Among the remnants which remained from the days of William the Testy were the militia laws, by which the inhabitants were obliged to turn out twice a year, with such military equipments as it pleased God; and were put under the command of tailors and man-milliners, who, though on ordinary occasions they might have been the meekest, most pippin-hearted little men in the world, were very devils at parades, when they had cocked hats on their heads and swords by their sides.  Under the instructions of these periodical warriors, the peaceful burghers of the Manhattoes were schooled in iron war, and became so hardy in the process of time, that they could march through sun and rain, from one end of the town to the other, without flinching; and so intrepid and adroit, that they could face to the right, wheel to the left, and fare without winking or blinking.

Peter Stuyvesant, like all old soldiers who have seen service and smelt gunpowder, had no great respect for militia troops:  however, he determined to give them a trial, and accordingly called for a general muster, inspection, and review.  But, O Mars and Bellona! what a turning-out was here!  Here came old Roelant Cuckaburt, with a short blunderbuss on his shoulder and a long horseman’s sword trailing by his side; and Barent Dirkson, with something that looked like a copper kettle, turned upside down on his head, and a couple of old horse pistols in his belt; and Dirk Volkertson, with a long duck fowling-piece without any ramrod, and a host more, armed higgledy-piggledy with swords, hatchets, snickersnees, crowbars, broomsticks, and what not; the officers distinguished from the rest by having their slouched hats cocked up with pins and surmounted with cocktail feathers.

The sturdy Peter eyed this nondescript host with some such rueful aspect as a man would eye the devil, and determined to give his feather-bed soldiers a seasoning.  He accordingly put them through their manual exercise over and over again, trudged them backwards and forwards about the streets of New Amsterdam, until their short legs ached and their fat sides sweated again, and finally encamped them in the evening on the summit of a hill without the city, to give them a taste of camp life, intending the next day to renew the toils and perils of the field.  But so it came to pass that in the night there fell a great and heavy rain, and melted away the army, so that in the morning when Gaffer Phoebus shed his first beams upon the camp, scarce a warrior remained, excepting Peter Stuyvesant and his trumpeter, Van Corlear.

This awful desolation of a whole army would have appalled a commander of less nerve; but it served to confirm Peter’s want of confidence in the militia system, which he thenceforward used to call, in joke—­for he sometimes indulged in a joke—­William the Testy’s broken reed.  He now took into his service a goodly number of burly, broad-shouldered, broad-bottomed Dutchmen, whom he paid in good silver and gold, and of whom he boasted that, whether they could stand fire or not, they were at least water-proof.