league, and resounding
throughout the regions of the east, menacing the fame and fortunes of
Peter Stuyvesant; I call, therefore, upon the reader to leave behind him
all the paltry brawls of the Connecticut borders, and to press forward
with me to the relief of our favorite hero, who, I foresee, will be
wofully beset by the implacable Yankees in the next chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] Hobbes, Leviathan, part i., ch. 13.

[42]
"Cum prorepserunt primis animalia terris,
Mutum et turpe pecus, glandem atque cubilia propter,
Unguibus et pugnis, dein fustibus, atque its porro
Pugnabaut armis, quae post fabricaverat usus."
--Hor. _Sat._ lib. i. s. 3.

CHAPTER V.

That the reader may be aware of the peril at this moment menacing Peter
Stuyvesant and his capital, I must remind him of the old charge advanced
in the council of the league in the time of William the Testy, that the
Nederlanders were carrying on a trade "damnable and injurious to the
colonists," in furnishing the savages with "guns, powther, and shott."
This, as I then suggested, was a crafty device of the Yankee confederacy
to have a snug cause of war _in petto_, in case any favorable opportunity
should present of attempting the conquest of the New Nederlands, the great
object of Yankee ambition.

Accordingly, we now find, when every other ground of complaint had
apparently been removed by treaty, this nefarious charge revived with
tenfold virulence, and hurled like a thunderbolt at the very head of Peter
Stuyvesant; happily his head, like that of the great bull of the Wabash,
was proof against such missiles.

To be explicit, we are told that, in the years 1651, the great confederacy
of the east accused the immaculate Peter, the soul of honor and heart of
steel, of secretly endeavoring, by gifts and promises, to instigate the
Narroheganset, Mohaque, and Pequot Indians to surprise and massacre the
Yankee settlements. "For," as the grand council observed, "the Indians
round about for divers hundred miles cercute seeme to have drunk deepe of
an intoxicating cupp, att or from the Manhattoes against the English,
whoe have sought their good, both in bodily and spirituall respects."

This charge they pretended to support by the evidence of divers Indians,
who were probably moved by that spirit of truth which is said to reside in
the bottle, and who swore to the fact as sturdily as though they had been