Where nowadays the Battery lies, New York had just begun, A new-born babe, to rub its eyes, In Sixteen Sixty-One. They christened it Nieuw Amsterdam, Those burghers grave and stately, And so, with schnapps and smoke and psalm, Lived out their lives sedately. Two windmills topped their wooden wall, On Stadthuys gazing down, On fort, and cabbage-plots, and all The quaintly gabled town; These flapped their wings and shifted backs, As ancient scrolls determine, To scare the savage Hackensacks, Paumanks, and other vermin. At night the loyal settlers lay Betwixt their feather-beds; In hose and breeches walked by day, And smoked, and wagged their heads. No changeful fashions came from France, The vrouwleins to bewilder; No broad-brimmed burgher spent for pants His every other guilder. In petticoats of linsey-red, And jackets neatly kept, The vrouws their knitting-needles sped And deftly spun and swept. Few modern-school flirtations there Set wheels of scandal trundling, But youths and maidens did their share Of staid, old-fashioned bundling. —The New Year opened clear and cold; The snow, a Flemish ell In depth, lay over Beeckman’s Wold And Wolfert’s frozen well. Each burgher shook his kitchen-doors, Drew on his Holland leather, Then stamped through drifts to do the chores, Beshrewing all such weather. But—after herring, ham, and kraut— To all the gathered town The Dominie preached the morning out, In Calvanistic gown; While tough old Peter Stuyvesant Sat pewed in foremost station,— The potent, sage, and valiant Third Governor of the nation. Prayer over, at his mansion hall, With cake and courtly smile He met the people, one and all, In gubernatorial style; Yet missed, though now the day was old, An ancient fellow-feaster,— Heer Govert Loockermans, that bold Brewer and burgomeester; Who, in his farm-house, close without The picket’s eastern end, Sat growling at the twinge of gout That kept him from his friend. But Peter strapped his wooden peg, When tea and cake were ended (Meanwhile the sound remaining leg Its high jack-boot defended), A woolsey cloak about him threw, And swore, by wind and limb, Since Govert kept from Peter’s view, Peter would visit him; Then sallied forth, through snow and blast, While many a humble greeter Stood wondering whereaway so fast Strode bluff Hardkoppig Pieter. Past quay and cowpath, through a lane Of vats and mounded tans, He puffed along, with might and main, To Govert Loockermans; Once there, his right of entry took, And hailed his ancient crony: “Myn Gott! in dese Manhattoes, Loock, Ve gets more snow as money!”