This visit over, however, they parted company, and Jan lingered long in the market-place to see the darkies dance to the rude music of horns and tom-toms. Here he encountered two of his chums, Nicholas Van Ripper and Rem Hochstrasser, carrying guns on their shoulders. “Thee, Jan? Good!” they cried. “Now come with us to the turkey-shooting. A prize thou art sure to win.” “But I started the New-Year visits to make!” said Jan. “And paid them in the market-place!” laughed Nicholas. “Thou art a sly one, Jan! But great sport is there at the Swamp to-day; much better than the chatter of the girls and a headache to-morrow.” “So think I, Nick; but I have on my _kirch_ clothes;” and Jan glanced down at his best galligaskins and his coat with its silver buttons. “Not a bit will it hurt them; so come along.” And thus urged, Jan joined his friends, and was soon at Beekman’s Swamp, where a bevy of youths were squandering their stivers in the exciting sport of firing at live turkeys. Nick and Rem did well, and each bore off a plump fowl, but luck seemed against Jan, who could not succeed in even ruffling a feather; while at last he had the misfortune to slip and get a rough tumble, besides soiling his breeches and tearing a rent in the skirt of his fine broadcloth coat. “Ha! ha! What will Madam Van Twinkle say to that?” laughed his unsympathetic companions, when they saw Jan stamping round, his little queue of hair, tied with an eel-skin, fairly standing out with rage. “Whatever she says, ’twill be your fault, ye dough-nuts!” he shouted, and would have indulged in some rather forcible Dutch epithets had not his cousin Tunis Vanderbeck come up at the moment, saying, “Mind it not, Jan, but with me come to Breucklyn to skate.” “Yah; better will that be than facing the mother in this plight,” said Jan; and he was skating across the Salt River before he remembered that he had been positively forbidden to venture there. “Sure art thou that the ice is strong, Tunis?” he asked. “Not so strong as it was. The thaw has weakened it some, but ’twill hold to-night, if--” But at that instant an ominous cracking sounded beneath their feet, and Tunis had just time to glide to a firmer spot before a scream rang through the air, and he looked back to see the dark surging water in an opening in the ice, and Jan’s head disappearing beneath. While, in the twilight, Katrina sat by her window, thinking of blue-eyed English Jeanie, she was startled by a voice on the shed roof without calling, “Let me in, Katrina--let me in;” and on opening the casement a very wet and bedraggled boy tumbled at her feet, sputtering out, “Run for dry clothes and a hot drink, my Trina, for nearly drowned am I, and frozen as well.” The girl hastened to obey, and not until her brother was snug and warm in her feather-bed did she ask, “Whatever has happened to thee, Jan?”