wild game, fish, fruits and fertile soil. As the Dutch burghers of New York and Albany prospered and grew more powerful, the choice fowling and fishing attractions of the Croton River region lured the officials and sportsmen of the seventeenth century. Came the Van Cortlandts ! The year the Half Moon sailed up the Hudson and nestled below Senasqua at the mouth of the Kenoten's River, there lived in south Holland a sturdy Dutch couple, Stevan and Catherine Van Cortlandt. They possessed a family coat-of-arms duly recorded in the great Stadthaus in Amsterdam. However, in 1609 little did they know their grandson, yet unborn, would rule the largest city in the New World and own a kingdom equal to one per cent of all Holland. The old folks never left the land of dykes and ditches, but their son Olaf did. He joined the army, sailed for the Dutch West Indies and finally came to New Amsterdam in 1638, just three hundred years ago. History shows there was something indomitable in the Van Cortlandt blood. Olaf had not lived in New Amsterdam but a few years before he was chosen as one of The Nine Men to protest to Director- General Kieft and to Peter Stuyvesant and demand reforms. Olaf was then elected Schepen at a salary of two hundred fifty guilders ; sent to Esopus, up the Hudson, to make a treaty with the Indians; then to Connecticut to fix the boundary line; then out to Jamaica to treat with the English who demanded Long Island. Olaf was the burgomaster of New York when the English fleet arrived, and one of six who met with the English to agree upon Manhattan's surrender. "Old Burgomaster Van Cortlandt" ruled New York as much after the English took it as he had under the Dutch.