s
house, and fell to smoking with tremendous violence. The testy William
issued forth like a wrathful spider, demanding the reason of this lawless
fumigation. The sturdy rioters replied by lolling back in their seats, and
puffing away with redoubled fury, raising such a murky cloud that the
governor was fain to take refuge in the interior of his castle.

A long negotiation ensued through the medium of Anthony the Trumpeter. The
governor was at first wrathful and unyielding, but was gradually smoked
into terms. He concluded by permitting the smoking of tobacco, but he
abolished the fair long pipes used in the days of Wouter Van Twiller,
denoting ease, tranquillity, and sobriety of deportment; these he
condemned as incompatible with the despatch of business; in place whereof
he substituted little captious short pipes, two inches in length, which,
he observed, could be stuck in one corner of the mouth, or twisted in the
hatband, and would never be in the way. Thus ended this alarming
insurrection, which was long known by the name of the Pipe Plot, and
which, it has been somewhat quaintly observed, did end, like most plots
and seditions, in mere smoke.

But mark, O reader! the deplorable evils which did afterward result. The
smoke of these villainous little pipes, continually ascending in a cloud
about the nose, penetrated into and befogged the cerebellum, dried up all
the kindly moisture of the brain, and rendered the people who used them as
vaporish and testy as the governor himself. Nay, what is worse, from
being goodly, burly, sleek-conditioned men, they became, like our Dutch
yeomanry who smoke short pipes, a lantern-jawed, smoke-dried,
leather-hided race.

Nor was this all. From this fatal schism in tobacco pipes we may date the
rise of parties in the Nieuw Nederlandts. The rich and self-important
burghers who had made their fortunes, and could afford to be lazy, adhered
to the ancient fashion, and formed a kind of aristocracy known as the Long
Pipes; while the lower order, adopting the reform of William Kieft as more
convenient in their handicraft employments, were branded with the plebeian
name of Short Pipes.

A third party sprang up, headed by the descendants of Robert Chewit, the
companion of the great Hudson. These discarded pipes altogether, and took
up chewing tobacco; hence they were called Quids; an appellation since
given to those political mongrels which sometimes spring up between two
great parties, a