boats, and pulled off, and the heroine of the Roost escaped with a mere
rumpling of the feathers.

The fear of tiring my readers, who may not take such an interest as
myself in these heroic themes, induces me to close here my extracts from
this precious chronicle of the venerable Diedrich. Suffice it briefly to
say, that shortly after the catastrophe of the Roost, Jacob Van Tassel,
in the course of one of his forays, fell into the hands of the British;
was sent prisoner to New York, and was detained in captivity for
the greater part of the war. In the mean time, the Roost remained a
melancholy ruin; its stone walls and brick chimneys alone standing,
blackened by fire, and the resort of bats and owlets. It was not until
the return of peace, when this belligerent neighborhood once more
resumed its quiet agricultural pursuits, that the stout Jacob sought the
scene of his triumphs and disasters; rebuilt the Roost, and reared again
on high its glittering weather-cocks.

Does any one want further particulars of the fortunes of this eventful
little pile? Let him go to the fountain-head, and drink deep of historic
truth. Reader! the stout Jacob Van Tassel still lives, a venerable,
gray-headed patriarch of the revolution, now in his ninety-fifth year!
He sits by his fireside, in the ancient city of the Manhattoes, and
passes the long winter evenings, surrounded by his children, and
grand-children, and great-grand-children, all listening to his tales of
the border wars, and the heroic days of the Roost. His great goose-gun,
too, is still in existence, having been preserved for many years in a
hollow tree, and passed from hand to hand among the Dutch burghers, as a
precious relique of the revolution. It is now actually in possession of
a contemporary of the stout Jacob, one almost his equal in years, who
treasures it up at his house in the Bowerie of New-Amsterdam, hard by