all the progeny of Mother Earth were of a gigantic stature; and Van
Zandt, we are told, was a tall, raw-boned man, above six feet high, with
an astonishingly hard head. Nor is this origin of the illustrious Van
Zandt a whit more improbable or repugnant to belief than what is related
and universally admitted of certain of our greatest, or rather richest,
men, who we are told with the utmost gravity did originally spring from a
dunghill!

Of the second of the trio but faint accounts have reached to this time,
which mention that he was a sturdy, obstinate, worrying, bustling little
man; and, from being usually equipped in an old pair of buckskins, was
familiarly dubbed Harden Broeck, or Tough Breeches.

Ten Broeck completed this junto of adventurers. It is a singular but
ludicrous fact, which, were I not scrupulous in recording the whole truth,
I should almost be tempted to pass over in silence, as incompatible with
the gravity and dignity of history, that this worthy gentleman should
likewise have been nicknamed from what in modern times is considered the
most ignoble part of the dress. But, in truth, the small-clothes seems to
have been a very dignified garment in the eyes of our venerated ancestors,
in all probability from its covering that part of the body which has been
pronounced "the seat of honor."

The name of Ten Broeck, or, as it was sometimes spelt, Tin Broeck, has
been indifferently translated into Ten Breeches and Tin Breeches. The most
elegant and ingenious writers on the subject declare in favor of Tin, or
rather Thin, Breeches; whence they infer that the original bearer of it
was a poor but merry rogue, whose galligaskins were none of the soundest,
and who, peradventure, may have been the author of that truly
philosophical stanza:----

"Then why should we quarrel for riches,
Or any such glittering toys?
A light heart and thin pair of breeches
Will go through the world, my brave boys!"

The High Dutch commentators, however, declare in favor of the other
reading, and affirm that the worthy in question was a burly, bulbous man,
who, in sheer ostentation of his venerable progenitors, was the first to
introduce into the settlement the ancient Dutch fashion of ten pair of
breeches.

Such was the trio of coadjutors chosen by Oloffe the Dreamer to accompany
him in this voyage into unknown realms; as to the names of his crews they
have not been handed down by history.

Having, as I befo