These were the only restrictions he ever imposed upon the sex, and these were considered by them as tyrannical oppressions, and resisted with that becoming spirit manifested by the gentle sex whenever their privileges are invaded. In fact, Antony Van Corlear, who, as has been shown, was a sagacious man, experienced in the ways of women, took a private occasion to intimate to the governor that a conspiracy was forming among the young vrouws of New Amsterdam; and that, if the matter were pushed any further, there was danger of their leaving off petticoats altogether; whereupon the good Peter shrugged his shoulders, dropped the subject, and ever after suffered the women to wear their petticoats, and cut their capers as high as they pleased, a privilege which they have jealously maintained in the Manhattoes unto the present day. CHAPTER III. In the last two chapters I have regaled the reader with a delectable picture of the good Peter and his metropolis during an interval of peace. It was, however, but a bit of blue sky in a stormy day; the clouds are again gathering up from all points of the compass, and, if I am not mistaken in my forebodings, we shall have rattling weather in the ensuing chapters. It is with some communities, as it is with certain meddlesome individuals--they have a wonderful facility at getting into scrapes; and I have always remarked that those are most prone to get in who have the least talent at getting out again. This is doubtless owing to the excessive valor of those states; for I have likewise noticed that this rampant quality is always most frothy and fussy where most confined; which accounts for its vaporing so amazingly in little states, little men and ugly little women more especially. Such is the case with this little province of the Nieuw Nederlands; which, by its exceeding valor, has already drawn upon itself a host of enemies; has had fighting enough to satisfy a province twice its size, and is in a fair way of becoming an exceedingly forlorn, well-belabored, and woebegone little province. All which was providentially ordered to give interest and sublimity to this pathetic history. The first interruption to the halcyon quiet of Peter Stuyvesant was caused by hostile intelligence from the old belligerent nest of Rensellaersteen. Killian, the lordly patroon of Rensellaerwick, was again in the field, at the head of his myrmidons of the Helderberg seeking to annex the whole of the Catskill mountains to his domains. The Indian tribes of these mountains had likewise taken up the hatchet, and menaced the venerable Dutch settlements of Esopus.