All the next day Nanking played ball and bandy with the Susquehannock boys, and taught them jack-stones and how to make a shuttlecock.  They put eagle’s feathers in his hair, and the old men adopted him into their tribe.  On the third day the absent Indians returned with a stork.  It was a white stork with a red bill and plenty of stork’s neck, but short legs.  Nanking doubted if it could stand on one leg on the top of a chimney and feed worms around to the young stork family, but he felt very proud and happy.  The whole tribe seemed to have assembled to see Nanking go away.  He had become the friend of all the boys and women and the protege of the tall warriors.  They placed his stork in a canoe, and in a second canoe following it were a couple of large deers freshly killed, which he was to take to his mother as the gift of the fierce Susquehannocks.  Amid the cheers and adieus of the nation the two canoes pushed off and, entering the broad bay, paddled up a river under the side of a bar of blue mountains, until the river dwindled to a mere creek, and finally its navigation ceased altogether.  By signs upon the head of the dead stag, indicating a larger deer, Nanking knew they were at the “Head-of-Elk” River.  His fierce friends left him here with many professions of apology and esteem, and soon after they departed Swedes and Minquas appeared, who had observed the hostile canoes from their lookout stations on the neighboring hills.  These also welcomed Nanking, being already well acquainted with him, and taking up his venison proceeded through the woods toward New Amstel.  He carried the live stork himself—­a rough bird, which would not yield to blandishments or good treatment.  After a very fatiguing journey and four days’ absence from home, Nanking entered New Amstel in the dead of night.

“To-morrow,” he thought, “I shall be repaid for all this.  They will say, ‘Nanking Cloos is the smartest man in the colony of New Amstel.’  Perhaps I shall be a burgomaster, and eat terrapin stewed in Canary wine!”

Nanking was up betimes, looking at the chimneys on his mother’s dwelling, of which there were two, and both were the largest chimneys in New Amstel.  The Widow Cloos lived in a huge log building with brick ends, long and rather low, which had been built by the commissary of the colony at the expense of the city of Amsterdam as a magazine of food and supply for her colonists; but after several years of unprofitable experiment with the colony, it was resolved to give no more provisions away, and the director, great Captain Hinoyossa, when Van Swearingen became the schout, allowed the latter’s sister to inhabit one end of the warehouse, and that the farthest end from the water.  The rest was uninhabited, and Nanking, looking at the chimney which surmounted the river gable, said to himself: 

“That will never do for my stork, as there is no fire lighted there.  I never saw smoke from that chimney in my life.  The stork requires a nest where there is heat, and plenty of it.”