canoe, and paddled
over to New Amsterdam. Immediately on landing, he repaired to Governor
Stuyvesant, and in more words than he had ever spoken before in the whole
course of his life, gave an account of the disastrous affair.

On receiving these direful tidings, the valiant Peter started from his
seat--dashed the pipe he was smoking against the back of the
chimney--thrust a prodigious quid of tobacco into his left cheek--pulled
up his galligaskins, and strode up and down the room, humming, as was
customary with him when in a passion, a hideous north-west ditty. But, as
I have before shown, he was not a man to vent his spleen in idle vaporing.
His first measure, after the paroxysm of wrath had subsided, was to stump
upstairs to a huge wooden chest which served as his armory, from whence he
drew forth that identical suit of regimentals described in the preceding
chapter. In these portentous habiliment she arrayed himself, like Achilles
in the armor of Vulcan, maintaining all the while an appalling silence,
knitting his brows, and drawing his breath through his clenched teeth.
Being hastily equipped, he strode down into the parlor, and jerked down
his trusty sword from over the fireplace, where it was usually suspended;
but before he girded it on his thigh, he drew it from its scabbard, and as
his eye coursed along the rusty blade, a grim smile stole over his iron
visage; it was the first smile that had visited his countenance for five
long weeks; but every one who beheld it prophesied that there would soon
be warm work in the province!

Thus armed at all points, with grisly war depicted in each feature, his
very cocked hat assuming an air of uncommon defiance, he instantly put
himself upon the alert, and dispatched Antony Van Corlear hither and
thither, this way and that way, through all the muddy streets and crooked
lanes of the city, summoning by sound of trumpet his trusty peers to
assemble in instant council. This done, by way of expediting matters,
according to the custom of people in a hurry, he kept in continual bustle,
shifting from chair to chair, popping his head out of every window, and
stumping up and downstairs with his wooden leg in such brisk and incessant
motion, that, as we are informed by an authentic historian of the times,
the continual clatter bore no small resemblance to the music of a cooper
hooping a flour-barrel.

A summons so peremptory, and from a man of the governor's mettle, was not
to be tr