Admiral Alpendam arrived without accident in the Schuylkill, and came upon the enemy just as they were engaged in a great “barbecue,” a kind of festivity or carouse much practised in Merryland. Opening upon them with the speech of William the Testy, he denounced them as a pack of lazy, canting, julep-tippling, cock-fighting, horse-racing, slave-trading, tavern-hunting, Sabbath-breaking, mulatto-breeding upstarts, and concluded by ordering them to evacuate the country immediately: to which they laconically replied in plain English, “they’d see him d——d first!” Now, this was a reply on which neither Jan Jansen Alpendam nor Wilhelmus Kieft had made any calculation. Finding himself, therefore, totally unprepared to answer so terrible a rebuff with suitable hostility, the admiral concluded his wisest course would be to return home and report progress. He accordingly steered his course back to New Amsterdam, where he arrived safe, having accomplished this hazardous enterprise at small expense of treasure and no loss of life. His saving policy gained him the universal appellation of the Saviour of his Country; and his services were suitably rewarded by a shingle monument, erected by subscription on the top of Flattenbarrack Hill, where it immortalized his name for three whole years, when it fell to pieces and was burnt for firewood. [Illustration: Black and white ink sketch of a portly, boastful soldier with a large mustache and helmet, leaning on a long sword with one hand on his hip.] =Chapter X.= TROUBLOUS TIMES ON THE HUDSON—HOW KILLIAN VAN RENSELLAER ERECTED A FEUDAL CASTLE, AND HOW HE INTRODUCED CLUB-LAW INTO THE PROVINCE. About this time the testy little governor of the New Netherlands appears to have had his hands full, and with one annoyance and the other to have been kept continually on the bounce. He was on the very point of following up the expedition of Jan Jansen Alpendam by some belligerent measures against the marauders of Merryland, when his attention was suddenly called away by belligerent troubles springing up in another quarter, the seeds of which had been sown in the tranquil days of Walter the Doubter.