"A weird river, they tell me," said another voice.
"True! true!" snorted the voyageur. "A river of ghosts and devils. A river which changes the flow of its tide 'gainst all nature. A river which shoals or deepens in an hour, to hold the explorer back, or to lure him into the heart of a storm. 'Tis a river which few dare to tempt. But I, Pieter von Donck, went up it under a master who, despite his English blood, was the bravest man upon this earth. Ay, but I saw even his cheek whiten, when we reached the whirlpools at the end of the known world, and yet saw no sea ahead."
"Who was that master?" asked the young man who had opened the conversation.
A derisive laugh sounded, followed by Von Donck's booming reproach:
"Young man, have you no pride in the doings of the great? Hast never heard the name of Hendrick Hudson?"
"I knew not that you had been with him," muttered the youth.
"Before Marie von Toit, your mother, was weaned I crossed the seas," snorted the old man, smiling into the fire. "What Dutchman has not heard of the ship which brought me over, the Goede Vrouw, which lies as I speak a-rotting within the wooden harbour of New Amsterdam? San Nicolas was her figure-head, the good saint who guided us through all perils, and to whom upon landing we erected a chapel within sight of the sea. He is the patron of our first settlement in this new world, and shall remain so for ever. Now they call him Santa Claus, and the children of New Amsterdam hang up each one a stocking in the chimney-side on San Nicolas' Eve, for the good saint is a lover of children, and rides that night over the houses, his wide breeches filled with gifts, which he lets fall down the chimneys and so into the stockings hung to receive them. All the city is a-laughing with children on the morn of San Nicholas' Day."
"Gives he then nothing to the elder folk?" asked one.
"'Twas once his custom to do so, when he could find an industrious body who spoke no evil of his neighbour," said Von Donck. "But he has much ado to find such now."
"Didst ever see the storm ship upon Hudson's River?" a listener demanded.