might have wrecked his frame, had he not been received into a cushion softer than velvet, which Providence, or Minerva, or St. Nicholas, or some cow, had benevolently prepared for his reception.

“The furious Risingh, in despite of the maxim, cherished by all true knights, that ‘fair play is a jewel,’ hastened to take advantage of the hero’s fall; but, as he stooped to give a fatal blow, Peter Stuyvesant dealt him a thwack over the sconce with his wooden leg, which set a chime of bells ringing triple bob-majors in his cerebellum.  The bewildered Swede staggered with the blow, and the wary Peter seizing a pocket-pistol, which lay hard by, discharged it full at the head of the reeling Risingh.  Let not my reader mistake; it was not a murderous weapon loaded with powder and ball, but a little sturdy stone pottle charged to the muzzle with a double dram of true Dutch courage, which the knowing Antony Van Corlear carried about him by way of replenishing his valor, and which had dropped from his wallet during his furious encounter with the drummer.  The hideous weapon sang through the air, and true to its course as was the fragment of a rock discharged at Hector by bully Ajax, encountered the head of the gigantic Swede with matchless violence.

“This heaven-directed blow decided the battle.  The ponderous pericranium of General Jan Risingh sank upon his breast; his knees tottered under him; a deathlike torpor seized upon his frame, and he tumbled to the earth with such violence that old Pluto started with affright, lest he should have broken through the roof of his infernal palace.

“His fall was the signal of defeat and victory:  the Swedes gave way, the Dutch pressed forward; the former took to their heels, the latter hotly pursued.  Some entered with them, pell-mell, through the sally-port; others stormed the bastion, and others scrambled over the curtain.  Thus in a little while the fortress of Fort Christina, which, like another Troy, had stood a siege of full ten hours, was carried by assault, without the loss of a single man on either side.  Victory, in the likeness of a gigantic ox-fly, sat perched upon the cocked hat of the gallant Stuyvesant; and it was declared by all the writers whom he hired to write the history of his expedition that on this memorable day he gained a sufficient quantity of glory to immortalize a dozen of the greatest heroes in Christendom!”

In the “Sketch-Book,” Irving set a kind of fashion in narrative essays, in brief stories of mingled humor and pathos, which was followed for half a century.  He himself worked the same vein in “Bracebridge Hall” and “Tales of a Traveller.”  And there is no doubt that some of the most fascinating of the minor sketches of Charles Dickens, such as the story of the Bagman’s Uncle, are lineal descendants of, if they were not suggested by, Irving’s “Adventure of My Uncle,” and the “Bold Dragoon.”