is manner did the profound council of New Amsterdam smoke, and doze,
and ponder, from week to week, month to month, and year to year, in what
manner they should construct their infant settlement; meanwhile the town
took care of itself, and, like a sturdy brat which is suffered to run
about wild, unshackled by clouts and bandages, and other abominations by
which your notable nurses and sage old women cripple and disfigure the
children of men, increased so rapidly in strength and magnitude, that
before the honest burgomasters had determined upon a plan it was too late
to put it in execution--whereupon they wisely abandoned the subject
altogether.

CHAPTER IX.

There is something exceedingly delusive in thus looking back, through the
long vista of departed years, and catching a glimpse of the fairy realms
of antiquity. Like a landscape melting into distance, they receive a
thousand charms from their very obscurity, and the fancy delights to fill
up their outlines with graces and excellences of its own creation. Thus
loom on my imagination those happier days of our city, when as yet New
Amsterdam was a mere pastoral town, shrouded in groves of sycamores and
willows, and surrounded by trackless forests and wide-spreading waters,
that seemed to shut out all the cares and vanities of a wicked world.

In those days did this embryo city present the rare and noble spectacle of
a community governed without laws; and thus being left to its own course,
and the fostering care of Providence, increased as rapidly as though it
had been burdened with a dozen panniers full of those sage laws usually
heaped on the backs of young cities--in order to make them grow. And in
this particular I greatly admire the wisdom and sound knowledge of human
nature displayed by the sage Oloffe the Dreamer and his fellow
legislators. For my part, I have not so bad an opinion of mankind as many
of my brother philosophers. I do not think poor human nature so sorry a
piece of workmanship as they would make it out to be; and as far as I have
observed, I am fully satisfied that man, if left to himself, would about
as readily go right as wrong. It is only this eternally sounding in his
ears that it is his duty to go right which makes him go the very reverse.
The noble independence of his nature revolts at this intolerable tyranny
of law, and the perpetual interference of officious morality, which are
ever besetting his path with finger-posts and directi