rs.
The learned Dominie Heckwelder records a tradition[33] that the Dutch
discoverers bargained for only so much land as the hide of a bullock would
cover; but that they cut the hide in strips no thicker than a child's
finger, so as to take in a large portion of land, and to take in the
Indians into the bargain This, however, is an old fable which the worthy
Dominie may have borrowed from antiquity. The true version is, that Oloffe
Van Kortlandt bargained for just so much land as a man could cover with
his nether garments. The terms being concluded, he produced his friend
Mynheer Ten Broeck, as the man whose breeches were to be used in
measurement. The simple savages, whose ideas of a man's nether garments
had never expanded beyond the dimensions of a breech clout, stared with
astonishment and dismay as they beheld this bulbous-bottomed burgher
peeled like an onion, and breeches after breeches spread forth over the
land until they covered the actual site of this venerable city.

This is the true history of the adroit bargain by which the Island of
Manhattan was bought for sixty guilders; and in corroboration of it I will
add that Mynheer Ten Breeches, for his services on this memorable
occasion, was elevated to the office of land measurer; which he ever
afterwards exercised in the colony.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] MSS. of the Rev. John Heckwelder: New York Historical Society.

CHAPTER VIII.

The land being thus fairly purchased of the Indians, a circumstance very
unusual in the history of colonization, and strongly illustrative of the
honesty of our Dutch progenitors, a stockade fort and trading house were
forthwith erected on an eminence in front of the place where the good St.
Nicholas had appeared in a vision to Oloffe the Dreamer; and which, as has
already been observed, was the identical place at present known as the
Bowling Green.

Around this fort a progeny of little Dutch-built houses, with tiled roofs
and weathercocks, soon sprang up, nestling themselves under its walls for
protection, as a brood of half-fledged chickens nestle under the wings of
the mother hen. The whole was surrounded by an enclosure of strong
palisadoes, to guard against any sudden irruption of the savages. Outside
of these extended the corn-fields and cabbage-gardens of the community,
with here and there an attempt at a tobacco plantation; all covering those
tracts of country at present called Broadway, Wall Street, William Street,