A ship of five hundred tons had been added to the old London line, and her great size was an object of curiosity. But the man who projected her was regarded by careful merchants as very reckless, and not a safe man to trust. That which troubled the minds of these peaceable old settlers most was Mr. Fulton and his steamboat. Steam they declared to be a very dangerous thing. And, as for this Mr. Fulton, he should be sent to an insane asylum, before he destroyed all his friends, and lost all his money in this dangerous undertaking. He might navigate the river with a big tea-kettle in the bottom of his boat, but he would be sure to set all the houses along the river on fire. And who was to pay the damages? Steam was, however, a reality, and the little Fire Fly went puffing and splashing up and down the river, alarming and astonishing the people along its banks. She could make the voyage from the upper end of the Tappan Zee to New York in a day, no matter how the wind blew. Hanz Toodleburg called the Fire Fly an invention of the devil, and nobody else. The bright blaze of her furnaces, and the long trail of fire and sparks issuing from her funnel of a dark night, gave a spectre-like appearance to her movements, that rather increased a belief amongst the superstitious that she was really an invention of the evil one, sent for some bad purpose. A meeting was called at Hanz Toodleburg's house to consider the dangerous look of things along the river. The Dominie and the schoolmaster, and all the wise men in the settlement, were present, and gave their opinions with the greatest gravity. If this Mr. Fulton, it was argued, could, with the aid of the evil one, build these steamboats to go to New York and back in a day, why there was an end to the business of sloops and barges. And if the honest men who owned these vessels were thrown out of business, how were they to get bread for their families? These new inventions, Hanz argued, would be the ruin of no end of honest people.