I remember being told a curious story of the Dutch, who have their homesteads on the Mohawk Flats, the richest pasture land in New York. These simple colonists, preserving their ancient habits, pipes, breeches, and phlegm, looked with astonishment at the progress of their Yankee neighbours, and predicted that so much haste and action would soon expend itself. At last came surveyors and engineers, those odious disturbers of antiquity and quiet rural enjoyments: they pointed their spirit-levels, they stretched their chains across the fair fields of the quiet slumbering valley of these smoking Dutchmen. The very cows looked bewildered, and Mynheer, taking his meerschaum from his lips, sighed deeply.
They told him that a railroad was projected across his acres; he would not have minded a canal. He had survived the wars of the Indians; he had forgotten Sir William Johnson and his neighbouring castle; he had gone through the rebellion of Washington without being despoiled; and had finally, as he thought, settled down in the lovely valley of the meandering Mohawk, in a flat very like what his ancestors represented to him as the pictured reality of Sluys or Scheldtland. He had smoked and dozed through all this excitement, and was just beginning to understand English. The American character was above his comprehension. He remembered George the Third with respect, because his great grandfather was a Dutchman, who had ascended the British throne, and had proclaimed Protestantism and _Orange boven_ as the law of the colonies. He still thought George the Third his ruler; and never knew that George Washington had, Cromwell-like, ousted the monarch from his fair patrimony, on pretence that tea was not taxable trans-atlantically.
The railroad came: Acts of Congress or of Assembly passed; and fire and iron rushed through the happy valley. The patriarchs lifted up their hands and their pipes in utter dismay.
"Ten thousand duyvels!" exclaimed one old Van Winkle; "vat is dis?--it is too ped! King Jorje is forget himsel. I should not vonder we shall hab a rebublic next."
"I dink ve shall," was the universal response from amidst a dense cloud of tobacco vapour.
The Mohawks, or Kan-ye-a-ke-ha-ka, as they style themselves, are now only a dispersed remnant of a once powerful tribe of the Five Nations. They received several grants of land in Canada for their loyalty, and among others, 160,000 acres of the best part of the province in which we are now travelling, but it is probable that their numbers altogether do not now exceed 3000. Two thousand two hundred dwell near the Grand River, and a large body near Kingston. The Kingston branch are chiefly Church of England men, and an affecting memorial of their adhesion to Britain exists in the altar-cloth and communion-plate which they brought from the valley of the Mohawk, where it had been given to them in the days of Queen Anne.