and on winter nights his guests sat down to a table laden with blue and white china ornamented with strange Chinese pictures, and drank their tea, alternately biting lumps of sugar, from the tiniest china cups, and altogether were entertained with all the pomp and circumstance he had known in The Hague. At these evening entertainments De Sille read his poems in such perfect style as to win much applause, and doubtless it was the reading of these, as well as his courtly manner and great wealth, that very soon won for him the love of fair Tryntie Croegers.

And then one day there was a grand gathering in the stone church inside the fort—on the wedding-day of Nicasius De Sille and Mistress Tryntie Croegers. Into the church went the friends: women, some with petticoats of red cloth, some with skirts of blue or purple silk set off with rare lace, all with silken hoods over much befrizzled hair, and their fingers covered with glittering rings, and with great lockets of gold on their bosoms. Each had a Bible fastened to her girdle by links of gold—not the plain, strongly bound Bibles used by Jacob Steendam and his friends, but elaborately wrought in silver, with golden clasps. The men were just as gaily dressed as the women, for they wore long coats adorned with shining buttons and pockets trimmed with lace, and colored waistcoats, knee-breeches of velvet, silk stockings, and low shoes set off by silver buckles. Outside the fort among the townspeople of lower degree it was, too, quite a holiday. Men with coarse frocks and leather aprons, women in homespun gowns, turbaned negresses, swarthy negro slaves, dusky Indians,—all made merry in their several ways as though glad of an excuse. And the motley throng outside the fort and the elegant gathering within all made way for the wrinkled little bell-ringer, who carried the cushions from the Stadt Huys for the burgomasters and the schepens, who insisted on every bit of their dignity, come what would, on this day or on any other. So, with those inside the church looking on in silence and the people outside keeping up an incessant din and clatter, the poet of the rich was married to Tryntie Croegers by the good Dominie Megapolensis.

But for all such a fair starting off this married life had an untimely ending. Though Nicasius De Sille might win a wife by his poetry, it seemed that he could not hold one. There were no poetic readings in the house by the canal after the marriage, and the literature of the town which had started out so bravely fell into a decline with the languishing of De Sille's connubial bliss. Before the third year had gone by, a commission of their friends was trying to tell the pair how happy their lives should have been. But all the reasoning had no effect, and the friends were forced to give it up and submit to a decision, in very quaint wording, the tenor of which was that it was acknowledged that there was no love between the two, and that the only recommendation that could be made was that the property should be divided equally and they go their several ways,—which they did. But the earlier readings of poetry had sown the seed of still another marriage. For at those readings, Anna, the youngest daughter of the poet, had sat by her father's side, and young Hendrick Kip had sat by his father's side, and about the time the commission of friends was announcing its failure to patch up matters, Anna De Sille and Hendrick Kip, all undismayed by the bad example, had decided to sit side by side through the remainder of their lives.

All this time De Sille was growing more and more rich, when there came a great change. Of a sudden one day the English ship sailed into the bay, and the English soldiers took possession of the town, and the rule of the Dutch in New Amsterdam had passed, and the English became governors of their province of New York. Then Stuyvesant went to live in a little settlement he had built up and called Bouwerie Village, which was far out on the Bouwerie Road, and Nicasius De Sille settled down as a merchant, and little more was heard of him as a poet.

It was a simple enough thing to rename the town and call it after the brother of an English king, but that made but little change in the customs of the people. For many a long year it was to remain the quaint, slow-going town it had been. Certainly no English brain or hand added to the literature of this time, and the only bit of writing which survives is the work of a Dutch minister.

In the eighteenth year after the coming of the English, when it had come to be 1682, Dominie Henricus Selyns came to New York from Holland. He had lived four years in the town when it was New Amsterdam, and we have his own words for it that he found the settlement scarcely altered a whit from the time he left. And now he took charge of the little church in the fort, the same church where Nicasius De Sille was married with such pomp. His congregation was made up of much the same kind of people as of old, and perhaps it was just as well, since he still preached in the Dutch language. The poems he wrote, all in the Dutch language, were read as piously as were the Bibles, and were quite at one with them in religious feeling. No one then imagined that a day would come when a critic might hint that the good Dominie's contributions to the early literature of New York might be just a shade gloomy and despairing in their views of the fearfulness of the after-life.

For quite twenty years the good Dominie lived to aid in fostering the infant literature of infant New York, living a life as quiet and as regular as any Dutch colonist could have demanded. On a Sunday morning he preached in the church in the fort the long, heavy sermons that his people loved. In the afternoon he rode away on the highway that led into the country, past the Collect Pond, over the Kissing Bridge at the Fresh Water, on to the stretch that was to grow into the Bowery, through the forest till he came to the few clustering houses of the Bouwerie Village, where Stuyvesant had spent his old age. In the village church he preached of an afternoon,—the church which Stuyvesant had built and beside which he was buried,—the church which was to stand another hundred years and which was then to give way to a house of worship to be called St. Mark's, which, in turn, two centuries and more after Stuyvesant's day, was still to be found standing in the core of a great metropolis.

Dominie Selyns lived long enough to