Chapter 4 - Page 2

there were other
dangers that gave my excellent parent much concern. All the bridges were
not considered safe; the roads were, and are yet, very circuitous, and it
was possible to lose one's way; while it was said persons had been known to
pass the night on Harlem common, an uninhabited waste that lies some seven
or eight miles on our side of the city. My mother's first care, therefore,
was to get Dirck and myself off early in the morning; in order to do which
she rose with the light, gave us our breakfasts immediately afterwards, and
thus enabled us to quit Satanstoe just as the sun had burnished the eastern
sky with its tints of flame-colour.

Dirck was in high good-humour that morning, and, to own the truth, Corny
did not feel the depression of spirits which, according to the laws of
propriety, possibly ought to have attended the first really free departure
of so youthful an adventurer from beneath the shadows of the paternal roof.
We went our way laughing and chatting like two girls just broke loose from
boarding-school. I had never known Dirck more communicative, and I got
certain new insights into his feelings, expectations and prospects, as we
rode along the colony's highway that morning, that afterwards proved to
be matters of much interest with us both. We had not got a mile from the
chimney-tops of Satanstoe, ere my friend broke forth as follows:--

"I suppose you have heard, Corny, what the two old gentlemen have been at,
lately?"

"Your father and mine?--I have not heard a syllable of any thing new."

"They have been suing out, before the Governor and Council, a joint claim
to that tract of land they bought of the Mohawks, the last time they were
out together on service in the colony militia."

I ought to mention, here, that though my predecessors had made but few
campaigns in the regular army, each had made several in the more humble
capacity of a militia officer.

"This is news to me, Dirck," I answered. "Why should the old gentlemen have
been so sly about such a thing?"

"I cannot tell you, lest they thought silence the best way to keep off the
yankees. You know, my father has a great dread of a yankee's getting a
finger into any of his bargains. He says the yankees are the locusts of the
west."

"But, how came you to know any thing about it, Dirck?"

"I am no yankee, Corny."

"And your father told _you_ on the strength of this recommendation?"

"He told me, as he tells me most things that he thinks it best I should
know. We smoke together, and then we talk together."

"I would learn to smoke too, if I thought I should get any useful