Suffice it to say that there being no legislature in session at Albany, he got away without being fleeced, or even being obliged to listen to a speech from the speaker. He was also spared a sight of the collection in the Agricultural Hall, and thus kept his favorable opinion of the soil and its capacity. His report to his employers, on his return in November following, was such as to stimulate the company to send another vessel the next year to trade with the natives; a trade which was conducted too much on the “heads I win, tails you lose” system to be other than advantageous to the Batavian pedlers. A few of the traders remained, opening stores in the slow settlement of New Amsterdam; putting up a windmill in what is now Pearl Street, raising the wind very easily, and taking as generous a toll from the Indian grists, as the natives now take from the strangers who frequent the island in search of bargains. The settlement grew then, as now, by importation; for although its trade increased, it was not until 1625 that the first white child was born within the present limits of the State. The growth of the place, however, was such, that in 1613, Samuel Argal, returning from an expedition against the French settlement of Port Royal, was attracted into the harbor of New Amsterdam, where, finding several huts and the windmill, he compelled an allegiance, during his two days stay, to England. The arbitrary principles of James I., however, were too repulsive to the sturdy Dutch to make them adhere to this allegiance longer than the existence of the force which compelled it. The Republic of the United Netherlands, twisted together of the two strands, furnished the one by the religious freedom generated by the Reformation under Luther, and the other drawn out by the mailed hand of William of Orange from the hard clutch of Philip II. of Spain, held by its strong yet soft cord the early emigrants from it to New Netherlands to an affectionate loyalty and love for itself. In no country is patriotism stronger than in Holland. Small in dimensions, struggling against the whole force of the sea on the north, from whose overwhelming devastation it is only saved by dikes, anchored by gigantic stones brought from Norway, and built up from thirty to fifty feet higher than the land they guard; its flat meadow surface, ever moist with water, divided by canals which serve the purposes both of fences and roads in other lands, and through which the water is kept flowing by a wonderful and hourly worked system of pumping,—this little state, conquered from the sea by industry, from Spain and the Inquisition by bravery unmatched, from a moneyed aristocracy by incessant vigilance, stood a peer among the largest and proudest monarchies of Europe. Her traders carried their square-rigged, heavy sterned ships in every port from the Cape of Good Hope to Lapland; and Amsterdam drew bills of exchange against shipments