Don't talk to me of Peter Stuyvesant's walking (puff--puff--puff--
puff)."
Here the redoubtable Ramm contracted his brow, clasped up his mouth
till it wrinkled at each corner, and redoubled his smoking with
such vehemence that the cloudy volumes soon wreathed round his
head, as the smoke envelops the awful summit of Mount Aetna.
A general silence followed the sudden rebuke of this very rich man.
The subject, however, was too interesting to be readily abandoned.
The conversation soon broke forth again from the lips of Peechy
Prauw Van Hook, the chronicler of the club, one of those prosing,
narrative old men who seem to be troubled with an incontinence of
words as they grow old.
Peechy could, at any time, tell as many stories in an evening as
his hearers could digest in a month. He now resumed the
conversation by affirming that, to his knowledge, money had, at
different times, been digged up in various parts of the island.
The lucky persons who had discovered them had always dreamed of
them three times beforehand, and, what was worthy of remark, those
treasures had never been found but by some descendant of the good
old Dutch families, which clearly proved that they had been buried
by Dutchmen in the olden time.
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