The Land of Sleepy Hollow

              40    The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
nothing remarkable remains on record. One of them was the very individual on whom master Hendrick Hudson and his mate Robert
Juet made that sage experiment gravely recorded by the latter, in the
narrative of the discovery.
Our master and his mate determined to try some of the cheefe
men of the country, whether they had any treacherie in them. So
they took them down into the cabin, and gave them so much wine
and aqua vitse, that they were all very merrie ; one of them had his wife with him, which sate so modestly as any of our countrywomen
would do in a strange place. In the end, one of them was drunke ;
and that was strange to them, for they could not tell how to take it." *
How far master Hendrick Hudson and his worthy mate carried
their experiment with the sachem's wife, is not recorded ; neither does
the curious Robert Juet make any mention of the after consequences
of this grand moral test; tradition, however, affirms that the sachem,
on landing, gave his modest spouse a hearty rib-roasting, according
to the connubial discipline of the aboriginals ; it further affirms that
he remained a hard drinker to the day of his death, trading away all
his lands, acre by acre, for aqua vitae ; by which means the Roost and
all its domains, from Yonkers to Sleepy Hollow, came, in the regular
course of trade, and by right of purchase, into the possession of the Dutchmen.
The worthy government of the New Netherlands was not suffered to enjoy this grand acquisition unmolested. In the year 1654, the
losel Yankees of Connecticut, those swapping, bargaining, squatting
enemies of the Manhattoes, made a daring inroad into this neighborhood, and founded a colony called Westchester, or, as the ancient Dutch
records term it, Vest Dorp, in the right of one Thomas Pell, who
pretended to have purchased the whole surrounding country of the
Indians, and stood ready to argue their claims before any tribunal of Christendom.
This happened during the chivalrous reign of Peter Stuyvesant,
* See Juet's Journal, " Purchas his Pilgrims."