We watch the puzzled Indians
trying to account for the fact that the largest bundle of furs never
weighed more than two pounds. We attend a council of burghers at
Communipaw, called to devise means to protect their town from an English
expedition. While they are thoughtfully smoking, the English sail by
without seeing the smoke-enveloped town. Irving shows us the Dutchmen
estimating their distances and time by the period consumed in smoking a
pipe,--Hartford, Connecticut, being two hundred pipes distant. He allows us
to watch a housewife emptying her pocket in her search for a wooden ladle
and filling two corn baskets with the contents. He takes us to a tea party
attended by "the higher classes or noblesse, that is to say such as kept
their own cows and drove their own wagons," where we can see the damsels
knitting their own woolen stockings and the vrouws serving big apple pies,
bushels of doughnuts, and pouring tea out of a fat Delft teapot. He draws
this picture of Wouter Van Twiller, Governor of New Amsterdam:--
"The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed and proportioned
as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning Dutch
statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur.
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