One of Kieft’s first acts was to protest against the Minuit, or Swedish jig, which Peter was dancing with his lively company on the Delaware. The protest was, like so many others since issued from New York, only made a note of, but left unheeded. Sharper protests, backed by bayonets and knapsacks provisioned with good long sausages, were, two years later, made against the Indians of Long Island, who, egged on by the Swedes of the south, and the sleek Pilgrims on the Connecticut, kindled their fires on Staten Island, and threatened to eat their omelets in New Amsterdam itself. For five long years were those Indian eggs and the colony over the fire. At last the Iroquois called away the coppery cooks, and the boiling waters simmered down again. The colony enlarged itself. Broom-corn waved along the Mohawk River; Dutch pigs were made into head-cheese in Schenectady; and Dutch cabbages, sweltered in large hogs-heads, came out sour-kraut for purple-colored families all up the valley, still so plentifully sprinkled with Dutch hamlets, baptized with genuine Holland names. The warm hearts of the colonists blunted Indian hostilities, as their thick heads, almost impenetrable to anything but three meals a day, defied their tomahawks. In 1647 Kieft was recalled, and Peter Stuyvesant reigned in his stead. His combustible temper was kept constantly crackling, like a bunch of fire-crackers, during the sixteen years he headed the Dutch settlements in America. His wooden leg, like Santa Anna’s in our own day, seemed ever stirring up the fires to renewed blazes. On all sides he was scorched. The wood, long seasoning, piled up by the colonists in Connecticut, and in the territory since divided up into Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, was kindled into a hot flame. Permission to the former, in 1650, to extend their settlements up to Oyster Bay on Long Island, and to Greenwich on the main-land, only whet their appetites for other kinds of oysters and new beds. Five years later, and the fiery Stuyvesant led a regiment of six hundred men against Christiana, and, reducing it to silence, brought his victorious troops back again; the colony now having a liberal supply of candidates for all its offices for that generation. Whether the burgomaster of New Amsterdam and the five scheppens took occasion of the return of these troops to vote themselves suppers, medals, and free rides around the island, is very doubtful, as contemporary accounts are mute on the subject.