rare thing for the quiet Hollander voluntarily to plant himself in the midst of a bustling Yankee settlement. However this may be, it is certain, that, about ninety years ago, a little neighbourhood had been formed of the descendants of both the emigrants from Holland and those from England. At first, the different races looked sourly upon each other, but the daily sight of each other's faces, and the need of each other's kindness and assistance soon brought them to live upon friendly terms. The Dutchman learned to salute his neighbour in bad English, and the Yankee began to make advances towards driving a bargain, in worse Dutch.

Jacob, or, as he was commonly called, Yok Suydam, was one of these early Dutch planters, and Jedidiah Williams, his neighbour, one of the first Yankees who sat down on the banks of this river. Williams was a man of a hard countenance and severe manners, who had been a deacon of the church in the parish he had left, and who did not, as I have known some people do, forget his religion when it ceased to be of any service to him in his worldly concerns. He was as grave in his demeanour, as guarded in his speech, and as constant in his devotions, as ever, notwithstanding that these qualities in his character were less prized in his new situation than they had been in Connecticut. The place had as yet no minister; but Williams contrived to collect every Sunday a few of the neighbours at his house to perform the weekly worship. On a still summer morning you might hear him doling out a portion of the Scriptures, or reading a sermon of some godly divine of the day, in a sort of nasal recitation, which could be distinguished, swelling over the noises of his pigs and poultry, at the distance of a quarter of a mile from his dwelling. Honest Yok read his Bible too, but he read it in Dutch, and excused himself from attending the meetings at Williams's house, on account of his ignorance of the language in which the exercises were held. Instead, however, of confining himself to the house during the whole Sunday like Williams, he would sometimes stray out into his fields, to look at his cattle and his crops, and was known once or twice to lie down on the grass under a tree, in the corner of one of his inclosures, where the rustling of his Indian corn, and the hum of the bees among the pumpkin blossoms, would put him to sleep. The rest of the day, when the weather was fine, he passed in smoking his pipe under a rude kind of piazza in front of his house, looking out over the rich meadows which he had lately cleared of their wood, or listening to a chapter of the New Testament, read to him by one of his daughters. He was also less guarded in his language than suited the precise notions of

Williams; the words "duyvel" or "donner," or some such unnecessary exclamation, would often slip out of his mouth in the haste of conversation. But there was another practice of Yok's, which was still less to the taste of his neighbour. As was the case with most of the Dutch planters at that time, his house swarmed with negro domestics, and among the merry, sleek-faced blacks, that jabbered Dutch and ate sour crout in his kitchen, there was one who could play tolerably on the fiddle. Yok did not suffer this talent to lie useless. On every New Year's eve, and not on that alone, but on many a long and bright winter evening that followed it, when the snow looked whiter than ever in the moonlight, and you could see the little wedges of frost floating and glistening in the air, the immense fireplace in the long kitchen was piled with dry hickory, the negro Orpheus was mounted on a high bench, and the brawny youths and ruddy girls of the place danced to the music till the cocks crew. Yok's own daughters, the prettiest maidens that ever ran in the woods of a new settlement, were allowed to acquit themselves exceedingly well on these occasions; but the performances of Yok himself extorted universal admiration. Old as he was, and he did not lack many winters of sixty, whenever he came on the floor, which was generally just before the breaking up of the revel, the youngest and most active of his guests acknowledged themselves outdone. He executed the double shuffle with incredible dexterity, drummed with his heels on the floor till you would have thought the drumming an accompaniment to the fiddle, and threw the joints of his limbs into the most gracefully acute angles that can be imagined.

Jedidiah, of course, did not suffer these irregularities of his neighbour to pass unrebuked, and Yok always took his admonitions kindly enough, although without much disposition to profit by them. He invariably apologized by saying that he was a Dutchman, that he followed the customs of his countrymen, and the practices of his fathers before him; and that it did not become the like of him to presume to be wiser or better than his ancestors, who were honest men, and who, he believed, had gone to heaven. The appearance of respect, however, with which he received these reproofs, went far to reconcile Jedidiah to his practical neglect of them, and a kind of friendship at length grew up between the two settlers and their families. Yok's pretty daughters came constantly to attend Williams's meetings, and Williams's son was a frequent and welcome visiter at the house of the hearty and hospitable Dutchman.

Yok's family, with the exception of the negro domestics I have mentioned, consisted only of himself and his two daughters. Mary, the elder, was somewhat tall, with a delicate shape, and a peaceful, innocent look. The climate, and three generations of American descent, had completely done away in her personal appearance all traces of her Dutch extraction, except the fair hair and the light blue eye. She was a sincere, single-hearted creature, whom the experience of eighteen years had not taught that there was such a thing as treachery in the world. It was no difficult matter to move her either to smiles or to tears, and had she lived in this novel-reading age, she would have been inevitably spoiled. As it was, the poor girl had no book but the Bible, of which there were in Yok's family several copies in the old Dutch letter, and she was forced to content herself with weeping over the fortunes of Ruth and the resurrection of Lazarus. Geshie, her sister, little more than a year younger, had an appearance of firmer and more sanguine health than Mary, and all that excess of animal spirits and love of mirth, with which youth and high health are generally accompanied. She was ruddier, shorter in stature, and fuller in her proportions than the elder sister, and under the shade of her thick brown hair, her bright eye shone out with a look so arch and full of mischief, that, like the sun in June, it was not a thing to look long upon. The two sisters, though so little alike, were both as kind and good as the day is long, and were acknowledged to be the handsomest girls in the settlement. People, however, were divided in opinion as to which was the handsomer and more agreeable of the two. The greater number gave the preference to the blooming and sprightly Geshie, but James Williams, the son of Jedidiah, thought differently.

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Young Williams, who had come with his father to the new settlement, was a frank, high-spirited, giddy young fellow. He had given some proofs of forwardness in early youth, and his father had set his heart upon seeing him one of the burning and shining lights of the church, emulating in the pulpit the eloquence of Solomon Stoddard, and the sound doctrine of Jonathan Edwards. He had sent him to Yale College to furnish his mind with the necessary worldly learning, trusting to his own prayers and to Providence for the piety that was to fit him for the work of the ministry. But his expectations were wretchedly disappointed, for the young man proved refractory under the discipline of a college, and made so good a use of his opportunities of rebellion, that in less than a year he was expelled. He came home to read Horace and shoot squirrels, and bear a part in the psalms

sung at the meetings for religious worship held at his father's. He could not make up his mind to go back to the labors of husbandry, and yet was uncertain to what other course of life to betake himself.

Young men, who have nothing else to do, are apt to amuse themselves with making love. Time hung heavy on the hands of James Williams in the new and thinly inhabited settlement. He wandered the old woods, that stretched away on all sides, till he was weary; he found them altogether too gloomy and too silent for his taste, and when their echoes were awakened by the report of his own fowling-piece, by the cawing of the crow, or the shriek of the hawk, he could not help thinking that these sounds would interest him more, if they conveyed a human meaning. He grew tired of reading Horace in a place where nobody cared for his Latin. At length he would shut his book, and lay his gun on the two wooden hooks in his father's kitchen, and walk down to the house of honest Yok Suydam, where the good Dutchman greeted him with a cordial grasp of the hand, and his daughters with smiles. James was soon master of Dutch enough to tell the story of his college pranks, which usually called a hearty laugh from the old gentleman, a sentence or two of kind expostulation from the elder daughter, and a torrent of goodhumored raillery from the younger. In return for the proficiency which the society of the family enabled him to make in their language, James offered to teach the young ladies English, and the elder readily undertook to be his pupil. As for Geshie, she had no ambition that way; it was, she said, a silken, glozing tongue,-the tongue of pedlars and sharpers, fit only for those who wished to defraud and deceive; she was contented, for her part, with the plain household speech in which she had been brought up, the language of honesty and sincerity. James began to read the New Testament along with Mary, it being the only book with which she was familiar. After getting through with a few chapters, it was exchanged for a volume of Richardson's "Pamela," which had then just made its appearance. James had contrived to possess himself of a copy of this work while at New Haven, and concealed it as carefully from the eyes of his father as the quail hides her nest from the schoolboy. He knew, that if it should be discovered, the consequences could be no less than the great wrath of his father towards so graceless a son, and that the offending book would be burnt with fire.

Geshie soon had occasion to pay her sister a multitude of sly compliments on her proficiency in English. She had never

known, she said, a tutor so assiduous, nor a pupil so teachable. It was not, indeed, extraordinary that James should fancy himself in love with the prettiest girl in the settlement, nor was it more so that she should be seriously in love with him. The young couple soon understood each other, and Geshie also, although not the confidant of her sister, understood enough of the matter to anticipate a merry wedding, and gay wedding-dresses. The language of Holland has been called barbarous and harsh; in the mouth of Mary, James thought it infinitely more musical than the Latin, and the whispers of affection in her imperfect English, seemed to give new graces to his native tongue. Their studies, however, were often interrupted by the frolics of Geshie. Sometimes the volume of "Pamela" was missing for several days, and James was obliged to defer his lessons till it could be found; sometimes the master and scholar, on attempting to rise, found themselves fastened to their chairs, and their chairs fastened together. James was somewhat of a superstitious turn; he had read Mather's "Magnalia," a copy of which by some accident belonged to his father, and had imbibed a deep respect for spirits and goblins. Geshie was not slow in discovering this weakness in his character, nor in making it contribute to her amusement. She had an abundance of stories of supernatural terrors, and always took care to relate them to James in the evening. On a moonlight night she would tell him of an apparition seen by moonlight, and on a cloudy evening, of a ghost that walked when you could not see your hand. She would then enjoy his evident alarm, as it late, and as he looked alternately at his hat and the window. In the mean time, Geshie, notwithstanding her pretended contempt for the English tongue, was making a progress in learning it equal at least to that of her sister. In truth, she was sufficiently indifferent as long as Mary was occupied with the English Testament; but when the first volume of "Pamela was brought to the house, her curiosity to know its contents prevailed over every other consideration. After that she lost nothing of the lessons James gave her sister; she treasured up in her memory every English phrase she heard uttered; she read "Pamela" by stealth; and her talent for mimicry soon gave her a tolerable command of the English accent.

grew

A year had now passed since James and Mary had become acquainted with each other. The settlement was growing every day more populous, and James had no difficulty of finding companions to cheat him of the tedious hours. There were also among the daughters of the new comers some who might be thought nearly