Others claimed to themselves the appellation of “Conquerors,” from their gallant achievements in New Sweden and their victory over the Yankees at Oyster Bay. Such was that list of warlike worthies heretofore enumerated, beginning with the Van Wycks, the Van Dycks, and the Ten Eycks, and extending to the Rutgers, the Bensons, the Brinkerhoffs, and the Schermerhorns,—a roll equal to the Doomsday-Book of William the Conqueror, and establishing the heroic origin of many an ancient aristocratical Dutch family. These, after all, are the only legitimate nobility and lords of the soil; these are the real “beavers of the Manhattoes”; and much does it grieve me in modern days to see them elbowed aside by foreign invaders, and more especially by those ingenious people, “the Sons of the Pilgrims”; who out-bargain them in the market, out-speculate them on the exchange, out-top them in fortune, and run up mushroom palaces so high, that the tallest Dutch family mansion has not wind enough left for its weather-cock. In the proud days of Peter Stuyvesant, however, the good old Dutch aristocracy loomed out in all its grandeur. The burly burgher, in round-crowned flaundrish hat with brim of vast circumference, in portly gabardine and bulbous multiplicity of breeches, sat on his “stoep,” and smoked his pipe in lordly silence; nor did it ever enter his brain that the active, restless Yankee, whom he saw through his half-shut eyes worrying about in dog-day heat, ever intent on the main chance, was one day to usurp control over these goodly Dutch domains. Already, however, the races regarded each other with disparaging eyes. The Yankees sneeringly spoke of the round-crowned burghers of the Manhattoes as the “Copperheads,” while the latter, glorying in their own nether rotundity, and observing the slack galligaskins of their rivals, flapping like an empty sail against the mast, retorted upon them with the opprobrious appellation of “Platter-breeches.” [Illustration: “PLATTER-BREECHES.” ] =Chapter II.= HOW PETER STUYVESANT LABORED TO CIVILIZE THE COMMUNITY—HOW HE WAS A GREAT PROMOTER OF HOLIDAYS—HOW HE INSTITUTED KISSING ON NEW YEAR’S DAY—HOW HE DISTRIBUTED FIDDLES THROUGHOUT THE NEW NETHERLANDS—HOW HE VENTURED TO REFORM THE LADIES’ PETTICOATS, AND HOW HE CAUGHT A TARTAR.