His fortress being finished, it would have done any man’s heart good to behold the swelling dignity with which the general would stride in and out a dozen times a day, surveying it in front and in rear, on this side and on that; how he would strut backwards and forwards, in full regimentals, on the top of the ramparts,—like a vainglorious cock-pigeon, swelling and vaporing on the top of a dove-cot. There is a kind of valorous spleen which, like wind, is apt to grow unruly in the stomachs of newly made soldiers, compelling them to box-lobby brawls and broken-headed quarrels, unless there can be found some more harmless way to give it vent. It is recorded in the delectable romance of Pierce Forest, that a young knight, being dubbed by King Alexander, did incontinently gallop into an adjacent forest and belabor the trees with such might and main, that he not merely eased off the sudden effervescence of his valor, but convinced the whole court that he was the most potent and courageous cavalier on the face of the earth. In like manner the commander of Fort Casimir, when he found his martial spirit waxing too hot within him, would sally forth into the fields and lay about him most lustily with his sabre,—decapitating cabbages by platoons, hewing down lofty sunflowers, which he termed gigantic Swedes, and if, perchance, he espied a colony of big-bellied pumpkins quietly basking in the sun,—“Ah! caitiff Yankees,” would he roar, “have I caught ye at last?”—So saying, with one sweep of his sword he would cleave the unhappy vegetables from their chins to their waistbands; by which warlike havoc his choler being in some sort allayed, he would return into the fortress with the full conviction that he was a very miracle of military prowess. [Illustration: VAN POFFENBURGH’S VALOR. ] He was a disciplinarian, too, of the first order. Woe to any unlucky soldier who did not hold up his head and turn out his toes when on parade, or who did not salute the general in proper style as he passed. Having one day, in his Bible researches, encountered the history of Absalom and his melancholy end, the general bethought him, that, in a country abounding with forests, his soldiers were in constant risk of a like catastrophe; he therefore, in an evil hour, issued orders for cropping the hair of both officers and men throughout the garrison.