It is an old saying that “a little pot is soon hot,” which was the case with William the Testy. Being a little man, he was soon in a passion, and once in a passion, he soon boiled over. Summoning his council on the receipt of this news, he belabored the Swedes in the longest speech that had been heard in the colony since the wordy warfare of Ten Breeches and Tough Breeches. Having thus taken off the fire-edge of his valor, he resorted to his favorite measure of proclamation, and despatched a document of the kind, ordering the renegade Minnewits and his gang of Swedish vagabonds to leave the country immediately, under pain of the vengeance of their High Mightinesses the Lords States-General, and of the potentates of the Manhattoes. This strong measure was not a whit more effectual than its predecessors, which had been thundered against the Yankees; and William Kieft was preparing to follow it up with something still more formidable, when he received intelligence of other invaders on his southern frontier, who had taken possession of the banks of the Schuylkill, and built a fort there. They were represented as a gigantic, gun-powder race of men, exceedingly expert at boxing, biting, gouging, and other branches of the rough-and-tumble mode of warfare, which they had learned from their prototypes and cousins-german, the Virginians, to whom they have ever borne considerable resemblance. Like them, too, they were great roisters, much given to revel on hoe-cake and bacon, mint-julep and apple-toddy; whence their newly formed colony had already acquired the name of Merryland, which, with a slight modification, it retains to the present day. [Illustration: THE MERRYLANDERS WERE FOND OF BOXING. ] In fact, the Merrylanders and their cousins, the Virginians, were represented to William Kieft as offsets from the same original stock as his bitter enemies the Yanokie, or Yankee tribes of the east, having both come over to this country for the liberty of conscience, or, in other words, to live as they pleased: the Yankees taking to praying and money-making, and converting quakers; and the Southerners to horse-racing and cock-fighting, and breeding negroes. Against these new invaders Wilhelmus Kieft immediately despatched a naval armament of two sloops and thirty men, under Jan Jansen Alpendam, who was armed to the very teeth with one of the little governor’s most powerful speeches, written in vigorous Low Dutch.