Nanking said they were very wicked to doubt true and good things.  He believed every thing, and particularly every thing pleasant.  His mother, whose house was on the river bank, looked out with a fond sadness as she heard him playing, his heart amongst the little boys, although he was so big.

“Ach! helas!” she said to herself, “what will become of my dear man-lamb?  He is simple and fatherless, poor and confiding.  Thank God, at least he is not a woman!”

The Widow Cloos had come but recently from Holland, sent out by charity at the instance of her brother, Van Swearingen, the schout or bailiff of New Amstel colony.  Her son, who was almost a man in years, had been kept in the Orphan House at Amsterdam until his growth made him a misplaced object there, and his feeble intellect forbade that he should become a soldier, and die, like his father, in the Dutch battles.  So the Widow Cloos brought Nanking out in the ship Mill, to the city of Amsterdam’s own colony on the banks of the South River, which the English called the Delaware.  They came in a starving time, when the crops were drenched out by rains and all the people and the soldiery of the fort were down with bilious and scarlet fever.  The widow was just getting over a long attack of this illness, and her brother, the schout, regarded the innocent Nanking as the cause of her poverty.

“Thou hadst better drown him,” said the hard official; “he’ll eat all thy substance or give the remainder away, for he believes every thing and everybody.”

“O brother!” pleaded the widow, “if he did not believe something, how sad would he be!  All the children love him, and he is company for them.”

It was an odd sight to see Nanking down with the boys, as big as the father of any of them, playing as gently as the littlest.  He rode them pig-a-back on his broad shoulders; they liked to see him light his pipe and smoke without getting sick.  He worked for his mother, carrying water and catching fish, and was the only person in New Amstel (or Newcastle) who could go out into the woods fearlessly among the Minquas Indians; for the Indians all believed that feeble-minded people were the Great Spirit’s especial friends, and saw beyond the boundaries of this world into that better heaven where shad ran all the year in the celestial rivers, and the oysters walked upon the land to be eaten.  Nanking believed all this, too.  It was his confiding nature which made him useless for worldly business.  Hobgoblins and genii, charms and saints, and whatever he had heard in earnest, he held in earnest to be true.

“Dear me!” thought Nanking, when he was done playing marbles, “can’t I be of use to somebody?  Perhaps if I could do something useful my uncle would not think me a big idiot.  Then, besides, little Elsje Alrichs might let me be her sweetheart and carry her doll!”