on the canal--now would he peep at it through a
telescope, from the other side of the Meuse--and now would he take a
bird's-eye glance at it, from the top of one of those gigantic windmills
which protect the gates of the city. The good folks of the place were on
the tiptoe of expectation and impatience--notwithstanding all the turmoil
of my great-grandfather, not a symptom of the church was yet to be seen;
they even began to fear it would never be brought into the world, but that
its great projector would lie down and die in labor of the mighty plan he
had conceived. At length, having occupied twelve good months in puffing
and paddling, and talking and walking--having traveled over all Holland,
and even taken a peep into France and Germany--having smoked five hundred
and ninety-nine pipes and three hundredweight of the best Virginia
tobacco--my great-grandfather gathered together all that knowing and
industrious class of citizens who prefer attending to anybody's business
sooner than their own, and having pulled off his coat and five pair of
breeches, he advanced sturdily up, and laid the corner-stone of the
church, in the presence of the whole multitude--just at the commencement
of the thirteenth month.

In a similar manner, and with the example of my worthy ancestor full
before my eyes, have I proceeded in writing this most authentic history.
The honest Rotterdammers no doubt thought my great-grandfather was doing
nothing at all to the purpose, while he was making such a world of
prefatory bustle about the building of his church; and many of the
ingenious inhabitants of this fair city will unquestionably suppose that
all the preliminary chapters, with the discovery, population, and final
settlement of America, were totally irrelevant and superfluous--and that
the main business, the history of New York, is not a jot more advanced
than if I had never taken up my pen. Never were wise people more mistaken
in their conjectures. In consequence of going to work slowly and
deliberately, the church came out of my grandfather's hands one of the
most sumptuous, goodly, and glorious edifices in the known
world--excepting that, like our magnificent capitol at Washington, it was
begun on so grand a scale that the good folk could not afford to finish
more than the wing of it. So, likewise, I trust, if ever I am able to
finish this work on the plan I have commenced (of which, in simple truth,
I sometimes have my doubts), it will be fo