s the poets, to which I would not have my judicious
reader attach any credibility. Neither am I disposed to credit an ancient
and rather apocryphal historian, who asserts that the ingenious Wilhelmus
was annihilated by the blowing down of one of his windmills, nor a writer
of later times, who affirms that he fell a victim to an experiment in
natural history, having the misfortune to break his neck from a garret
window of the stadthouse in attempting to catch swallows by sprinkling
salt upon their tails. Still less do I put my faith in the tradition that
he perished at sea in conveying home to Holland a treasure of golden ore,
discovered somewhere among the haunted regions of the Catskill
mountains.[38]

The most probable account declares, that what with the constant troubles
on his frontiers--the incessant schemings and projects going on in his own
pericranium--the memorials, petitions, remonstrances, and sage pieces of
advice of respectable meetings of the sovereign people, and the refractory
disposition of his councillors, who were sure to differ from him on every
point, and uniformly to be in the wrong--his mind was kept in a furnace
heat, until he became as completely burnt out as a Dutch family pipe which
has passed through three generations of hard smokers. In this manner did
he undergo a kind of animal combustion consuming away like a farthing
rushlight, so that when grim Death finally snuffed him out, there was
scarcely left enough of him to bury!

FOOTNOTES:

[37] "The old Welsh bards believed that King Arthur was not dead,
but carried awaie by the fairies into some pleasant place, where
he sholde remaine for a time, and then returne againe and reigne
in as great authority as ever."--_Holinshed_.

"The Britons suppose that he shall come yet and conquere all
Britaigne; for, certes, this is the prophicye of Merlyn--He say'd
that his deth shall be doubteous; and said soth, for men thereof
yet have doubte and shullen for evermore, for men wyt not whether
that he lyveth or is dede."--_De Leew Chron_.

[38] Diedrich Knickerbocker, in his scrupulous search after
truth, is sometimes too fastidious in regard to facts which
border a little on the marvelous. The story of the golden ore
rests on something better than mere tradition. The venerable
Adrian Van der Donck, Doctor of Laws, in his description of the