The colonists of Breuckelen were specially solicitous for a meeting-house and domine. They insisted that they should have good measure in discourses and that if the services should be abbreviated by the preacher, then on their side no tithes should be forthcoming. The first meeting-house was begun in 1654 at Midwout (Flatbush). Soon they worshipped in the partly roofed building. After much difficulty and repeated applications to the Council it had been arranged that the Rev. Mr. Polhemus should have his morning discourse at Flatbush, with his evening service alternately at Midwout and in Breuckelen. Governor Stuyvesant may have fancied that he had composed the difficulty. Next winter, however, the Governor was presented with a further remonstrance against the cutting-short of these alternating evening devotions. They thus complained of this brief and scanty service: “Every fortnight on Sundays he comes here, only in the afternoon for a quarter of an hour, when he only gives us a prayer in lieu of sermon, by which we can receive very little instruction; while often, while one supposes the prayer or sermon (whichever name might be preferred for it) is beginning, then it is actually at an end, by which he contributes very little to the edification of his congregation.” To modern ears, this seems a strange grievance for legislation. Governor Stuyvesant, however, admonished the Breuckelen folk to pay their full tithes. Doubtless he privately reminded Mr. Polhemus of his duties and obligations to give his people full service. In three years they obtained a domine of their own. The Rev. Henricus Selyns, a learned and devout young clergyman of a prominent Amsterdam family came to Breuckelen in 1660. At first his parishioners worshipped in a barn, but a meeting-house was soon erected. His spiritual labors and influence were successful, and the four years of Mr. Selyns’s ministrations were affectionately remembered. Compelled to return to Holland by the last illness of his father, he came to America and settled in New York eighteen years later. His warm admiration for Cotton Mather is attested by a graceful Latin poem appended to the later editions of the _Magnalia_. Breuckelen was equally fortunate in a schoolmaster—Carel de Beauvois—a cultured French Protestant from Leyden, who was appointed in Breuckelen in 1661. Besides his duties, in the church, of precentor and Scripture reader, it was stipulated that: “He shall properly, diligently, and industriously attend to the school, instill in the minds of the young the fear of the Lord, and set them a good example; to open the school with prayer and close with a Psalm, also to exercise the scholars in the questions in the _groat regulen_ of the Rev. pious and learned father Do. Johannes Megapolensis, Minister of the gospel in N. Amsterdam.”