The good folks of the place were on the tiptoe of expectation and impatience--notwithstanding all the turmoil of my great-grandfather, not a symptom of the church was yet to be seen; they even began to fear it would never be brought into the world, but that its great projector would lie down and die in labor of the mighty plan he had conceived.

At length, having occupied twelve good months in puffing and paddling, and talking and walking--having traveled over all Holland, and even taken a peep into France and Germany--having smoked five hundred and ninety-nine pipes and three hundredweight of the best Virginia tobacco--my great-grandfather gathered together all that knowing and industrious class of citizens who prefer attending to anybody's business sooner than their own, and having pulled off his coat and five pair of breeches, he advanced sturdily up, and laid the corner-stone of the church, in the presence of the whole multitude--just at the commencement of the thirteenth month.
In a similar manner, and with the example of my worthy ancestor full before my eyes, have I proceeded in writing this most authentic history.
The honest Rotterdammers no doubt thought my great-grandfather was doing nothing at all to the purpose, while he was making such a world of prefatory bustle about the building of his church; and many of the ingenious inhabitants of this fair city will unquestionably suppose that all the preliminary chapters, with the discovery, population, and final settlement of America, were totally irrelevant and superfluous--and that the main business, the history of New York, is not a jot more advanced than if I had never taken up my pen.

Never were wise people more mistaken in their conjectures.

In consequence of going to work slowly and deliberately, the church came out of my grandfather's hands one of the most sumptuous, goodly, and glorious edifices in the known world--excepting that, like our magnificent capitol at Washington, it was begun on so grand a scale that the good folk could not afford to finish more than the wing of it.

So, likewise, I trust, if ever I am able to finish this work on the plan I have commenced (of which, in simple truth, I sometimes have my doubts), it will be found that I have pursued the latest rules of my art, as exemplified in the writings of all the great American historians, and wrought a very large history out of a small subject--which nowadays, is considered one of the great triumphs of historic skill.