Chapter 10

"Dear Hasty-Pudding, what unpromised joy
Expands my heart to meet thee in Savoy!
Doom'd o'er the world through devious paths to roam,
Each clime my country, and each house my home,
My soul is sooth'd, my cares have found an end:
I greet my long-lost, unforgotten friend."

BARLOW.

The winter was soon drawing to a close, and my twenty-first birth-day was
past. My father and Col. Follock, who came over to smoke more than usual
that winter with my father, began to talk of the journey Dirck and I were
to take, in quest of the Patent. Maps were procured, calculations were
made, and different modes of proceeding were proposed, by the various
members of the family. I will acknowledge that the sight of the large,
coarse, parchment map of the Mooseridge Patent, as the new acquisition was
called, from the circumstance of the surveyors having shot a moose on a
particular ridge of land in its centre, excited certain feelings of avarice
within my mind. There were streams meandering among hills and valleys;
little lakes, or ponds, as they were erroneously called in the language of
the country, dotted the surface; and there were all the artistical proofs
of a valuable estate that a good map-maker could devise, to render the
whole pleasing and promising. [17]

If it were a good thing to be the heir of Satanstoe, it was far better to
be the tenant in common, with my friend Dirck, of all these ample plains,
rich bottoms, flowing streams and picturesque lakes. In a word, for the
first time, in the history of the colonies, the Littlepages had become
the owners of what might be termed an estate. According to our New York
parlance, six or eight hundred acres are not an estate; nor two or three
thousand, scarcely, but ten, or twenty, and much more, forty thousand acres
of land might be dignified with the name of an estate!

The first knotty point discussed, was to settle the manner in which Dirck
and myself should reach Mooseridge. Two modes of going as far as Albany
offered, and on one of these it was our first concern to decide. We might
wait until the river opened, and go as far as Albany in a sloop, of which
one or two left town each week when business was active, as it was certain
to be in the spring of the year, It was thought, however, that the army
would require mos' of the means of transportation of this nature that
offered; and it might put us to both inconvenience and delay, to wait on
the tardy movements of quarter-masters and contractors. My grandfather
shook his head when the thing was named, and advised us to remain as
independent as possible.

"Have as little as possible to do with such people, Corny," put in my
grandfather, now a grey-headed, venerable-looking old