o pieces."

"But not in Holland," exclaimed Nanking. "There he gives the strong
boys skates and the weak boys Canary wine. He brought, one time, long
ago, three murdered boys to life, so that they could eat goose for
Christmas dinner. And three poor maidens, whose lovers would not take
them because they had no marriage portions, found gold on the
window-sill to get them husbands."

"_Foei! Fus!_ You're lied to, Nanking! There is no good Christmas in
this land."

Nanking said they were very wicked to doubt true and good things. He
believed every thing, and particularly every thing pleasant. His
mother, whose house was on the river bank, looked out with a fond
sadness as she heard him playing, his heart amongst the little boys,
although he was so big.

"_Ach! helas!_" she said to herself, "what will become of my dear
man-lamb? He is simple and fatherless, poor and confiding. Thank God,
at least he is not a woman!"

The Widow Cloos had come but recently from Holland, sent out by
charity at the instance of her brother, Van Swearingen, the schout or
bailiff of New Amstel colony. Her son, who was almost a man in years,
had been kept in the Orphan House at Amsterdam until his growth made
him a misplaced object there, and his feeble intellect forbade that he
should become a soldier, and die, like his father, in the Dutch
battles. So the Widow Cloos brought Nanking out in the ship Mill, to
the city of Amsterdam's own colony on the banks of the South River,
which the English called the Delaware. They came in a starving time,
when the crops were drenched out by rains and all the people and the
soldiery of the fort were down with bilious and scarlet fever. The
widow was just getting over a long attack of this illness, and her
brother, the schout, regarded the innocent Nanking as the cause of her
poverty.

"Thou hadst better drown him," said the hard official; "he'll eat all
thy substance or give the remainder away, for he believes every thing
and everybody."

"O brother!" pleaded the widow, "if he did not believe something, how
sad would he be! All the children love him, and he is company for
them."

It was an odd sight to see Nanking down with the boys, as big as the
father of any of them, playing as gently as the littlest. He rode them
pig-a-back on his broad shoulders; they liked to see him light his
pipe and smoke without getting sick. He worked for his mother,
carrying water and catching fish, and was the only pers