ed mode of discoverers; but the sage Oloffe gave them the
significant sign of Saint Nicholas, laying his finger beside his nose
and winking hard with one eye, whereupon his followers perceived that
there was something sagacious in the wink. He now addressed the Indians
in the blandest terms, and made such tempting display of beads,
hawks'-bells, and red blankets that he was soon permitted to land, and a
great land speculation ensued. And here let me give the true story of
the original purchase of the site of this renowned city about which so
much has been said and written. Some affirm that the first cost was but
sixty guilders. The learned Dominie Heckwelder records a tradition that
the Dutch discoverers bargained for only so much land as the hide of a
bullock would cover; but that they cut the hide in strips no thicker
than a child's finger, so as to take in a large portion of land and to
take in the Indians into the bargain. This, however, is an old fable
which the worthy Dominie may have borrowed from antiquity. The true
version is, that Oloffe Van Kortlandt bargained for just so much land as
a man could cover with his nether garments. The terms being concluded,
he produced his friend Mynheer Ten Broeck as the man whose breeches were
to be used in measurement. The simple savages, whose ideas of a man's
nether garments had never expanded beyond the dimensions of a
breech-clout, stared with astonishment and dismay as they beheld this
burgher peeled like an onion, and breeches after breeches spread forth
over the land until they covered the actual site of this venerable city.

This is the true history of the adroit bargain by which the island of
Manhattan was bought for sixty guilders; and in corroboration of it I
will add that Mynheer Ten Breeches, for his services on this memorable
occasion, was elevated to the office of land measurer, which he ever
afterward exercised in the colony.

The land being thus fairly purchased of the Indians, a circumstance very
unusual in the history of colonization, and strongly illustrative of the
honesty of our Dutch progenitors, a stockade fort and a trading-house
were forthwith erected on an eminence, the identical place at present
known as the Bowling Green.

Around this fort a progeny of little Dutch-built houses, with tiled
roofs and weathercocks, soon sprang up, nestling themselves under its
walls for protection, as a brood of half-fledged chickens nestles under
the wings of the