lamentations made in their name as are those men of straw, John Doe and
Richard Roe, of the plaintiffs for whom they are generously pleased to
become sureties.

The most glorious hero that ever desolated nations might have mouldered
into oblivion among the rubbish of his own monument, did not some
historian take him into favor, and benevolently transmit his name to
posterity; and much as the valiant William Kieft worried, and bustled, and
turmoiled, while he had the destinies of a whole colony in his hand, I
question seriously whether he will not be obliged to this authentic
history for all his future celebrity.

His exit occasioned no convulsion in the city of New Amsterdam nor its
vicinity; the earth trembled not, neither did any stars shoot from their
spheres; the heavens were not shrouded in black, as poets would fain
persuade us they have been, on the death of a hero; the rocks
(hard-hearted varlets!) melted not into tears, nor did the trees hang
their heads in silent sorrow; and as to the sun, he lay abed the next
night just as long, and showed as jolly a face when he rose, as he ever
did, on the same day of the month in any year, either before or since. The
good people of New Amsterdam, one and all, declared that he had been a
very busy, active, bustling little governor; that he was "the father of
his country;" that he was "the noblest work of God;" that "he was a man,
take him for all in all, they ne'er should look upon his like again;"
together with sundry other civil and affectionate speeches, regularly said
on the death of all great men; after which they smoked their pipes,
thought no more about him, and Peter Stuyvesant succeeded to his station.

Peter Stuyvesant was the last, and, like the renowned Wouter Van Twiller,
the best of our ancient Dutch governors; Wouter having surpassed all who
preceded him, and Pieter, or Piet, as he was sociably called by the old
Dutch burghers, who were ever prone to familiarize names, having never
been equalled by any successor. He was, in fact, the very man fitted by
Nature to retrieve the desperate fortunes of her beloved province, had not
the Fates, those most potent and unrelenting of all ancient spinsters,
destined them to inextricable confusion.

To say merely that he was a hero would be doing him great injustice; he
was, in truth, a combination of heroes; for he was of a sturdy, raw-boned
make, like Ajax Telamon, with a pair of round shoulders that Hercules
would h