
administration at home. He went back on board the City of Rome one day,
and did not return.

New York had a gleam of hope for civil freedom under the rule of the
Duke of York and the county Democracy, but when the duke became James
II. he was just like other people who get a raise of salary, and refused
to be privately entertained by the self-made ancestry of the American.

He was proud and arrogant to a degree. He forbade legislation, and
stopped his paper. New York was at this time annexed to the New England
Colony, and began keeping the Sabbath so vigorously that the angels had
great difficulty in getting at it.

[Illustration: DUKE OF YORK.]

Nicholson, who was the lieutenant tool of iniquity for Andros, fled with
him when democracy got too hot for them. Captain Leisler, supported by
Steve Brodie and everything south of the Harlem, but bitterly opposed by
the aristocracy, who were distinguished by their ability to use new
goods in making their children's clothes, whereas the democracy had to
make vests for the boys from the cast-off trousers of their fathers,
governed the province until Governor Sloughter arrived.

Sloughter was another imported Smearkase in official life, and arrested
Leisler at the request of an aristocrat who drove a pair of bang-tail
horses up and down Nassau Street on pleasant afternoons and was
afterwards c