rrack Hill, where it immortalized his name for three whole
years, when it fell to pieces and was burnt for firewood.

CHAPTER X.

About this time, the testy little governor of the New Netherlands appears
to have had his hands full, and with one annoyance and the other to have
been kept continually on the bounce. He was on the very point of following
up the expedition of Jan Jansen Alpendam by some belligerent measures
against the marauders of Merryland, when his attention was suddenly called
away by belligerent troubles springing up in another quarter, the seeds of
which had been sown in the tranquil days of Walter the Doubter.

The reader will recollect the deep doubt into which that most pacific
governor was thrown on Killian Van Rensellaer's taking possession of Bearn
Island by _wapen recht_. While the governor doubted and did nothing, the
lordly Killian went on to complete his sturdy little castellum of
Rensellaersteen, and to garrison it with a number of his tenants from the
Helderberg, a mountain region famous for the hardest heads and hardest
fists in the province. Nicholas Koorn, a faithful squire of the patroon,
accustomed to strut at his heels, wear his cast-off clothes, and imitate
his lofty bearing, was established in this post as wacht-meester. His duty
it was to keep an eye on the river, and oblige every vessel that passed,
unless on the service of their High Mightinesses, to strike its flag,
lower its peak, and pay toll to the Lord of Rensellaersteen.

This assumption of sovereign authority within the territories of the Lords
States General, however it might have been tolerated by Walter the
Doubter, had been sharply contested by William the Testy, on coming into
office and many written remonstrances had been addressed by him to Killian
Van Rensellaer, to which the latter never deigned a reply. Thus by degrees
a sore place, or, in Hibernian parlance, a raw, had been established in
the irritable soul of the little governor, insomuch that he winced at the
very name of Rensellaersteen.

Now it came to pass that, on a fine sunny day, the company's yacht, the
Half Moon, having been on one of its stated visits to Fort Aurania, was
quietly tiding it down the Hudson; the commander, Govert Lockerman, a
veteran Dutch skipper of few words but great bottom, was seated on the
high poop, quietly smoking his pipe, under the shadow of the proud flag
of Orange, when, on arriving abreast of Bearn Island, he was