cramped for elbow-room.

Peter Stuyvesant was not a man to submit quietly to such intrusions; his
first impulse was to march at once to the frontier, and kick these
squatting Yankees out of the country; but, bethinking himself in time that
he was now a governor and legislator, the policy of the statesman for once
cooled the fire of the old soldier, and he determined to try his hand at
negotiation. A correspondence accordingly ensued between him and the great
council of the league, and it was agreed that commissioners from either
side should meet at Hartford, to settle boundaries, adjust grievances,
and establish a "perpetual and happy peace."

The commissioners on the part of the Manhattoes were chosen, according to
immemorial usage of that venerable metropolis, from among the "wisest and
weightiest" men of the community; that is to say, men with the oldest
heads and heaviest pockets. Among these sages the veteran navigator, Hans
Reinier Oothout, who had made such extensive discoveries during the time
of Oloffe the Dreamer, was looked up to as an oracle in all matters of the
kind; and he was ready to produce the very spy-glass with which he first
spied the mouth of the Connecticut river from his masthead, and all the
world knows that the discovery of the mouth of the river gives prior right
to all the lands drained by its waters.

It was with feelings of pride and exultation that the good people of the
Manhattoes saw two of the richest and most ponderous burghers departing on
this embassy; men whose word on 'Change was oracular, and in whose
presence no poor man ventured to appear without taking off his hat: when
it was seen, too, that the veteran Reinier Oothout accompanied them with
his spy-glass under his arm, all the old men and old women predicted that
men of such weight, with such evidence, would leave the Yankees no
alternative but to pack up their tin kettles and wooden wares, put wife
and children in a cart, and abandon all the lands of their High
Mightinesses on which they had squatted.

In truth, the commissioners sent to Hartford by the league seemed in no
wise calculated to compete with men of such capacity. They were two lean
Yankee lawyers, litigious-looking varlets, and evidently men of no
substance, since they had no rotundity in the belt, and there was no
jingling of money in their pockets; it is true they had longer heads than
the Dutchmen; but if the heads of the latter were flat at top, they were