Joel Cook

X.

ASCENDING THE HUDSON RIVER.

Hudson River Scenery—Fort Washington—Fort Lee—The Palisades—Piermont—Greenwood Lake—Tuxedo Lake—Font Hill—Yonkers—Philipse Manor—Mary Philipse—Hastings—Dobbs's Ferry—Tappan Zee—The Flying Dutchman—Tarrytown—AndrÉ and Arnold—Tappan—Irvington—Sunnyside—Washington Irving—The Sleepy Hollow—Ichabod Crane—Point-no-Point—Rockland Lake—Sing-Sing—Croton Point—Haverstraw Bay—Stony Point—Treason Hill—Verplanck's Point—The Highlands—The Donderberg and its Goblin—Peekskill—Anthony's Nose—Iona Island—West Point—Forts Clinton and Montgomery—Sugar Loaf Mountain—Buttermilk Falls—Constitution Island—Susan Warner—General Kosciusko—Beverly House—Arnold's Treason—Old Cro' Nest—Flirtation Walk—The Storm King—Mount Taurus—Joseph Rodman Drake—The Culprit Fay—Cornwall—Fishkill—Newburg Bay—Newburg and Washington's Headquarters—Ural Knapp—The Tower of Victory—Enoch Crosby, the Spy—The Devil's Dance Chamber—The Long Reach—Poughkeepsie—Lakes Mohonk and Minnewaska—Vassar College—Crom Elbow—Rondout—Kingston—Esopus—Rhinebeck and Rhinecliff—Ellerslie—Rokeby—Wilderscliff—Montgomery Place—Plattekill Clove—Saugerties—Livingston Manor—Clermont—Chancellor Livingston—Fulton's First Steamboat—Catskill Mountains—Natty Bumppo—Rip Van Winkle—Slide Mountain—Kaaterskill Clove—Kaaterskill Falls—Haines's Falls—The Big Indian—City of Hudson—The Dutch—New Lebanon—The Shakers—Mother Ann Lee—Kinderhook—Stuyvesant Landing—Martin Van Buren—Schodack—The Mohicans—Beeren Island—The Overslaugh—The Patroons—The Van Rensselaers—The Anti-Rent War—Albany—New York State Capitol—Albany Medical College—Calvin Edson—Albany Academy—Prof. Joseph Henry—Dudley Observatory—Van Rensselaer Mansion—Vanderheyden Palace—Lydius House—Balthazar Lydius—Anneke Jans Bogardus—Albany Regency—Schuyler Mansion—Erie Canal Basin—Troy—The Monitor—Mohawk River—Stillwater—Schuylerville—Burgoyne's Defeat—General Fraser's Death—Round Lake—Ballston Spa—Saratoga Lake and Town—High Rock Spring—Sir William Johnson—Saratoga Hotels—Saratoga Springs—Congress Spring—Hathorn Spring—Mount McGregor—Fort Edward—Israel Putnam—Jenny McCrea—Baker's Falls—Sandy Hill—Quackenboss' Adventure—Glen's Falls—Last of the Mohicans—Hawkeye—Sources of the Hudson—The Adirondack Wilderness—Hendrick Spring—The Tear of the Clouds—Indian Pass—Tahawas, the Sky-Piercer—Schroon Lake—The Battenkill.

THE HUDSON RIVER SCENERY.

The noble Hudson is one of the most admired of American rivers. It does not possess the vine-clad slopes and ruined castles and quaint old towns of the Rhine, but it is a greater river in its breadth and volume and the commerce it carries. It has scenery fully as attractive in the Palisades and Highlands, the Helderbergs and Catskills, and on a scale of far more grandeur, while the infinite variety of its shores and villas and the many flourishing river towns are to most observers more pleasing. A journey along the Hudson presents ever varying pictures of rural beauty, in mountain, landscape, field and village; at times almost indescribably grand, and again entrancing in the autumn's gorgeous coloring of the forest-clad slopes, and the brilliant picture under our clear American skies. George William Curtis, voicing the opinion of most of our countrymen, is enthusiastic about the Hudson, saying: "The Danube has in part glimpses of such grandeur, the Elbe sometimes has such delicately pencilled effects, but no European river is so lordly in its bearing, none flows in such state to the sea. Of all our rivers that I know, the Hudson with this grandeur has the most exquisite episodes. Its morning and evening reaches are like the lakes of a dream." The Hudson may not have as many weird and elfish legends as so many historic centuries and the mythical preceding era have gathered upon the annals of the Rhine, but its beauties, tragedies and folklore have been a favorite theme, and the romantic and poetic fancies of Irving, Drake and Cooper, with many others, have given it plenty of fascinating literature and picturesque incident. Oliver Wendell Holmes thus sings the praises of the Hudson:

"I wandered afar from the land of my birth,

I saw the old rivers renowned upon Earth;

But fancy still painted that wide-flowing stream,

With the many-hued pencil of infancy's dream.

"I saw the green banks of the castle-crowned Rhine,

Where the grapes drink the moonlight and change into wine,

I stood by the Avon, whose waves, as they glide,

Still whisper his glory who sleeps by their side.

"But my heart would still yearn for the sound of the waves,

That sing as they flow by my forefathers' graves;

If manhood yet honors my cheek with a tear,

I care not who sees it—nor blush for it here.

"In love to the deep-bosomed stream of the West,

I fling this loose blossom to float on its breast;

Nor let the dear love of its children grow cold,

Till the channel is dry where its waters have rolled."

THE PALISADES.

In ascending the Hudson from New York, there are passed on either hand the heights which were covered in early Revolutionary days with the defenses of New York, Fort Washington and Fort Lee, but beyond the names no trace of either fort remains. The British captured both in the latter part of 1776, and afterwards held them. Fort Lee is now a favorite picnic ground. Above it rises the great wall of the Palisades, the wonderful formation built up of columned trap rock that extends along the western river bank for twenty miles up to Piermont, this rocky buttress making the northern limit of New Jersey on the Hudson River. Occasionally a patch of trees grows upon the tops or sides of the Palisades, while the broken rocks and dÉbris that have fallen down make a sloping surface from about half-way up their height to the water's edge. These columns rise in varying heights from three to five hundred feet. This grand escarpment of the Palisades is a giant wall along the river bank, sometimes cut down by deep and narrow ravines, through which the people behind them get brief peeps at the picturesque stream far below. Their general surface makes a sort of long and narrow table-land, barely a half-mile to a mile wide, dividing the Hudson from the valley of the Hackensack to the westward, the top being usually quite level, and in most cases having a growth of trees. These desolate-looking Palisades are a barrier dividing two sections of country seeming in sharp contrast. To the westward, the inhabitants lead simple pastoral lives in a region of farm land and dairies. To the eastward, the opposite shore of the Hudson is a succession of villas and fashionable summer resorts, whither the New York people come out, seeking a little rest and freshness after the season's dissipation. From the tops of the Palisades are admirable views both east and west, displaying some of the finest sunrises and sunsets seen along the great river. Extensive blasting operations, to get the building-stone and paving material for which they form valuable quarries, are marring the beauty of the Palisades, but legal arrangements are maturing for their preservation. Their highest elevation, the Indian Head, not far above Fort Lee, rising five hundred and ten feet, has been ruined by these blasts, which at times will break off many thousand tons of rock at a single explosion.

Palisades of the Hudson

The rocky buttress of Piermont, the termination of the Palisades on the Hudson, gets its name from a pier, a mile long, which is extended from the shore at the foot of the mountain out to deep water, and a branch of the Erie railway terminates here. This line runs inland northwestward through a fine country. Over there is Greenwood Lake, known as the "miniature Lake George," a beautiful river-like body of water, ten miles long and a mile wide, almost entirely enclosed in the mountains, and presenting extremely picturesque scenery. This lake is at a thousand feet elevation, with clear and deep spring water, and in the neighborhood are the smaller but as charming Lakes Wawayanda, Macopin and Sterling. The long look over mountain and vale causing an expression of surprise in broken English from an Indian gazing upon the attractive prospect, is said to have named the first of these pretty little lakes;—"Away, way, yonder," he said, but it sounded like "Wa-wa-yanda," and the name has since clung to it. Not far away, among these mountains, is Tuxedo Lake, the fashionable resort of the Tuxedo Park Association, also reached by the Erie railway. This club of wealthy New Yorkers has made a paradise among the Allegheny foothills, with game-preserves, golf-links, club-house, and many cottages for the members.

Above Spuyten Duyvel Creek the western Hudson River shore presents the monotonous front of these Palisades, stretching for miles apparently without a sign of active life; but the eastern bank is a far different picture of undulating hills, with gentle slopes to the water's edge, and covered in every eligible position with an endless variety of villas, presenting every phase of artistic taste and the development of abundant wealth. These summer homes upon the Hudson are among the crowning glories of the ever-changing river scene. Here is the famous Font Hill, now the Convent of Mount St. Vincent. In 1850 the tragedian Edwin Forrest built it for his home, a mediÆval graystone castle, with moat and drawbridge and six battlemented towers; but he held it only a few years, when he quarrelled with his wife, and sold the estate for $100,000 to the Sisters of Charity of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul for their Mother House, which had to remove from the site of Central Park in New York. The cross now surmounts the tallest castle tower, and it is surrounded by noble trees which have grown higher than the turrets, while on the hill behind, and almost overshadowing the little castle, is a huge red-brick convent building. Lawns slope down to the shore, and there are superb river views, with the grand wall of the Palisades rising high in front.

Yonkers is seventeen miles above New York, a galaxy of castellated and ornamental mansions fringing the town about, upon the amphitheatre of hills surrounding the flat depression on which it is mainly built. The little Neperhan or Sawmill River pours down a series of rapids through it before reaching the Hudson, with factories bordering the banks, while the great Vanderbilt railway, the New York Central, with a half-dozen sets of rails, runs along the front of the town. Here are now forty thousand people, in sharp contrast with the time when Hendrick Hudson, exploring the river, anchored in front of the little Indian village of Napperhamok, or the "Rapid Water." Curiosity brought them out in canoes to examine his ship, the "Half Moon," and he bought oysters and beans, saying he found them "a loving people who attained great age." The Dutch early bought land from these Indians for a settlement, and it became the domain of Patroon Vanderdonck, who set the town going under the name of Yonk-heer, or the "young master," meaning the heir of the family. Then the English came along and it became the "Philipse Manor," the old stone manor house built in 1682 being the antiquarian attraction, and used now as a sort of City Hall, a Soldiers' Monument standing in front. This was a manor of twenty-four thousand acres stretching along the river from Spuyten Duyvel up to the Croton. The third of the English lords of the manor was Fredericke Philipse, who was a shrewd aristocrat, and during the Revolution tried the difficult political game of a neutral, desirous of keeping on the winning side. But neither party trusted him, and although Washington had been his guest in the famous old manor house, yet he was attainted of treason by the State of New York, his great manor confiscated, cut up into small tracts and sold. The romance of Yonkers is the love story of his daughter, Mary Philipse, the "belle of the Hudson Valley." Tradition tells of her as the first love of Washington, but he wooed in vain, and she married another. Cooper made her the heroine of his novel The Spy.

The lands of this manor are among the most prized locations on the Hudson. Magnificent estates cover the sloping eastern bank, with hundreds of villas of all kinds and styles, fortunes being expended upon their elaborate decoration. Highly ornamental grounds upon the hillsides and terraces surround costly houses, built to reproduce palaces, churches, castles, baronial halls and old manors, with some sombre buildings not unlike tombs. There is every conceivable structure the florid imagination of an architect can fashion into a dwelling, some being of great size. They show up prettily among the trees, and some are thrust out upon crags almost overhanging the river, others nestle far back in clefts, and still others are set high upon the slopes. Amid the grand display is the villa-environed and exclusive town of Hastings-on-the-Hudson; and a mile above, and still in the gilded colony, is the village of Dobbs's Ferry. It got its name from the venerable John Dobbs, a Swede, who came over from the Delaware River to run the ferry during the Revolution. Not long ago some of the modern aristocrats of the place got ashamed of their old Dobbs heritage and sought to change the name to Paulding. Then came a sharp controversy, fanned into fever heat by the sensational warriors of the New York newspapers. Soon, however, the Pauldingites surrendered, old Dobbs was vindicated, and Dobbs's Ferry the place remains. It was here in the Livingston Mansion, in 1783, that Generals Washington, Carleton and Clinton met to finally settle the terms of English recognition of American independence. Two miles above is Irvington, with more elaborate villas. This favored region of the Hudson is the choicest abiding-place of the New York multi-millionaires, and a newspaper scribe on one occasion counted in the space of six miles above Hastings the rural homes of sixty-three men whose aggregate wealth was estimated at more than $500,000,000. The single million fellow no longer cuts a figure in such a galaxy. On an eminence near Irvington stood the country house of the wealthiest of them, loftily situated, a white stone building with a tall tower, having very attractive surroundings. This was the Paulding Manor of Lyndehurst, the home of Jay Gould.

THE TAPPEN ZEE.

Over opposite, the grand terminating buttress of the Palisades, Piermont, compresses the river channel, the rocks then receding, so that to the northward it broadens into the beautiful lake of the Tappan Zee. Here is the boundary dividing New Jersey from New York, and the long ridge, retiring from the river, stretches inland some miles, encircles the town of Nyack, and comes back to the river some distance above in an abrupt elevated cliff known as Point-no-Point. This lake is over four miles wide, and is the scene of the legend of "The Flying Dutchman of the Tappan Zee." Irving tells us that often in the still twilight of a summer evening, when the sea would be as glass, and the opposite hills threw their shadows half across it, a low sound would be heard, as of the steady vigorous pull of oars, though no boat could be seen. Some said it was a whale-boat of the ancient water-guard, sunk by the British ships during the war, but now permitted to haunt its old cruising-grounds. But the prevalent opinion connected it with the awful fate of "Rambout Van Dam of graceless memory." He was a roystering Dutchman of Spuyten Duyvel, who in a time long past navigated his boat alone one Saturday the whole length of the Tappan Zee to attend a quilting-party at Kakiat, on the western shore. Here he danced until midnight, when he started home. He was warned it was the verge of Sunday morning, but he went off, swearing he would not land until he reached Spuyten Duyvel, if it took him a month of Sundays. He was never seen afterwards, but may still be heard, plying his oars, being "the Flying Dutchman of the Tappan Zee, doomed to ply between Kakiat and Spuyten Duyvel until the day of judgment." There is also another legend of a stout, round, Dutch-built vessel of the olden time, with high bow and stern, sailing up New York harbor in the teeth of wind and tide. She never returned down the Hudson, but the Dutch skippers plying the river often saw her, sometimes along the Palisades, or off Croton Point, or in the Highlands, but never above them. Sometimes it was by the lightning flashes of a storm upon a pitchy night, and giving glimpses of her careering across the Tappan Zee or the wide waste of Haverstraw Bay. Sometimes on quiet moonlight nights she would lie under a high bluff in the Highlands, all in deep shadow, excepting her topsails glittering in the moonbeams. She appeared always just before or after or during unruly weather, and all the skippers knew her as the "Storm Ship." Some maintained this phantom was the "Flying Dutchman," come from the Cape of Good Hope into more tranquil waters. Others held it to be Hendrick Hudson and the shadowy crew of the "Half Moon" sailing to their revels in the Catskills. We are told by Irving that "she still haunts the Highlands and cruises about Point-no-Point. People living along the river insist they sometimes see her in summer moonlight, and that in a deep still midnight they have heard the chant of her crew as if heaving the lead."

Tappan Village, naming the Tappan Zee, is some distance back from Piermont. Over on the eastern bank, nearly opposite Nyack, is Tarrytown, the "Torwen-Dorp" or "Wheat-Town" of the ancient Dutch, which has gradually changed to the present name. The genial Irving, never at a loss for a reason for the names of places along the river, tells how the good housewives named it Tarrytown because of their spouses' propensity to linger in the village tavern on market days. It is now one of the most elegant places on the Hudson, notable for its splendid villas. The attractive region about the Tappan Zee is full of Revolutionary memories, and particularly of the great historic tragedy made by the treason of Arnold and the capture of AndrÉ. Major John AndrÉ, at the age of twenty-nine, in 1780, was Adjutant General of the British Army, then commanded by Sir Henry Clinton in New York. On September 20th AndrÉ came to Dobbs's Ferry to meet Arnold, with whom he had been in secret correspondence in reference to the surrender of West Point, where Arnold commanded. The next night he met Arnold at Stony Point, just below the Highlands, and started back with Arnold's passport and documents enabling the British to so direct an attack upon West Point as to capture it. These papers were in Arnold's handwriting, and at his suggestion AndrÉ concealed them between the soles of his feet and his stockings. AndrÉ tried to make his way down the eastern side of the Hudson to New York in disguise, taking the Tarrytown road, through what was then known as the "neutral ground," which was overrun by marauders from both armies. When within a half-mile of Tarrytown, at a little stream since called AndrÉ's Brook, he was captured by Paulding, Williams and Van Wert, three American scouts, whom he mistook for his own partisans, and they searched him and found the treasonable papers. Rejecting all bribes, they took him across the Hudson to Tappan, then the American army headquarters, where he was condemned and hanged as a spy on October 2d. The old house wherein he was imprisoned still stands in Tappan, and his remains were interred there until 1821, when they were conveyed to Westminster Abbey, London.

THE HOME OF WASHINGTON IRVING.

Near Irvington is Sunnyside, long the home of the famous and genial Washington Irving. In the early days this house was built by a cynical Dutch councillor named Wolfert Acker, who inscribed over the door, "Lust in Rust,"—meaning "pleasure in quiet,"—whence the English called it "Wolfert's Roost." As the Spanish Escurial had been modelled after the famous gridiron of the blessed Saint Lawrence, so this loyal councillor is said to have modelled his house after the cocked hat of the doughty Dutch Governor, Peter the Headstrong. The old house with its quaint Dutch gables became in time the castle of Baltus Van Tassel, and being held by Jacob Van Tassel, an active American partisan during the Revolution, the British sacked and burned it. The eastern front is overrun by ivy given Irving by Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, and originally from Melrose Abbey. The great author lived here from 1846 until his death in 1859, and his pen has immortalized the neighborhood. Nearby is the sequestered vale of Slaeperigh Haven, famed in the "Legend of the Sleepy Hollow." Not far from Tarrytown, he writes, there is a little valley, or rather a lap of land among high hills, one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquility. At the opening of this hollow, by the side of a winding lane, stands the ancient Dutch church, which is the oldest religious house in New York State. It is a curious little building with a diminutive spire enclosing a bell with the inscription, "Si . Deus . Pro . Nobis . Contra . Nos . 1685"—If God for us, who against us. It was built of bricks brought out from Holland, and in the ancient and mossy graveyard, almost under the shadow of the old church, Irving is buried. He lies upon a beautiful sunny slope, whence one can look into the Sleepy Hollow, and also far over the lovely Tappan Zee and its pleasant surroundings, a spot he selected for his tomb. Longfellow thus sweetly sings of this modest grave:

"Here lies the gentle humorist, who died

In the bright Indian Summer of his fame

A simple stone, with but a date and name,

Marks his secluded resting place, beside

The river that he loved and glorified.

Here in the autumn of his days he came,

But the dry leaves of his life were all aflame

With tints that brightened and were multiplied.

How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death!

Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours,

Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer;

Dying, to leave a memory like the breath

Of summer, full of sunshine and of showers,

A grief and gladness in the atmosphere."

Only a short distance from the church is the old bridge made famous in the legend describing the escapade of the schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, with his "soft and foolish heart toward the sex." In his love he had a rival in the stalwart and muscular Brom Bones. The legend tells us that Ichabod taught the Dutch urchins of these parts, and at the same time paid court to old farmer Van Tassel's daughter, the fair Katrina. Brom Bones, otherwise Brom Van Brunt, determined to drive him away. One dismal night Ichabod left the Van Tassel mansion in very low spirits. In the hush of midnight he could hear the watchdog bark, distant and vague, from the far opposite shore of the Hudson. Irving tells us a belief existed in a spectre—the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow—supposed to be the spirit of a Hessian trooper whose head had been carried off by a cannon-ball. Nearing the old church, this horrid ghost appeared in pursuit of Ichabod, who was bestride an inflexible old horse called Gunpowder. The terrified schoolmaster made all haste to reach the bridge, having passed which, he would be beyond the power of his pursuer. He spurred Gunpowder forward, but looking back, beheld the spectre close behind him, and in the very act of hurling its horrid head at him. The crash came; Ichabod rolled to the ground; the spectre and Gunpowder rushed past him in a whirlwind. Next day, we are told, a shattered pumpkin was found in the road, and not long afterwards Brom Bones led Katrina to the altar, but the luckless Ichabod was never heard of again.

In the hills behind Point-no-Point, on the western verge of the Tappan Zee, at one hundred and sixty feet elevation, is Rockland Lake, a crystal sheet of water which gives New York much of its ice supply, the blocks being sent from the top of the hill on a long slide to the barges that carry it down the river. As they glide along, they look in the distance, under the sunlight, like a string of diamonds. Hook Mountain, separating the lake from the river, is over six hundred feet high, and out of the lake flows the Hackensack River behind the Palisades, through the Jersey meadows to Newark Bay. Just above Tarrytown, on the eastern shore, is Sing-Sing Village, on a pretty slope, the name coming from the Indian Ossining, meaning "a stony place." Here, just back from the shore, is the famous Sing-Sing Prison, the long, low tiers of white stone buildings having the railway tunnelled through them, and the pleasant village rising on the hillside behind. The convicts built their own prison many years ago, with stone hewn out of an adjacent marble ridge, called Mount Pleasant. Just above, the long forest-covered projection of Teller's or Croton Point, thrust for two miles, or more than half-way across the broad river, from the eastern bank, makes the northern boundary of the Tappan Zee. The West Shore railway, which has come up through the Hackensack Valley from Jersey City, emerges high on the western hills and runs gradually down to the river bank, so that the Hudson above has a railway on either shore. Alongside the Point, the Croton River flows in, the Reservoir being about six miles up that stream. It was off Teller's Point the British sloop "Vulture" anchored, when she brought AndrÉ up from New York for his interview with Arnold.

ENTERING THE HIGHLANDS.

Beyond Teller's Point is another broadened expanse of the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay, spreading in parts five miles wide, its western shore lined with brickmaking establishments, lime-kilns and the factories which break up the stone quarried in the neighboring hills into Belgian blocks for New York street paving. Far in front, over the spacious bay, looms up the distant range of Hudson River Highlands, an outcrop of the great Kittatinny ridge, stretching broadly across the country, a part of the same deep blue-gray mountain wall we have already penetrated farther south. Its changing hues and appearance, as approached, remind of Campbell's couplet in the Pleasures of Hope:

"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,

And robes the mountain in its azure hue."

High Torn, just behind the bank below Haverstraw, rises over eight hundred feet, while above is Stony Point, the outcrop of a long line of limestone hills stretching into the river. Between it and the town, standing on a little eminence not far from the shore, was the frame house of Smith the Tory, known as the "Treason House," where AndrÉ and Arnold had their clandestine meeting to arrange the surrender of West Point, this eminence now being known as "Treason Hill." Across the ferry to Verplanck's Point, on the opposite shore, AndrÉ went when the meeting was over, and started on his fateful journey down to Tarrytown. The two Points suddenly narrow the Hudson, above Treason Hill, to a half-mile width, and they make the northern boundary of Haverstraw Bay. This is a region filled with Revolutionary memories. These Points commanded the southern river entrance to the Highlands, and behind them, back of the western shore, rises the buttress of the Kittatinny and the outpost of the pass, the massive Donderberg Mountain, eleven hundred feet high. The eastern Point was part of the Van Cortlandt manor, whose heiress, Gertrude, married Philip Verplanck, for whom it was named. Forts were built on both Points to control the river, and the British surprised and captured both of them in June, 1779, giving Washington much annoyance; but General Wayne, in July, by one of the most brilliant movements of the war, surprised and recaptured Stony Point. On the site of the old fort, and built of some of its materials, is now a little lighthouse guiding the river navigation. Over on the opposite shore, behind Verplanck's Point, Baron Steuben drilled the Revolutionary soldiers. This region now is chiefly devoted to the peaceful occupations of burning lime and making bricks.

The Hudson bends towards the northeast along the base of the towering Donderberg,—the Thunder Mountain,—the limestone quarries cut into its cliffs looking much like an old-time fortress. The narrow river contracted in the pass always has gusty winds blowing over it, and this was a weird region in the ancient Dutch rÉgime, many a tale of woe and wonder being told by the skippers who sailed that way. Irving records how they used to "talk of a little bulbous-bottomed Dutch goblin in trunk-hose and sugar-loaf hat, with a speaking-trumpet in his hand, which they say keeps the Donder-Berg." He declares "they have heard him in stormy weather, in the midst of the turmoil, giving orders in Low Dutch for the piping up of a fresh gust of wind, or the rattling off of another thunder-clap; that sometimes he had been seen surrounded by a crew of little imps, in broad breeches and short doublets, tumbling head over heels in the rack and mist, and playing a thousand gambols in the air, or buzzing like a swarm of flies about Anthony's Nose; and that at such times the hurry-scurry of the storm was always greatest." The genial historian supports this statement by testimony. "Skipper Daniel Ouslesticker of Fish Kill, who was never known to tell a lie," declared that in a severe squall he saw the goblin "seated astride of his bowsprit, riding the sloop ashore full butt against Anthony's Nose," but that he was happily exorcised by "Dominie Van Geisen of Esopus, who happened to be on board, and who sang the song of Saint Nicholas, whereupon the goblin threw himself up in the air like a ball, and went off in a whirlwind, carrying away with him the nightcap of the Dominie's wife, which was discovered the next Sunday morning hanging on the weathercock of Esopus Church steeple, at least forty miles off." Such misadventures occurring, the skippers for a long time did not venture past the Donderberg without lowering their peaks in homage, "and it was observed that all such as paid this tribute of respect were suffered to pass unmolested."

The Hudson River Highlands in some peaks rise nearly sixteen hundred feet. The river, coming from the north, breaks through them in a series of short bends, making narrow reaches, and in the fifteen miles required for the passage presents some of the most attractive American scenery. Beyond Verplanck's Point is the town of Peekskill, with the mountain range trending far away to the northeast, the river flowing along its base, and from the view ahead seeming to come from the lowlands beyond Peekskill. It was not strange, therefore, that in the early seventeenth century one of the Dutch skippers who braved the goblin of the Donderberg, in his explorations should have sailed his sloop up there, got into a shallow creek, and run aground. This was the misfortune of the honest Dutch mariner Jan Peek; but he made the best of it, and seeing that the soil of the valley was fertile, settled there, and the creek became Peek's Kill, and thus named the town. The rich Canopus Valley is to the northeastward, and the mountains blend so well that the sharp right-angled bend the river makes into the Highlands is completely hidden.

ANTHONY'S NOSE.

Thus rise, high over the valley, "the rough turrets of the Highland towers." The Indians believed this mountain region was created by the mighty spirit Manetho, to protect his favorite abodes from the unhallowed eyes of mortals. Their tradition was that the vast mountains of rock were raised before the Hudson poured its waters through them, and within them was a prison where the omnipotent Manetho confined rebellious spirits. Here, bound by adamantine chains, jammed in rifted pines, or crushed under ponderous crags, they groaned for ages. At length the mighty Hudson burst open their prison-house, rolling its overwhelming tide triumphantly through the stupendous ruins. Entering the pass, it really seems as if the Hudson River channel ought to run up where Jan Peek went, but instead it goes sharply around the ponderous base of the Donderberg Mountain. This is a very narrow gateway, where the swift tidal current makes the "Race," and in an instant the contracted passage is opened between the Donderberg on the left and Anthony's Nose on the right, entering this beautiful Highland district, which Chateaubriand has likened to "a large bouquet tied at its base with azure ribbon." As the narrow strait is traversed, Iona Island, tree-clad and attractive, appears ahead, and the winds usually blow a lively gale, buffeted from one mountain side to the other. The tide runs swiftly around the base of Anthony's Nose, and the romantic Brocken Kill pours down his sloping side, while through the jutting point of the Nose the railway has pierced a tunnel, making on either side a veritable nostril. The huge tree-covered mountain rises grandly to the clouds, while just over the tunnel at the point, a mass of protruding rocks and timber makes a first-class pimple to ornament the Nose. This is one of the prominent Highland peaks, rising over twelve hundred feet, and is said by some to have been named from a fancied resemblance to the nose of the great St. Anthony, the Egyptian monk of the third century.

Irving, however, has given us the more popular tradition that it was named in memory of luckless Anthony the Trumpeter, who met his fate at Spuyten Duyvel. The veracious historian Knickerbocker writes: "It must be known that the nose of Anthony the Trumpeter was of a very lusty size, strutting boldly from his countenance like a mountain of Golconda, being sumptuously bedecked with rubies and other precious stones—the true regalia of a king of good fellows—which jolly Bacchus grants to all who bouse it heartily at the flagon. Now, thus it happened, that bright and early in the morning the good Anthony, having washed his burly visage, was leaning over the quarter railing of the galley, contemplating it in the glossy wave below. Just at this moment, the illustrious sun, breaking in all his splendor from behind a high bluff of the Highlands, did dart one of his most potent beams full upon the nose of the sounder of brass, the reflection of which shot straightway down hissing hot into the water and killed a mighty sturgeon that was sporting beside the vessel. This huge monster, being with infinite labor hoisted on board, furnished a luxurious repast to all the crew, being accounted of excellent flavor, except about the wound, where it smacked a little of brimstone, and this, on my veracity, was the first time that ever sturgeon was eaten in these parts by Christian people. When this astonishing miracle became known to Peter Stuyvesant, and he tasted of the unknown fish, he, as may well be supposed, marvelled exceedingly, and as a monument thereof, he gave the name of 'Anthony's Nose' to a stout promontory in the neighborhood, and it has continued to be called 'Anthony's Nose' ever since that time."

WEST POINT.

The most famous locality in the Highlands is West Point. "In this beautiful place," wrote Charles Dickens, "the fairest among the fair and lovely Highlands of the North River; shut in by deep green heights and ruined forts, and looking down upon the distant town of Newburg, along a glittering path of sunlit water, with here and there a skiff, whose white sail often bends on some new tack as sudden flaws of wind come down upon her from the gullies in the hills, hemmed in besides, all around, with memories of Washington and events of the Revolutionary war: is the Military School of America." Opposite Anthony's Nose, Montgomery Creek flows in, its mouth broadened into a little bay. Upon the high rocks at the entrance, on either side, stood the great defenders of the lower Highlands during the early Revolution, Forts Clinton and Montgomery, considered impregnable then, and to bar the river passage a ponderous iron chain on timber floats was stretched across the channel to Anthony's Nose. The Continental Congress spent $250,000 on these obstructions, but the British in 1777 surprised and captured the forts, destroyed the chain and burnt the gunboats guarding it. This was a great victory, but barren of results, for Burgoyne's surrender soon afterwards compelled them to abandon this region and retire down towards New York. There are traces of the forts, and a flagstaff on the hill north of the creek marks the site of Fort Montgomery. Just above, on the eastern bank, is the charming and symmetrical cone of the Sugar Loaf Mountain, with several smaller companions, and the vista views along the river, and through some of the deep valleys between these mountains, are magnificent. The little town of Garrison's fringes the shore, the school of the Sisters of St. Francis, formerly a popular hotel, is perched high on the cliff on the western bank; while in front the dome of the West Point Library and the barracks rise in view upon the Point itself, which stretches completely across the view, its extremity hidden by the jutting headlands of the eastern bank. Here comes down in rainy weather the frothy current of the beautiful Buttermilk Falls, for a hundred feet over the rocks into the river, and the West Shore Railroad, winding along the edge of the cliffs, cuts or goes through their extended points, and finally darts into a long tunnel bored right under the West Point Academy.

The Hudson River, some distance above, bends sharply around the little lighthouse on the end of West Point, its extremity being a moderately sloping rock covered with cedars, the reef going deep down into the water, while on its highest part is a monument to General Kosciusko, who had much to do with constructing the original military works. The flat and elevated surface, some distance inland, plainly visible both from up and down the river, is the Parade Ground, the Academic buildings being constructed around it, while behind them on higher ground is the dome-crowned library. The surface of West Point is not so high as the surrounding mountains, but its advanced position completely commands the river approach both ways, and hence its military importance. Along the water's edge at the Point the rocks are worn smooth, it is said, by so many cadets sitting there in the summer time. Just above is the cove, where they swim and practice at pontoon-bridge building, and back of this cove is the artillery ground, the guns being fired at the huge side of old Cro' Nest Mountain to the northward. Gee's Point is also above, and from its extremity was extended the second big chain across to Constitution Island, used during the later years of the Revolution, to obstruct the passage, also buoyed on timber floats; some of its huge links being still preserved. Constitution Island was long the home of Susan Warner, the authoress, who died in 1885, and her grave is in West Point Cemetery. Her Hills of the Shatemuc is full of Hudson River scenes, but her best-known book was The Wide, Wide World, published in 1850.

The military post and academy of West Point is about fifty miles north of New York, the Government domain covering twenty-four hundred acres. The buildings stand on a plain of one hundred and sixty acres, elevated one hundred and fifty-seven feet above the river, with mountains all around, rising in some cases fifteen hundred feet, the highest being old Cro' Nest. South of the Academy, on a commanding hill six hundred feet high, are the ruins of Fort Putnam, the chief work during the Revolution. When that war began in 1775 it was ordered that the passes of the Hudson through the Highlands should be fortified, and Fort Constitution was built on the opposite island. As the higher adjacent hills commanded it, this work was soon abandoned, and three years later West Point was selected and fortified, with Fort Clinton at the Point, and several other formidable works, becoming the "American Gibraltar," the second massive chain being then extended across to the island as an additional protection. It was considered the most important post in the country, and at the time of Arnold's treason in September, 1780, was garrisoned by over three thousand men, and had one hundred and eighteen cannon in the various works. After peace came, the military defenses fell into ruin; but Washington repeatedly recommended that a military school be established at West Point, and in 1802 it was authorized by Congress, going into operation in 1812. The earthworks of the original Fort Clinton on the point, built by the youthful engineer Thaddeus Kosciusko in 1778, have been restored, and are carefully preserved. This young officer, descended from a noble Polish family, had not completed his studies in the military school of Warsaw when he eloped with a girl of high rank. The enraged father pursued and captured them, and the youthful lover was compelled either to slay the father or abandon the daughter. He chose the latter, and going to Paris met Dr. Franklin, who soon filled him with a desire to help the struggling Americans, and he came over and entered the army as an engineer in 1776. He served with distinction throughout the war, was made a General, and publicly thanked by Congress. He fought afterwards in the Polish Revolution, and retiring to Switzerland, died in 1817. He is buried in the Cathedral Church of Cracow, and near that city a mound one hundred and fifty feet high has been raised to his memory, earth being brought from every battlefield in Poland. The Kosciusko monument of marble was erected in memory of the noble Pole in an angle of Fort Clinton at West Point in 1829.

ARNOLD'S TREASON.

West Point itself saw no fighting, the great event of its early history being Benedict Arnold's treason. Across the river from the Point, and under the shadow of Sugar Loaf Mountain, is Beverly Cove, with a little wharf, where then stood Beverly House, previously the home of a prominent loyalist, Colonel Beverly Robinson of Virginia. Dr. Dwight, afterwards President of Yale College, was Chaplain of a Connecticut regiment at West Point in 1778, and he then climbed the Sugar Loaf, describing its view over the Highlands as "majestic, solemn, wild and melancholy." Arnold, when he plotted for the surrender of the post with AndrÉ at Treason Hill, below the Highlands, agreed to the treason for $50,000 gold and a Brigadier General's commission in the British army. Believing the plot was working prosperously, Arnold, after the interview, had crossed from the Point over to Beverly House, his headquarters, and three days afterwards breakfasted there on September 24, 1780. Hamilton and Lafayette arrived early that morning and met him, announcing that Washington was at the ferry below and would soon join them. While at the table, Arnold received a letter from an officer down the river with the startling intelligence, "Major AndrÉ of the British army is a prisoner in my custody." Arnold is said to have acted with wonderful coolness in the presence of his distinguished company, and although evidence of his own guilt might at any moment have arrived, he thoroughly concealed his emotions. Ordering a horse prepared, on the plea that his presence was needed "over the river," he left the table and went up stairs to his wife. He briefly told her they must part, perhaps forever, as his life depended on speedily reaching the British lines. The poor young wife, a bride of less than two years, was horror-stricken, and swooning, sank senseless upon the floor. Arnold dare not summon assistance, but kissed their sleeping infant, and mounting his horse galloped down to the wharf. Here he jumped into his six-oared barge, ordering them to row him swiftly down the Hudson, strengthening their energies by a promised reward of two gallons of rum. The oarsmen worked with a will, not knowing where they were going, and were astonished when he got below the Highlands to find him guiding them to the British sloop "Vulture." They were kept aboard as prisoners by Arnold's orders, and saw him greeted as a friend by their enemies. Even Sir Henry Clinton, when they arrived in New York, despised this meanness and ordered their liberation.

Washington arrived at Beverly House soon after Arnold had left, being anxious to see him, but could not find him. The General took a hasty breakfast and crossed over the river to West Point seeking him, but having no suspicions. He was disappointed at not finding Arnold there, and talking to Colonel Lamb, commanding Fort Clinton, the latter told him he had not heard from Arnold for two days. Washington's suspicions began to awaken, and crossing back to Beverly House, he was met by Hamilton, with the papers found upon AndrÉ, revealing Arnold's guilt. He summoned Lafayette and Knox for counsel, and the deepest sorrow evidently stirred Washington's bosom as he asked them the memorable question, "Whom can we trust now?" But soon the condition of the deserted wife, who was frantic with grief and apprehension, aroused his liveliest sympathy. Describing the scene, Hamilton wrote: "The General went up to see her. She upbraided him with being in a plot to murder her child, for she was quite beside herself. One moment she raved; another she melted into tears. Sometimes she pressed her infant to her bosom and lamented its fate, occasioned by the imprudence of its father, in a manner that would have moved insensibility itself." Washington did all in his power to soothe her, believing her innocent of previous knowledge of her husband's guilt. After Arnold had got safely aboard the "Vulture," he wrote to Washington, imploring protection for his wife and child, saying: "She is as good and innocent as an angel, and as incapable of doing wrong." Ample protection was afforded, and they were sent safely to her friends. She was Miss Shippen of Philadelphia, and only eighteen years old when Arnold, then the Military Governor of Philadelphia, married her in 1778, his second wife. The infant, James Robertson Arnold, afterwards became a distinguished officer in the British army, serving with credit in different parts of the world, and rising to the rank of Lieutenant General, dying in London in 1854. Benedict Arnold was made a Major General by the British, and was given a considerable sum of money; but his life was unhappy, as he was shunned and often insulted, and sinking into obscurity, he died in London in 1801. His treason was deliberately plotted, investigation showing he had been over a year in correspondence with the enemy, and had sought the command at West Point, given him in August, 1780, in order to compass its surrender.

OLD CRO' NEST AND THE STORM KING.

The dark pile of old Cro' Nest, guarding the northern side of West Point, rises fourteen hundred and eighteen feet, one of the noblest mountains of the Highlands. Beyond it, the Storm King and Mount Taurus are the northern portals of the pass, with Pollopell's Island, rocky and tree-clad, lying in the river between, and farther on the distant hazy shores enclosing Newburg Bay. These buttresses of the northern entrance solidly rise as protectors of the pass into the valley:

"Mountains that like giants stand

To sentinel enchanted land."

On the northern side of the promontory making the Point, upon a little level plain above the cliffs, overlooking the river, and almost under the shadow of old Cro' Nest, is the West Point Cemetery. Here is buried General Winfield Scott. Upon the Parade Ground is the Battle Monument, erected in 1894, a column seventy-eight feet high, surmounted by a statue of Victory. Down along the most beautiful part of the shore at the Point, and leading to Kosciusko's Garden, a favorite resort of the Polish officer, is the secluded path which generations of impulsive young cadets have known as the "Flirtation Walk." Beginning at the roadway, high on the bluff, overlooking the river, it winds with devious turns down the declivity, and after curving around the promontory near the water's edge, sweeps grandly up the incline again. This trysting-path leads under a lacework of foliage, giving it pleasant and meditative gloom even when the sun shines brightly. Over across the river is the village of Cold Spring, having both above and below the shores rising steeply, and hung upon the edge is the pretty Church of St. Mary's, with its columned portico and surmounting belfry. Nearby the railway running along the shore pierces a tunnel through a rugged protruding rock. Here is the Cold Spring foundry that makes cannon for the army. Almost under the Parade Ground on the northern side is the Siege Battery, where the guns in time of artillery practice carry on a noisy and reverberating warfare across the Cove against the dark and towering side of old Cro' Nest. This grand mountain, the target for the youthful gunners, inspired the muse of George P. Morris, the lyric poet of the Highlands, whose delightful home was at Undercliff, across the river above, at the foot of Mount Taurus. His eyes perpetually feasted upon the view of this peak, and thus he described it:

The northern portal of the Highlands is guarded on either hand by the Storm King, rising fifteen hundred and twenty-nine feet, and Mount Taurus, fifteen hundred and eighty-six feet. There are also a galaxy of attendant peaks. Beyond Mount Taurus is Breakneck Hill, rising nearly twelve hundred feet, with a chain of mountains stretching far to the northeast, among them the Old Beacon and the towering Grand Sachem, sixteen hundred and eighty feet high. The Storm King was the old Boter-Berg of the early Dutch, thus named because, to their matter-of-fact minds, the mountain resembled nothing so much as a huge lump of butter. Similarly, the eastern portal of the pass was Bull Mountain originally, but has since been more classically transformed into Mount Taurus. The ancient Knickerbocker legend records how the primitive inhabitants chased a wild bull around this mountain to the peak beyond it, where he fell and broke his neck, thus naming both of them, though Breakneck Hill yet awaits a more classic transformation.

The geologists tell us that in early ages, like the Minisink of the Delaware, the region north of the Highlands adjacent to the Hudson Valley was a vast lake, extending back to Lake Champlain, which still remains as a fragment of the inland sea, following the melting of the great glacier. To get a southern outlet, the river broke through the mountain barrier and formed the winding and romantic Highland Pass. There is a grand outlook from the summit of the Storm King over this valley to the northward. The river expands into the beautiful Newburg Bay, its most perfect land-locked harbor, and its course can be traced through the "Long Reach" for more than twenty miles, a broad, straight stream between the pleasant banks, up to Crom Elbow, the "Krom Elleboge" of the original Dutch colonists. Villages dot the shores, and fertile fields stretch up on either hand, while hung in mid air, far away across the water, is the distant, slender, spider-like span of the high railway bridge at Poughkeepsie, the route by the "back door" into New England, which has gone through such serious throes of reconstruction. Upon the left hand the Catskills, and upon the right hand the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts, bound the distant horizon. Behind, and to the southward, the river can be traced as it winds through the Highlands down to Anthony's Nose, while nearer, one can look into the depression on top of the adjoining mountain, within a surrounding amphitheatre of peaks that makes the striking resemblance giving the significant name to the old Cro' Nest.

THE CULPRIT FAY.

Between the Storm King and old Cro' Nest is the deep and beautiful Vale of Tempe, with wild ravines furrowed through it, forming channels for clear mountain streams, and the trees conceal many a delicious dell. In this picturesque nook among the mountains is laid the scene of Joseph Rodman Drake's charming poem of "The Culprit Fay":

The story is told that Drake, then about twenty-one years of age, and James Fenimore Cooper and Fitz-Greene Halleck, who were his close friends, in August, 1816, were strolling through these Highlands. His companions got into a discussion, holding that our American rivers gave no such rare opportunities for poetic fancy as the streams of older lands. Drake disputed this, and, to prove the contrary, composed within three days this exquisite poem, which has largely made his fame. It is a simple yet interesting story. The fairies living in this beautiful valley are called together at midnight to punish one who has broken his vow, and they sentence him to a difficult penance, with all the evil spirits of air and water opposing. The genius of the poet interweaves the poem with every natural attraction the locality affords. Thus are the fairies summoned to the dance:

These Cro' Nest fairies are a dainty race. Owlet's eyes are their lanterns; they repose in cobweb hammocks swung on tufted spears of grass and rocked by midsummer night zephyrs; some lie on beds of lichen, with pillows of the breast-plumes of the humming-bird; others nestle in the purple shade of the four-o'clock, or in rock-niches lined with dazzling mica. Velvet-like mushrooms are their tables, where they quaff the dew from the buttercup. Their king's throne is of spicewood and sassafras, supported on tortoise-shell pillars and draped with crimson tulip-leaves. The "culprit" himself, however, in his beautiful outfit and quaint adventures, gives the best imagery of the poem. At the opening of his journey, chagrined and fatigued, he captures a spotted toad for a steed, and bridles her with silk-weed twist, spurring her onward with an osier whip. Arriving at the water's edge, he plunges in, but leeches, fish and other watery foes drive him back with bruised limbs. The use of cobweb lint and the balsam dews of sorrel and henbane relieve his wounds, and being refreshed by the juices of calamus, he embarks in a mussel-shell boat, painted brilliantly without and tinged with pearl within. He gathers a colen-bell for a cup, and sculls into the middle of the stream, laughing at the foes who chatter and grin in the water. There he sits in the moonlight, until a sturgeon, coming by, leaps glistening into the silvery light; and then, like a liliputian Mercury, balancing upon one foot, he lifts the flowery cup and catches the sparkling drop that washes the stain from his wing. He returns to the shore, having sweet nymphs grasping the sides of the boat with their tiny hands and urging it onward. The next enterprise of the "culprit" is more knightly. He is arrayed as a fairy cavalier, in acorn helmet, plumed with thistle-down, corselet made of a bee's nest, and cloak of butterfly wings. His shield is a lady-bug's shell; his lance a wasp-sting; his spurs of cockle-seed; his bow of vine-twig strung with corn-silk; and his arrows, nettle-shafts. He mounts a fire-fly steed, and waving a blade of blue grass, speeds upward to catch a flying meteor's spark. Again the spirits of evil are let loose, those of air being as bad as those of water. A sylphid queen tries to enchant him with her beauty and kindness; she toys with the butterfly cloak as he tells the dangers he has passed. But he never forgets the object of his pilgrimage, and triumphing over the foes of air, he is escorted with honor by the sylph's lovely retinue; his career is resumed, his flame-wood lamp rekindled, and before a streak of dawn is proclaimed in the eastern sky by the sentry elf, the "Culprit Fay" has made his full penance and been welcomed back to all his original glory. Drake died at the early age of twenty-five, a victim of consumption, and his grave is beside the little river Bronx in New York. To his memory his friend Halleck wrote the noted poem, thus beginning:

NEWBURG BAY.

Emerging from the Highlands, the gentle slopes of the town of Cornwall are under the shadow of the Storm King, while the mountain range stretches off to the northeast, with Fishkill village in front, and the Revolutionary signal station of the Old Beacon standing up prominently behind. These mountains were the Indian Matteawan, the "Council of Good Fur." The same name was given the stream draining their sides until the Dutch called it Vis Kill, or Fish Creek, and hence its present name and that of the village. The shores of Newburg Bay seem low, as they are dwarfed by the mountains, and on the western slope an elevated bench of table-land in terraces stretches back to the distant hills. The town of Newburg, which has about twenty-five thousand people, spreads up these terraces, and in front there are storehouses, mills and railway terminals. When Hendrick Hudson sailed his ship "Half Moon" through the Highlands, he was attracted by the site of Newburg, and wrote: "It is as beautiful a land as one can tread upon; a very pleasant place to build a town on." A tribe of the Minsis who had a village known as the Quassaic, meaning "the Place of the Rock," then occupied it, and would not for a half-century permit a settlement. They were driven away, however, and a colony of Lutherans from the Palatinate came here and founded the "Palatine Parish of Quassaic." They did not flourish, and ultimately some Scots arrived from the Tay, and seeing quite a resemblance to their old home, named the place Newborough. Its most distinguished citizen has probably been General John E. Wool, born here in 1788. At the southern end of this pleasant town, a short distance back from the river, is its chief celebrity, a low, old-fashioned graystone building, appearing to be almost all roof, from which tall chimneys rise. There is a broad lawn and flagstaff in front, and a grove for the background. This is the historic house, maintained by New York State as a relic, which was General Washington's headquarters during the closing campaign of the Revolution. It was built by Jonathan Hasbrouck, a Huguenot, in 1750, and is also known as the Hasbrouck House. In its centre is a large hall, having a huge fireplace on one side, and containing seven doors, but only one window. This was Washington's reception hall, and here he dined with his guests. At the foot of the flagstaff on the lawn is buried the last survivor of Washington's Life Guard, Ural Knapp, who died in 1856 at the age of ninety-seven. This Guard, organized in Boston in 1776, continued as his bodyguard throughout the war, and was selected from all the regiments of the army. Knapp was its sergeant, and at his last public appearance at a banquet in Newburg, the old man made a brief address, concluding with an invitation to the entire company to attend his funeral; four months later they did so.

The "Tower of Victory" is a fine monument, built on the grounds by the Government, and surmounted by a statue of Washington in the act of sheathing his sword. A bronze tablet with the figure of Peace announces that it was erected "in commemoration of the disbandment, under proclamation of the Continental Congress of October 18, 1783, of the armies by whose patriotic and military virtue our National independence and sovereignty was established." It was at Newburg that Washington was offered the title of King by the officers of the army, but declined it. Over at Fishkill is the old Verplanck House, with its quaint dormer windows, which was the headquarters of Baron Steuben, and here, upon the disbandment of the army, was held the meeting of the officers at which was formed the Society of the Cincinnati, Washington being its first president. The mountainous region east and south and the "neutral ground" were the haunts of Enoch Crosby of Massachusetts, the American spy of the Revolution, whose exploits all about this locality Fenimore Cooper wove into his novel The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground, which made the novelist's earliest fame. The ancient Wheaton House, around which much of the tale centred, is still there. The Murderer's Creek comes down to the Hudson through Newburg,—an attractive stream which deserved a better name, but did not get it until N. P. Willis, who lived at Cornwall, and who converted the Dutch "Butter Hill" into the Storm King, and "Bull Hill" into Mount Taurus, tried his persuasive powers at Newburg and got this stream softened into the pleasant Indian name of Moodna. The neighborhood of Newburg is famous from a scientific standpoint for the finding of the remains of mastodons. One was unearthed there in 1899, making the eleventh found in Orange County, New York, during the past century, some of them being among the finest specimens extant.

At the head of Newburg Bay, on the western shore, is a rocky platform down by the waterside, known as the "Devil's Dance Chamber." When the "Half Moon" came up the river and anchored for the night, this broad flat rock, now almost hidden by cedars, was the scene of a wild midnight revel of the Indians, with all the accessories of song and dance, fire and war-paint, at which the Dutch sailors marvelled exceedingly, calling it the "Duyvel's Dans-Kamer." Here the warlike Minsis of the Quassaic, before going on hunting expeditions or the warpath, would paint themselves grotesquely and dance around a fire with horrible contortions, singing and yelling under direction of the soothsayers or "medicine men." They believed, if this was kept up long enough, the evil spirit would appear, either as a wild beast or a harmless animal; if the former, it foreboded ill-fortune and the expedition was abandoned, while the latter was a good omen. These hideous performances afterwards scared old Governor Peter Stuyvesant, according to the veracious Knickerbocker, when he sailed up the river, for the historian says, "Even now I have it on the point of my pen to relate how his crew was most horribly frightened, on going on shore above the Highlands, by a gang of merry, roystering devils, frisking and curvetting on a huge flat rock projecting into the river, and which is called the Duyvel's Dans-Kamer to this very day."

POUGHKEEPSIE AND VASSAR.

The Hudson River's "Long Reach" stretches many miles almost due northward, and on it is Poughkeepsie, with thirty thousand population, midway between New York and Albany. Near here lived stout Theophilus Anthony the blacksmith, who forged the great chains stretched across the Hudson in the Highlands, for which the British burnt his house and carried him a captive down to the New York prison-ships. Here, at Locust Grove, a foliage-covered rocky point protruding into the river, was long the home of Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph. Poughkeepsie spreads broadly upon its group of gentle hills, with the great railway-bridge crossing high overhead, elevated two hundred feet above the water, and nearly a mile and a half long. The Poughkeepsie streets, lined with fine elms, maples and acacias, rise upon the sloping banks to a height above the bridge level, the town being environed by rocky buttresses. The Indians named the place Apo-keep-sinck, or the "pleasant and safe harbor," and in it they housed their canoes. From this was gradually evolved the present name, through a variety of spellings, of which no less than forty-two different styles are found in the old records of the town. The "safe harbor" of the Indians was between two protruding rocky bluffs, and is now filled with wharves. The rapid Winnakee Brook leaps into it, a stream which the Dutch called the Fall Kill. The northern bordering bluff was their Slange Klippe, or the "Adder Cliff," infested with venomous serpents, and the other is the "Call Rock." Tradition tells that once a band of Mohican warriors who had made a foray into New England brought here some Pequot captives, among them a young chief who was tied to a tree for a sacrifice, when a shriek startled them, and a girl, leaping from the thicket, implored his life. She also was a captive Pequot and his affianced. As the captors debated, the warwhoop was suddenly sounded by hostile Hurons, and they seized their arms for defense. The maiden released her lover, but in the conflict they were separated, and a Huron carried her off. The young chief was almost inconsolable, but he pursued them beyond the river, and conceived a daring plan for rescue. He entered the Huron camp disguised as a wizard, found the maiden ill, and her Huron captor implored the wizard to save her life. This he essayed to do, she recognized him, and eluding the Huron vigilance, they escaped at nightfall. They made their way to the Hudson, paddled over in a canoe, and though pursued, he brought her into the "safe harbor," concealed her, and then, by the aid of the friendly Indians he found there, beat off the Hurons.

The Dutch often sailed by, and cast longing eyes upon this spot, so favorable for a settlement, but it was nearly a century after Hudson's exploration when the venerable yet venturesome Baltus Van Kleek concluded it was about time to take possession. He landed in the harbor, became the lord of the manor, and in 1705 built near the Winnakee Brook a stout fortress-dwelling, which stood until recently. It was loop-holed for musketry, and in it the New York Legislature met for two sessions during the Revolution. Out in front was the "Call Rock," where old Baltus and his friends used to stand and hail the passing Dutch sloops when they wanted to get the news or journey upon the river. The New York State Convention met at Poughkeepsie in 1788, and ratified the Federal Constitution by the small majority of three, after a protracted debate. From its many elevations, this leading city of the Hudson Valley has a superb outlook, only limited by the Catskills far to the northwest, the Highlands down the river, and the dark-blue Shawangunk ridge off to the westward, where the attractive lakes Mohonk and Minnewaska, the former at twelve hundred and the latter at eighteen hundred feet elevation, nestle high among the mountain peaks, overshadowed by the bold summits of Paltz Point and Sky Top. Here flows deep in the valley the pretty Wallkill, out to the Rondout and the Hudson, giving the railroad a route into the mountain fastness.

About two miles back from the river, and behind the city, is Vassar College, the foremost educational institution for women in the world. The splendid buildings stand in grounds covering two hundred acres, attractively laid out, and the main building, modelled after the Tuileries, with high surmounting dome, is five hundred feet long. From Sunset Hill, their highest eminence, there is a panorama of the Hudson for forty miles. This college was the gift of Matthew Vassar, a wealthy Poughkeepsie merchant and brewer, of English birth, who desired to make it the most complete foundation of its kind, and gave and bequeathed $1,000,000 besides the land, there being over $400,000 expended upon the buildings. His nephews have since made large additional gifts. Here is provided a complete mathematical, classical and English education for several hundred female students. Its main building is the chief structure of Poughkeepsie. There are art galleries, a museum, library and observatory. The museum of American birds is the most complete existing, there is a fine gallery of water-colors, and a collection of ancient weapons and armor, including the halberd of King Francis I. The founder, having an ample fortune and no children, devoted the closing years of his life to this beneficent work, the college being begun in 1861 and opened in 1865. He labored assiduously at its development and died at his post of duty. Three years after the opening, when attending the annual meeting of the trustees, while reading his address, he was suddenly stricken with death.

CROM ELBOW TO KINGSTON.

Upon the Hudson River's "Long Reach" is the favorite locality of the winter "ice-boat races," this exhilarating sport in boats on runners speeding over the ice, before the wind, being much enjoyed. A few miles above Poughkeepsie the reach comes to an abrupt termination, in the bent and narrow pass, where the cliffs compress the channel and form the crooked strait known as the Crom Elbow, the Dutch and English words having the same meaning. Above, the western shore for a long distance is lined with apple orchards and vineyards, while the eastern bank for over thirty miles is a succession of villas interspersed with hamlets. Moving northward, the noble Catskill range comes into full view, gradually changing from distant gray to nearer blue, and then to green with the closer approach. Along the river for many miles, where these magnificent mountains give such a grand front outlook, there are a series of old Knickerbocker estates, many occupied by the descendants of the early settlers. Here was the princely home of the late William B. Dinsmore of Adams Express Company, a business begun in 1840 with two men, a wheelbarrow and a boy, Dinsmore being one of the men and the late John Hoey of Long Branch the boy. Dinsmore built his gorgeous palace on the Hudson—and died. On the western shore is Pell's great apple orchard, shipping the fruit from twenty-five thousand trees all over the world. Some distance above, the Rondout Creek comes out through a deep gorge, having the twin cities of Rondout and Kingston nestling among its bordering hills. They have together over twenty-five thousand people. This was the outlet of the abandoned Delaware and Hudson Canal. Kingston Point, the mouth of the creek, was the place of earliest Dutch settlement in this part of New York, where they called it Wittwyck, or the "Wild Indian Town," and for defense built a redoubt, whence come the name of Rondout.

The historic city of Kingston spreads back to Esopus Creek, a short distance inland, and was the Esopus town of colonial times, the name coming from the Indian dwellers here, meaning "the river." The old "Senate House" of Kingston, built in 1676, was the first meeting-place of the New York Legislature, and it now contains a collection of Dutch and other relics. The Esopus Indians broke up the original settlements with a terrible massacre, but Huguenot refugees came and re-peopled the place, and during the Revolution Esopus was such a "nest of rebels" that when the British came along in 1777 they burnt it. This punishment was inflicted because it was made the capital and the first New York State Constitution had been framed here during the preceding February. The tale is told that the British landing to burn the town scared a party of Dutch laborers, who briskly scampered off. One of them stepped on a hay-rake, and the handle flying up gave him a sharp rap on the head. Being frightened more than hurt, and sure that a Britisher closely pursued him, he fell on his knees, and imploringly exclaimed, "Mein Gott, I give up; hooray for King Shorge!" Kingston is a great producer of flagstones and manufactory of Rosendale cements, made from a fine-grained, hard, dark-blue stone, which is broken, burnt in kilns with coal, ground, and then prepared for market. Mixed with clean sharp sand, this cement becomes in time entirely impervious to water, and has all the strength of the best natural building stones.

GREAT HISTORIC ESTATES.

The solid old German burgher William Beckman came over from his native Rhine in 1647, and went sailing up the Hudson, his Fatherland memories being delighted at the sight of a noble hill on the eastern bank, opposite Rondout Creek. He settled there, building a house, and behind the hill started the town of Rhinebeck, a combination of his own name and that of his native river. This well-known Rhinecliff stands up alongside the Hudson, much like a vine-clad slope bordering the great German river, and is adorned with the ancient Beckman House, a stone structure built for a fort and dwelling. Famous estates surround Rhinebeck. Here is Ellerslie, the summer home of Levi P. Morton, formerly Vice-President, fronting the river for a long distance. The Astor estate of Rokeby, which was the home of William B. Astor and his son William Astor, is north of Rhinebeck, the house, surmounted by a tower, standing in a spacious park about a mile back from the river. Rokeby was a noted place in Revolutionary days, the home of General Armstrong, whose daughter married the elder Astor. Here is the Fleetwood estate, with its old house, built in 1700, having the "cannon-room" in front, with a port-hole facing the river. Here are Wilderstein and Grasmere, the home of the Livingston descendants, also Wildercliff, built by Rev. Freeborn Garrettson, one of the founders of the Methodist Church in America, its name signifying the "wild Indian's cliff." Garrettson was educated in Maryland for the Church of England. As a matter of conscience he afterwards espoused the cause of the Methodists, then in their infancy, entered their ministry, freed his slaves, and preached the gospel of Methodism everywhere, declaring his firm faith in a special Providence, and often proving it in his own person. Once a mob seized him and was taking him to jail, when a sudden and overpowering flash of lightning dispersed them, and he was left unmolested. In 1788 he came to New York in missionary work, and was made Presiding Elder of the district between Long Island Sound and Lake Champlain. Coming to Clermont, among his converts was the sister of Chancellor Livingston, and he married her in 1793, shortly afterwards building his house at Wildercliff. This was long a home for Methodist clergymen, his daughter continuing his hospitality. Another historic estate, just above Rokeby, is Montgomery Place, the home of another Livingston, the widow of General Montgomery, who was in the colonial attack upon Quebec, by Wolfe, and afterwards, in the early days of the Revolution, led a forlorn hope against Quebec, and perished as Wolfe had before him. His young widow lived here a half-century, and her brother's descendants now possess it.

Krueger's Island, on the eastern shore, discloses in a grove a picturesque ruin, with broken arches, specially imported from Italy by a former owner of the island to give it a flavor of antiquity. The Catskills now rise in grander view, the Plattekill Clove comes down out of them, and Esopus Creek from the south flows into the Hudson. The Dutch called this Zaeger's Kill, which time corrupted into Saugerties, a pleasant factory village built behind the flats at the creek's mouth, and having the Catskills for a splendid background. Opposite, on the eastern bank, is Tivoli, and near here is located the parent estate of these historic homes. Robert Livingston came from Scotland to America in 1672 and married a member of the Schuyler family, who was the widow of a Van Rensselaer. He was a patrician of high degree, of the family of the Earls of Linlithgow, and seeking a home in the American wilderness, settled on the Hudson. He first lived at Albany, and being Secretary to the Indian Commissioners, he acquired extensive tracts of land fronting the river, which afterwards became the basis of great wealth. In 1710 these lands were consolidated under one English patent, giving him a princely domain of one hundred and sixty-two thousand acres for an "annual rent of twenty-eight shillings, lawful money of New York," equalling about $3.50. This "Livingston Manor" gave him a seat in the Colonial Legislature, and he built his manor-house upon a grassy point along the Hudson River bank, at the mouth of "Roeleffe Jansen's Kill," flowing in a few miles north of Tivoli. The greater part of the manor descended to his son Robert, who built a finer mansion there, known as "Old Clermont," which the British burnt during the Revolution. In this house was born the grandson, the famous Chancellor of New York, Robert R. Livingston, who had so much to do with guiding the course of the State in that momentous era. He built the present Clermont mansion on the river bank above Tivoli. It is on a bluff shore, a grand estate surrounding it, and sloping gradually up to the hill-tops stretching to the horizon behind. This estate extended back originally to the Berkshire hills. The full glory of the Catskills is spread out in panorama before this noted mansion, with the distant hotels perched on the mountain tops.

Chancellor Livingston was sent Minister to France, and when he returned he brought over merino sheep, introducing them into this country. His great honor as a man of science comes from his connection with Fulton's steamboat experiments. He met Fulton in Paris, and was closely connected with the first steamboat on the Hudson, which in fact could not have been built without his aid. By the help of Livingston's money, Fulton in 1807 built this steamboat in New York, naming her the "Clermont" in his honor. The experiment was publicly derided as "Fulton's Folly," but he persevered and succeeded. The "Clermont" was one hundred feet long, twelve feet beam and seven feet depth. In September, 1807, she made the first successful experimental trip from New York to Albany in thirty-six hours, charging the passengers $7.50 fare. She afterwards made regular trips, and on October 5, 1807, the Albany Gazette announced: "Mr. Fulton's new steamboat left New York on the 2d, at ten o'clock A.M., against a strong tide, very rough water, and a violent gale from the north. She made a headway against the most sanguine expectations and without being rocked by the waves." Chancellor Livingston in Jefferson's Administration negotiated the cession of Louisiana by France to the United States, and ripe with honors, he died at Clermont in 1813.

THE CATSKILL MOUNTAINS.

Opposite these great estates, the Catskill Mountains rise in all their glory, spreading across the western horizon at a distance of eight to ten miles from the Hudson River. They stretch for about fifteen miles, and the range covers some five hundred square miles. The most prominent peaks in the view are Round Top and the High Peak, rising thirty-seven hundred and thirty-eight hundred feet, and in front of them, on lower elevations, are the summer hotels that have such superb views over the Hudson River valley. The town of Catskill on the river—a flourishing settlement of five thousand people—is the usual point of entrance, and from it a railway extends back to the bases of the mountains. An inclined plane railway over a mile long then ascends the face of the range, sixteen hundred feet high, to the hotels. This "Otis Elevating Railway," which accomplishes its journey in about ten minutes, is said to be the greatest inclined road in the world. The Indians knew these grand peaks as the Onti Ora, or "Mountains of the Sky," thus named because in some conditions of the atmosphere they appear like a heavy cumulus cloud hanging above the horizon. The weird Indian tradition was that among these mountains was held the treasury of storms and sunshine for the Hudson, presided over by the spirit of an old Indian squaw who dwelt within the range. She kept the day and the night imprisoned, letting out one at a time, and made new moons every month and hung them up in the sky, for they first appeared among these mountains, and then she cut up the old moons into stars. The great Manitou also employed her to manufacture thunder and clouds for the valley. Sometimes she wove the clouds out of cobwebs, gossamers and morning dew, and sent them off, flake by flake, floating in the air, to give light summer showers. Sometimes she would blow up black thunder-storms and send down drenching rains to swell the streams and sweep everything away. All these storms coming from the west appeared to originate in the mountains. The Indians also told of the imps that haunted their dells, luring the hunters to places of peril. When the Dutch colonists came along, they sent expeditions into the mountains, searching for gold and silver, but chiefly found wildcats, causing them to be named the Kaatsbergs, and from this their present title has come to be, in time, the Kaatskills or the Catskills.

These attractive mountains are a group of the Alleghenies, having spurs extending northwest and west, at right angles to the general trend of the range, thus giving them quite a different form from that usual in the Allegheny ridges. They assume also more of the abrupt and rocky character of the Alpine peaks, and instead of the usual folds or fragments of arches commonly seen elsewhere, the Catskill crags are masses of piled-up strata in the original horizontal position. They have a most precipitous declivity facing the east towards the river valley. Deep ravines, which the Dutch called "Cloves," are cut into them by the mountain torrents, descending in places in beautiful cascades, sometimes for hundreds of feet. This aggregation of rocky cliffs and rounded peaks, and the intersecting gorges and smiling verdant valleys, have become a great resort for the summer pleasure-seeker, with myriads of hotels and boarding-places, where it is said that eighty to a hundred thousand people will go in the season. Their eastern verge is drained by the Hudson, while the many brooks and kills flowing out to the westward are gathered into the two branches that form the Delaware River.

From their eastern front, where the huge hotels, built at twenty-four hundred feet elevation, are anchored by ponderous chain cables to keep them from being overthrown by the wind, there is an unrivalled view over the valley. The Hudson River stretches a silvery streak across the picture, and can be traced nearly a hundred miles from West Point up to Albany. Its distant diminutive steamboats slowly move, and like a shining thread, as the western sun strikes the car-windows and is reflected, a railway train glides along the bank ten miles away, seen so well, and yet so small. The perpendicular mountain wall brings the valley almost beneath one's feet, the buildings looking like children's toy houses, the trees like dwarfed bushes, and the fields, with their alternating green and brown colors, contrasting as the spaces on a chess-board. Wagons crawl like little ants upon the narrow mud-colored lines representing roads. The broad valley, though its surface is rugged and has high hills surmounted by patches of woodland, is so far below that it appears from above as a flat floor. Thus it stretches off to the river, with a sparkling pond here and there, and extending beyond to the eastern horizon the view is enclosed by the dark-blue Berkshire hills in Massachusetts, forty miles away. Behind them, on favored days, rise like a misty haze, off to the northeast, the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was in this region that James Fenimore Cooper located the "Leather Stocking Tales," for his home at Cooperstown was on the Catskills' western verge. Natty Bumppo climbed up the mountain to get this wonderful view. "What see you when you get there?" asked Edward. "Creation," said Natty, sweeping one hand around him in a circle, "all creation, lad," and then he continued, "If being the best part of a mile in the air, and having men's farms at your feet, with rivers looking like ribands, and mountains bigger than the 'Vision' seeming to be haystacks of green grass under you, give any satisfaction to a man, I can recommend the spot."

RIP VAN WINKLE AND THE KAATERSKILL.

These Catskill Mountains were purchased from the Indians on July 8, 1678, by a company of Dutch and English gentlemen, who took their title at a solemn conclave held at the Stadt Huis in Albany, where the Indian chief Mahak-Neminea attended with six representatives of his tribe. The Indians seem to have soon disappeared, and the region for a century or more remained mythical and almost unexplored, thus contributing to the many fairy tales that have got mixed up with its history. It was among these wonderful mountains that Washington Irving was thus enabled to discover Rip Van Winkle. Down on the mountain side, upon the margin of a deep dark glen leading up from Catskill Village, stands Rip Van Winkle's ancient little cabin. It is within the vast amphitheatre where Hendrick Hudson's ghostly crew held their revels and beguiled him to drink from the flagon which put him into his sleep of twenty years. It was a curious revel, for with the gravest faces, and in mysterious silence, they rolled their nine-pin balls, which echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of thunder. The huge cliffs overhanging the dark glen were evidently put there for just such a ghostly scene, and even now the old denizens of the Catskills are said to never hear a summer thunder-storm reverberating among these mountains without concluding that the Dutch ship's company from the "Half Moon" are again playing at their game of nine-pins. There is still pointed out the slab of rock on which Rip took his long sleep, and until recently there is said to have lived in the old cabin an alleged "Van Winkle" who made a pretence to be a descendant of the original Rip, and dispensed to the weary traveller liquids fully as sulphurous as those in the flagon of the ghostly crew. Among these mountains originated many of the quaint Dutch legends that have got so interwoven into the early history of New York that it is hard to separate the fact from the fiction.

It was not until 1823 that the first summer hotel was built in the Catskills, a rude little structure standing where is now the Mountain House, near the summit of the inclined plane railway. The highest peak of the range is Slide Mountain, in the western Catskills, at the head of the Big Indian Valley, rising forty-two hundred and five feet. A large portion of this mountain, including the crest, is a New York State reservation, and from its top six States are in view. These Catskill peaks are built up of huge and jagged piles of crags and broken stone, through which the torrents have carved the "Cloves." The stratified rocks are easily split into layers, and they furnish the towns along the Hudson with much of the flagging used for footwalks. Enormous boulders, some as big as a house, are liberally strewn about, where they were dropped by the great glacier. Among the grandest of the gorges, which the torrents have cleft, is the Kaaterskill Clove, its stream, after various windings, finally flowing eastward towards the Hudson. As the name Kaatskill comes from the cat, so the Kaaterskill is regarded as derived from an animal of most complete feline development, the "gentleman cat." The steep borders of this Kaaterskill Clove, a wonderful canyon, down in the bottom of which ice and snow remain during the summer, furnish many points of remarkable outlook, giving a startling realization of the vast scale of these mountains. The stream bubbles far below, heard but not seen, and the mountain peaks above are occasionally obscured by passing clouds. Adjoining this canyon is an immense gorge carved out of the hills, into which pours the majestic Kaaterskill Falls, plunging down an abyss of two hundred and sixty feet in two leaps, respectively of one hundred and eighty and eighty feet. The stream is dammed above the cataract, so that in times of drouth the water may be retained and the falls thus be exhibited at intervals by turning on the water, as is the case with various cataracts in Switzerland. Few waterfalls have had more praises sung than this ribbon of spray, which was a favorite both of Cooper and Bryant. An inscription on the rock at the foot preserves the memory of a faithful dog, who once jumped down to follow a stone, because he thought it his master's bidding.

The unique description of the Kaaterskill Falls by Cooper's Leather Stocking is interesting. He says, "The water comes crooking and winding among the rocks, first so slow that a trout might swim in it, and then starting and running just like any creature that wanted to make a far spring, till it gets to where the mountain divides like the cleft hoof of a deer, leaving a deep hollow for the brook to tumble into. The first pitch is nigh two hundred feet, and the water looks like flakes of driven snow afore it touches the bottom; and then the stream gathers itself together again for a new start, and may be flutters over fifty feet of flat rock before it falls for another hundred, where it jumps about from shelf to shelf, first turning this a-way, and then turning that a-way, striving to get out of the hollow, till it finally comes to the plain. To my judgment, it's the best piece of work I've met with in the woods, and none know how often the hand of God is seen in the wilderness but them that rove it for a man's life." William Cullen Bryant thus sings the praises of the Kaaterskill Falls:

At the head of the Kaaterskill Clove are Haines's Falls in a picturesque environment, the stream making two main leaps of one hundred and fifty and eighty feet, and other plunges lower down, descending in all four hundred and seventy-five feet, within the distance of a quarter of a mile. The water here is also dammed to make a better exhibition. A main railway route into the Catskills is from Kingston up the valley of Esopus Creek, gradually ascending to its sources in the southwestern part of the range. This leads past the highest peak, Slide Mountain, past Shandaken or "the rapid water," and up the Big Indian Valley, at the head of which the summit is crossed between the waters of the Hudson and the Delaware. The "Big Indian" whose memory is thus preserved was Winnisook, a savage seven feet high. He fell in love with a white maiden of the lowlands, who, however, married one Joe Bundy instead, but got along so unhappily that she finally ran away to her dusky lover. Winnisook on one occasion came down to the lowlands with his tribe on a cattle-stealing expedition, and Joe Bundy shot and mortally wounded him, saying, "The best way to civilize the yellow serpent is to let daylight into his black heart." The Big Indian was afterwards found dead standing upright in the hollow of a large pine tree. The inconsolable maiden, overwhelmed with grief, is said to have spent the rest of her life near Winnisook's grave, while the stump of the pine was preserved until the railroad came along and covered it with an embankment. The whole Catskill region is full of charming places, and the vast summer crowds who visit it never tire of the bracing atmosphere, and the magnificent and ever-changing panorama of cloud and sunshine and diversified landscape, exhibited from its magnificent mountain tops.

THE DUTCH AND THE SHAKERS.

When Hendrick Hudson came up the river he found sand-bars above the Catskills, and anchored his "Half Moon" near Mount Merino, at what is now the head of ship navigation upon the Hudson, one hundred and fifteen miles from New York. Just beyond, a high plateau sloping to the shore is covered by the city of Hudson, having a green island in front, and over opposite the little town of Athens, with a lighthouse in midstream between them. Hudson has ten thousand people, a picturesque city sloping up Prospect Hill, which rises five hundred feet for a noble background, and it once had more ships and commerce than the city of New York. A colony of thrifty Quakers from New England started the settlement, which had many fishermen and whalers, and a large fleet of ships sailing to Europe and the Indies, fifteen loaded vessels having cleared from its wharves in a single day. But Napoleon's wars swept away its fleet and commerce, and the last ship was sold in 1845, so that its commercial greatness is only a tradition; although it has become a seat of considerable manufactures. Its most noted citizen was General Worth, a hero of the Mexican War, whose monument stands on Fifth Avenue, New York. Both sides of the river here are inhabited by the Dutch, and in fact theirs is the universal language of the Hudson from Kingston up to Albany. These Dutch of New York have given the country some notable men, among them General Philip Schuyler, Colonel Van Rensselaer, General Stryker and others of the Revolution, and President Martin Van Buren. They view with pardonable pride the important share they have had in founding and building up the Empire State, and Rev. Dr. Henry A. Van Dyke has poetically and ingeniously described the "Typical Dutchmen" of New York:

"They sailed from the shores of the Zuyder Zee

Across the stormy ocean,

To build for the world a new country

According to their notion:

A land where thought should be free as air

And speech be free as water;

Where man to man should be just and fair,

And Law be Liberty's daughter.

From the Taghkanic range of the Berkshire hills, behind Hudson City, a pretty stream comes down in many falls and cascades to the river just northward, whose charming valley was known among the Dutch as "Het Klauver Rack," or the "Clover Reach," modernized since, however, into the Claverack Creek. The Columbia Springs are in this valley, and farther on is Kinderhook Village, while back on the hills at a thousand feet elevation above the river, most picturesquely located, are the Lebanon Springs. Here is the noted Shaker settlement of New Lebanon, founded by "Mother Ann" in the eighteenth century. The sect has been declining in recent years, however. This is the governing Shaker community, and it has been well said, of these celibates, that "by frugality and industry they give us many useful things, but they do not produce what the Republic most needs—men and women." They cultivate large tracts of land, produce and sell quantities of herbs, seeds and botanic medicines, and make baskets, brooms and sieves. Ann Lee was the wife of a blacksmith in Manchester, England, and had been the mother of several children. She had what she claimed as Divine revelations, and was confined in a lunatic asylum for reviling matrimony. Being released in 1770, she founded the new sect, announcing, "I am Ann, the Word," and to escape further persecution migrated to New York, where she was made its spiritual head. Converting many, she established at New Lebanon the capital of the Shaker world, which has been called "the rural Vatican which claims a more despotic sway over the mind of man than ever the Roman Pontiff assumed." She claimed her Divine revelation to be that she was the female manifestation of Christ upon earth, the male manifestation having been Jesus, and the Deity being considered a duality, composed of both sexes. The Shakers call themselves the "United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing." They have entire community of property, believe idleness to be sinful, and everyone able to work is employed. In worshipping they "exercise both soul and body," singing and dancing, and at times of fervent excitement making, with regularity and perfect rhythm, rapid bodily evolutions. In these they form in circles around a band of singers, to whose music they "go forth in the dances of them that make merry." Since the death of "Mother Ann" the Shaker community has been ruled by what is known as the "Holy Lead," composed of the first and second elders and elderesses. A peculiar tenet is that persons may join the sect after death, and among these posthumous members are Washington, Lafayette, Pocahontas, Napoleon and Tamerlane; and they hold that woman is supreme over mankind. Near the village and among the Berkshire hills, just over the border in Massachusetts, is their "Mount Sinai," where, according to the tradition, the Shakers hunted Satan throughout a long summer night, finally killing and burying him. They tell us that Washington and Lafayette still keep guard over his grave, mounted on white horses, and can be seen on summer nights by any of the truly faithful who may pass that way.

The village of Kinderhook is in the Claverack Valley, and out in front on the Hudson is its port, Stuyvesant Landing, where the testy old Governor, Peter Stuyvesant the "Headstrong," made his landing when he came up the river to attack the great Patroon, Killian Van Rensselaer. Hendrick Hudson is said to have first named Kinderhook, or "Children's Point," because he saw here a crowd of Indian children watching his vessel. On the Lindenwold estate at Kinderhook, embowered in linden trees, lived for many years President Martin Van Buren, a descendant of the early Dutch settlers, and the shrewdest New York politician of his time. Over on the western bank is the Chaney Tinker Lighthouse, mounted on a crag a hundred feet high, and the distant horizon is bounded by the Helderbergs, a long range of peaks, lower, however, than the Catskills. Above, at Schodack Landing on the eastern shore, was the seat of the council-fire of the Mohicans, called by the French the Loups or Wolves. The word "Is-cho-da" in their language means the "fireplace," and from this has come the name. When Hudson ascended the river, he found the Mohicans occupying its shores for a hundred miles above Rondout Creek, but the race dwindled, until it became the handful to whom the noted Jonathan Edwards ministered in the eighteenth century, at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Hudson passed a day with them at Schodack, was treated hospitably, and wrote that their land was "the finest for cultivation he ever set foot on." Two centuries later, Cooper lamented the Last of the Mohicans.

THE LAND OF THE PATROONS.

We have now come to the high and rocky Bear or Beeren Island, which in New York's early days was the southern boundary on the river of the domain of the great Patroon, Killian Van Rensselaer. It marks the limit of two counties on either bank, Greene and Columbia below, joining Albany and Rensselaer above. Here stood the proud castle of Rensselaerstein, cannoned and fortified, where the Patroon's agent, the bold and doughty Nicolas Kroon, compelled all the Dutch sloops coming up from New Amsterdam to dip their colors in token of his sovereignty, and pay tribute for the privilege of entering the sacred domain. We are told that all passing craft yielded homage excepting two large whales, which in 1647 swam by and went up to the Mohawk, greatly terrifying the honest Albany burghers. Above the island, the Normanskill and other streams come down from the Helderbergs, making the shoals of the "Overslaugh," which the Government has improved by an extensive dyke system to deepen the river channel up to Albany. There are long and narrow alluvial islands on these flats, among which tows of Erie Canal barges thread their careful way; and ahead, the city of Albany comes into view with its bridges in front, and the grand new Capitol building elevated high on the hill above the town, its red-topped pyramidal roofs seen from afar.

We are now at the domain of the great Patroon, the region around Albany and Troy. When Hudson anchored his ship below the shoals, he came with five of his sailors up to Albany in a row-boat and examined the location. The result was that from his report Albany was actually settled, five years later, in 1614, by the "United Nieu Nederlandts Company," who built a trading-post, thus making Albany, after Jamestown in Virginia, the oldest European settlement in the original thirteen colonies. The post was located on an island just below the city, near which the Normanskill flowed out through the forest on the western bank—the Indian Tawasentha, or "place of many dead." This island was called the "Kasteel," and in the "castle" a garrison of about a dozen Dutchmen conducted a profitable fur-trade with the Mohicans. Ultimately a freshet drove them to the mainland and they built a fort at the mouth of the Normanskill, and in 1623 a stockade was constructed above, at Albany, named Fort Orange in honor of the Prince of the Netherlands. In 1629 colonists were sent out from Holland, and the patroon system established. The Dutch West India Company made arrangements for extensively colonizing the New Netherlands, and passed a charter of exemptions and privileges to encourage patroons (or patrons) to make settlements. Every patroon establishing a colony was to have there within four years, as permanent residents, at least fifty persons, over fifteen years of age, of whom one-fourth were to arrive the first year. A director of the company, Killian Van Rensselaer, a pearl merchant of Amsterdam, was granted a patroonship, and got the officials at Fort Orange to buy extensive tracts from the Indians. He thus, with three others, acquired a manor extending twenty-four miles along the Hudson, from Beeren Island up to the Mohawk River, and this manor, which afterwards became the sole property of his family, was subsequently enlarged to extend twenty-four miles back from the Hudson in both directions, and contained over seven hundred thousand acres. The Patroon was a feudal lord, possessing absolute title to the soil, with power to administer civil and criminal justice, and enjoying other rights that reduced his colonists to a condition little better than serfs. His son Johannes inherited this patroonship from Killian, and it went by entail through five generations, when the United States laws barred further succession. The last Patroon, General Stephen Van Rensselaer, died in 1839, and his son Stephen, the sixth of the line, still styled by courtesy "the Patroon," died in 1868, aged eighty years. The original settlement of Fort Orange in the manor of Rensselaerwyck, as it was called, became a centre of the fur-trade, and a town quickly grew around the fort, which the English, upon their occupation in 1664, named Albany.

THE ANTI-RENT WAR.

As population increased on the adjacent lands, they began taking leases from the Patroon, paying rent for their farms, and this produced one of the bitterest conflicts known in American politics, the New York "Anti-Rent War." After the Revolution the inhabitants increased rapidly, and General Stephen Van Rensselaer, then the Patroon, leased farms in perpetuity, upon the nominal consideration for eight years of "a peppercorn a year," and at the expiration of this time these leases drew a rent estimated at six per cent. interest on the land value, about $5 per acre, payable in the produce of the soil, fowls, and days' service with wagons and horses, the latter designed to secure road-making. When the old General died in 1839, the entail being abolished, he divided the manor between his two sons, Stephen getting Albany County on the west bank, and William, Rensselaer County on the east bank, including Troy. He had been a lenient landlord, but the tenants became anxious, especially about what was known as the "quarter sales clause" in their leases, giving the landlord the right to claim one-fourth the purchase money whenever the land passed by purchase, this condition being really inserted to prevent alienation, as it did not become operative when the land was sold or descended to one of the original tenant's family. The tenants proposed that the landlord should sell the reservations, releasing them from the rentals and making them owners in fee, but this was declined. The tenants then employed counsel, who advised that the landlord's right was absolute, but suggested, while there was no legal remedy, that it would be good policy to make the rent collections so difficult, the landlord would be willing to come to terms; that they band together and give each other notice of the approach of bailiffs, so the service of legal process would be troublesome. William H. Seward, Governor of New York, espoused their cause, and to this advice, he being a candidate for re-election in 1840, he added the recommendation that the "anti-renters" should organize and send to the Legislature men who would hold the balance of power between the great parties, thus forcing the passage of laws relieving them.

Then began the "anti-rent" conflicts convulsing New York politics for years. They formed an active and powerful political party, and created other organizations, disguised as Indians, who attacked the law officers. These supposed red men killed a man at Grafton in Rensselaer County, and all legal efforts failed to discover the culprits. Other similar manors existed in different parts of New York State where payment of rents of much the same character was resisted, and these regions also were excited. Outbreaks continued several years, until in 1845 Governor Silas Wright issued a proclamation declaring Delaware County, on the western verge of the Catskills, in a state of insurrection. This caused additional trouble, but the "anti-renters" disposed of Wright by defeating him for re-election in 1846, and he died soon afterwards. They elected their own candidate for Governor, John Young, who pardoned out of jail nearly everybody imprisoned for "anti-rent" crimes. The disputes finally got into the courts, and the Van Rensselaers, fatigued with the controversy, sold all their rights to a Colonel Church. He was sustained by legal decisions, and then adopted a compromising policy, which quieted the agitation. He released the rentals and gave fee-simple titles, so that at least three-fourths of the old manor became without rental. His method of compromise was based on a scale: for a farm of one hundred and sixty acres where the annual rent was twenty-two and one-half bushels of wheat, four fat fowls and one day's service, the value was fixed at $26, being six per cent. interest on $433, and by paying this the tenant got his fee-simple title. Thus the harassing conflict which frequently required troops to be called out at Albany and elsewhere was finally adjusted.

THE CITY OF ALBANY.

Albany, the New York State Capital, has over one hundred thousand people. The city rises from the strip of level land along the river bank, in a series of terraces, to a height of nearly two hundred feet, the top being surmounted by the Capitol Building in a spacious park, back of which the surface extends westward in a sandy, almost level plain. The city spreads broadly along the river, where there are wharves, foundries, railway stations, mills, storehouses and lumber yards. Deep ravines are scarred into the hill behind them, and rows of fine old Knickerbocker houses line the hilly streets, with frequent church towers and spires rising above them. The main street, just back from the river, is Broadway, of varying width, but of the first commercial importance. At right angles to it, leading up the hill, is State Street, a noble avenue, one hundred and fifty feet wide, the front approach to the Capitol. This is the finest building in New York State, was thirty years in construction, and has cost $25,000,000. It is a quadrangle three hundred feet wide and four hundred feet deep, with an unfinished central tower, intended to be three hundred feet high, and Louvre pavilion towers at the angles. It is built in the French Renaissance, of a light-colored granite, pleasantly contrasting with the red-tiled roofs. Few of the pretentious buildings of the world occupy a more commanding situation, standing aloft like the Capitol at Washington, and, seen from afar, a complete old-time French chateau. Mr. E. A. Freeman has written of it, "If anyone had come up to me and told me in French, old or new, that the new Capitol was 'Le Chateau de Monseigneur le duc d'Albanie,' I could almost have believed him." Its architecture combines features adapted from the Louvre and Hotel de Ville of Paris and the Lyons Maison de Commerce. It stands in Capitol Square, a park of about eight acres, of which it covers three acres. The finest halls are the Senate and Assembly Chambers, to which grand stairways lead, and the interior is decorated with rich carvings, rare marbles and emblematic frescoes. The New York State Library, of nearly two hundred thousand volumes, is in the building. Upon the six dormer windows opening in the interior court are emblazoned the heraldic insignia of six noted families distinguished in New York history—Stuyvesant, Schuyler, Livingston, Jay, Clinton and Tompkins.

Southward from the Capitol Square is the spacious and comfortable Executive Mansion, with an extensive lawn, on Eagle Street. On the same street, to the northeast of the Square, is the City Hall, a fine Gothic building with an elaborate bell tower. Also on Eagle Street is the Albany Medical College, having one of the finest Medical Museums in the country. Among its curios is the embalmed body of Calvin Edson, the "walking skeleton." This curious man came to Albany in 1830, being then forty-two years old and five feet two inches high, yet weighing only sixty pounds. He exhibited himself, and appeared in a play as Jeremiah Thin. He had a good appetite, but the more he ate the thinner he grew, until in 1833, the food ceasing to nourish him, he literally starved to death amid plenty, and when the end came, weighed but forty-five pounds. His widow sold his body to the college, and he now stands in a glass case, preserved with the skin on, labelled "No. 1," and excepting discoloration is said to appear not very different from when living. On the northern side of the Square is the Albany Academy, one of the chief city schools, where Professor Joseph Henry was for several years an instructor, and noted as the place where he first demonstrated the theory of the magnetic telegraph by ringing a bell by an electric spark transmitted through a mile of wire strung around the room. The Dudley Astronomical Observatory is a small but imposing building upon an eminence overlooking the Hudson, having a munificent endowment begun by Mrs. Blandina Dudley in memory of her husband, a wealthy Albany merchant. A charming spot is Washington Park, westward from the Capitol, an enclosure of eighty-one acres, surrounded by ornamental villas, with magnificent views and most tastefully arranged. Part of this Park is land given the city by King James II.

INTERESTING BUILDINGS.

The most noted old Albany building is at the northern end of Broadway, in grounds extending to the river, and surrounded by fine trees, the ancient Van Rensselaer Mansion, commonly called the "Patroon's,"—a broad house with porch and wide central hall. This occupies the site of the first mansion, which was covered with a roof of reeds. Over on the opposite side of the river at Greenbush, the "Greene Bosch" or "pine woods" of the original settlers, is the Patroon's other residence, built of bricks from Holland, by the second Patroon Johannes. Port-holes were cut in the walls for the musketeers, it having been a fort in the Indian forays. The family burial-ground adjoins the mansion. State Street, at the corner of Pearl, which is parallel with Broadway, is the most interesting historic locality of ancient Albany. Here stood that elaborate dwelling of the Knickerbockers, regarded as the best specimen of old Dutch architecture in New York State, the "Vanderheyden Palace," an extensive building with two tall gables facing the street. One of the old burghers, Johannes Beekman, built it in 1725, and during the Revolution Jacob Vanderheyden of Troy bought it, and lived there many years in the almost regal state of the Dutch aristocracy. Washington Irving tells of it in the story of Dolph Heyliger, in Bracebridge Hall, as the residence of "Herr Anthony Vanderheyden," and when Irving transformed Van Tassel's old farmhouse into his villa at Sunnyside he made a gable in imitation of one of these, and also captured the old weather-vane of the "Palace"—a horse going at full speed—to mount on top of it. Upon the opposite corner was the quaint "Lydius House," the home of Rev. John Lydius, the owner of a great manor at Fort Edward, farther up the Hudson, and in front of it stood the crooked elm, giving the locality the name of the "Old Elm Tree Corner." This tree is said to have been planted by Philip Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who lived in an adjoining house. The "Lydius House" had been built as a parsonage for the clergyman sent out to the old Dutch church, Rev. Gideon Schaats, the bricks, tiles, iron and woodwork, together with the church bell and pulpit, all coming from Holland in 1657, in the same ship. During many years its only occupant was Balthazar Lydius, an eccentric bachelor, a tall, spare, morose and irritable Dutchman, fond of bottle and pipe, and having a round bullet head thinly sprinkled with white hair. He gloried in his celibacy until the infirmities of age came upon him, when it is said he gave a pint of gin for an Indian squaw, called her his wife, and they lived contentedly together until he died. This was the oldest brick building in the United States; its partitions were made of mahogany and the exposed beams were richly carved.

The antique pulpit, which came across in the ship with the materials of the "Lydius House," has done duty from then until now in various Dutch churches of Albany. It is of carved oak, octagonal in form. The original church stood in the middle of State Street, a low building with a tall pyramidal roof and little steeple, since removed to widen the street. The church gallery was quite low, while the huge stove warming the building was put upon a platform so high that the sexton had to step on it from the gallery when he wanted to kindle the fire. The astute Albany philosophers of those days believed heat descended from above. The bell-rope hung from the little steeple down into the centre of the church, and here, at eight o'clock at night, was rung the "suppawn bell," a signal to the obedient people to eat their "suppawn" or hasty pudding, and go to bed. Albany in the olden time had a quaint aspect because of the predominance of steep-roofed houses, with their terraced gables, but many of them have given way for modern improvements. Upon State Street, at the corner of James, lived in one of these the famous Anneke Jans Bogardus, who died there in 1663, the owner of the lands in New York city now partly held by Trinity Church, which her heirs have acquired so much notoriety in trying to recover. A bank now occupies the site. Albany has had some interesting history. In 1754 the Congress met here which was the first colonial organization, and finally developed into the Continental Congress. Seven colonies, north of Maryland, sent twenty-five Commissioners, who made a treaty with the Iroquois, the Indian league of the "Six Nations." Afterwards, under the guidance of Benjamin Franklin, a plan was adopted for a union of the colonies, its provisions being much similar to the United States Constitution of 1787. Thus the germ of the American Union was first developed at Albany. Her influences have been powerful in politics. For many years the "Albany Regency" controlled the old Democratic party, this name having been given by Thurlow Weed, then editor of the Albany Evening Journal, to a junta of politicians usually assembling there, headed by Martin Van Buren. Subsequently, another combination at Albany was potential in ruling the Whigs and in controlling the Republican party—the political firm of "Seward, Weed and Greeley." Albany manoeuvres managed to control the preliminaries that twice made Grover Cleveland President; and in both parties the Albany political "patroons" are still industriously at work.

Among the finest Albany buildings is the magnificent new Episcopal Cathedral of All Saints, an English Gothic structure, as yet incomplete, which will be one of the most beautiful churches in America. In the southern part of the city is the Schuyler Mansion, built in 1760, a brick house with a broad front, having a closed octagonal porch over the doorway and spacious apartments; its lawns in the olden time reaching to the Hudson, where now the city is densely built. Peter Schuyler was the first Mayor of Albany, and his descendant, General Philip Schuyler of the Revolution, occupied a large space in New York history. In this house Alexander Hamilton was married to Elizabeth Schuyler, and a subsequent owner, Mrs. McIntosh, was made the wife of Millard Fillmore, President of the United States. General Schuyler and his family always dispensed a princely hospitality in this mansion. In 1781, towards the close of the Revolution, it was the scene of a stirring event. The British, discovering that Schuyler was at home, tried to capture him. The house was then distant from the small town and surrounded by forests. A party of Canadians and Indians prowled for several days in the woods, and capturing a laborer, learnt that the General was in the house with a bodyguard of six men. The laborer escaped afterwards and notified the General. Upon a sultry day in August, when three of the guards were asleep in the basement and the other three lying on the grass in front of the house, a servant announced that a stranger at the back gate wished to speak with the General. The errand being apprehended, the doors and windows were barred, the family collected up stairs, and the General hastened to his bedchamber for his arms. From the window he saw the place surrounded by armed men, and fired a pistol to arouse the guards on the grass and alarm the town. At this moment the enemy burst open the doors, when Mrs. Schuyler suddenly discovered she had left her infant in the cradle in the hall below. She rushed to the rescue, but the General stopped her. One of her daughters then quickly ran down stairs, and carried the infant up in safety. An Indian who had entered hurled a tomahawk, as she rushed up the stairs, which cut her dress within a few inches of the baby's head, and striking the hand-rail made a deep scar. As she ran up stairs, the Tory commander, thinking her a servant, called out, "Wench, where is your master?" With great presence of mind she quickly replied, "Gone to alarm the town." General Schuyler heard her, and taking advantage, threw up a window, crying out loudly, as if to a multitude, "Come on, my brave fellows, surround the house and secure the villains!" The marauders, who were then plundering the plate in the dining-room, becoming frightened, beat a hasty retreat, taking prisoners the three guards who were in the house. The brave daughter, who made the gallant rescue, afterwards became the wife of the last Patroon Van Rensselaer, while the infant she saved lived until 1857, and was Schuyler's last surviving child, Mrs. Catharine Cochran of Oswego, New York. General Schuyler is buried in the beautiful Albany Rural Cemetery, north of the city, and nearby is Palmer's famous figure of the "Angel at the Sepulchre." Here is also the tomb of President Chester A. Arthur, who died in 1886.

THE MODERN TROY.

Travelling northward along the Hudson, the broad basin where the Erie Canal comes out to the river is passed, being shielded by a pier eighty feet wide and nearly a mile long. Here is the vast storehouse for Canadian and Adirondack lumber brought by the canals, a leading Albany industry, there being ten miles of dockage within this basin for the lumber barges. The Erie Canal from the west, and also the Champlain Canal from the north, here have their outlets into the Hudson. Both sides of the river are lined with villages between Albany and Troy—there being Greenbush, East Albany, Bath, Troy and West Troy, and beyond, Lansingburgh and Waterford at the confluence of the Mohawk. This series of cities and towns stretching for ten miles along the shores, with intervals of farm land, have an aggregate population exceeding three hundred thousand, with large manufactures and commerce. There are extensive iron mills on the river and upon Green Island in front of Troy, where General Gates had the camp for his Revolutionary army which fought Burgoyne at Saratoga. Upon the western bank is the Watervliet Arsenal, where the government manufactures army supplies, an enclosure of over a hundred acres. Troy is a fringe of city extending along the eastern bank and up the steep ridge behind, crowned by the imposing Byzantine buildings and spires of St. Joseph's Theological Seminary. This high ridge, bordering the alluvial flat on which the modern Troy is built, thoroughly carries out the Grecian idea which was adopted to supersede the original Dutch name of Vanderheyden which was given the town. From the northeast Mount Olympus and from the east Mount Ida frown upon Troy, and this modern Mount Ida does not hesitate at times to hurl down Jove's thunderbolts in the form of destructive landslips. Derick Vanderheyden leased this estate from the Patroon in 1720, and it slept in Dutch peacefulness until after the Revolution, when in 1789 it had twelve dwellings and the freeholders adopted the present name. Just before this, Jacob Vanderheyden had removed to Albany to occupy his "Palace." The opening of the Erie Canal gave Troy great prosperity. It has fine water-power, and thus became a busy manufacturing centre. Here are the great Albany and Rensselaer Iron Works, which were famous makers of armor plates and cannon in the Civil War, and the Berdan Horseshoe Mill, the largest in the country, which has the biggest water-wheel, eighty feet in diameter, turned by one of the kills coming down from the mountain behind the town. It was here that John Ericsson built the little "Monitor" ironclad which defeated the "Merrimac" at Fortress Monroe in 1862. There are also great textile mills and a vast laundry. Its famous Polytechnic Institute is an endowment of the last Patroon, Stephen Van Rensselaer, who was Troy's steady benefactor.

THE DEFEAT OF BURGOYNE.

The Mohawk, its principal tributary, flows into the Hudson just above Troy, and each, being a mountain torrent, has brought down large alluvial deposits making extensive flats between the hills, so that their junction is marked by fertile islands and low shores, backed by picturesque ridges bordering broad valleys. Here are Green Island, Adam's Island and Van Schaick's Island, making an extensive delta. The Mohawk, after flowing from central New York nearly one hundred and forty miles in a rich agricultural section, pours down the falls at Cohoes, and enters the Hudson through four separate channels formed by these islands. The Mohawk Valley is largely a pastoral region, its dairies and cheeses having much fame, and in the lower valley hop-growing and broom-making are important industries, chiefly controlled by the Shakers. At one of their settlements, about six miles northwest of Albany, their foundress, "Mother Ann," who died in 1784, is buried. The Hudson flows to its confluence with the Mohawk, with generally rapid current, bordered by rich plains, as it is ascended to Stillwater, and thirteen miles beyond, to Schuylerville, where Fish Creek comes in, the outlet of Saratoga Lake.

Here is a region of great historic interest, for through it marched Sir John Burgoyne's army in 1777 to disastrous defeat. At and above Stillwater, and Bemis's Heights beyond, was the scene of his closing conflict, while Schuylerville stands upon the site of his camp at the time of his final surrender. General Schuyler, from whom the village is named, was then the owner of the entire domain of Saratoga. Burgoyne had come south from Canada to meet another British force thought to be advancing up the Hudson from New York, the design being to cut the rebellious colonies in two and defeat them in detail. The rebels hung upon Burgoyne's flanks, and at Bennington, Vermont, Stark's bold movement in August captured a large force of Hessians. Schuyler sent Arnold up the Mohawk, who cut off another detachment under St. Leger, who had come over from Oswego, intending to make a detour to Albany. In September, Burgoyne came to Saratoga, and had his first contest south of the springs, with the Americans under Gates. Afterwards, each army encamped within cannon-shot of the other until October 7th, Burgoyne all the while hoping for some diversion from the lower Hudson. The British camp was on the river below Schuylerville, and on that day they marched out to give battle, Burgoyne's chief lieutenant, General Fraser, directing the movements. Fraser was in full uniform, mounted upon an iron-gray steed, and became a most conspicuous object. Colonel Morgan, who had a force of Virginia sharpshooters, perceived this, and calling a number of his best men around him, pointed to the British right wing, which was making a victorious advance under Fraser's inspiration, and said: "That gallant officer is General Fraser; I admire and honor him, but it is necessary he should die; victory for the enemy depends on him; take your stations in that clump of bushes and do your duty." Within five minutes afterwards he was mortally wounded. His aid, recognizing that he was a conspicuous mark, had just observed: "Would it not be prudent for you to retire from this place?" and he had scarcely got the reply out of his mouth, "My duty forbids me to fly from danger," when he was shot. He survived throughout the night, and asked to be buried in a redoubt he had built on a hill near the Hudson. He died next day, and at sunset a funeral procession moved towards the redoubt. The Americans saw it, and, ignorant of what it meant, cannonaded, but desisted on learning the mournful object; and then a single cannon, fired at intervals, reverberated along the Hudson; an American minute-gun in memory of a brave soldier.

Fraser's fall caused the British defeat, and they afterwards abandoned guns and baggage trains and retreated north to Schuylerville. Burgoyne's provisions gave out, many auxiliaries deserted him, the camp was incessantly cannonaded, and finally, with his forces reduced below six thousand men, on October 17th, he surrendered. It was said at the time, in the British Parliament, that the campaign thus ended "had left the country stripped of nearly every evidence of civilized occupation," and in its result it was declared to be "one of the fifteen decisive battles of the world." There were six members of Parliament among the captive officers, and Burgoyne gave up forty-two brass cannon. His army was held in captivity nearly five years, till the end of the war, at first near Boston, and later in Virginia. This victory was the turning-point of the Revolution. Among its results were, an appreciation of twenty per cent. in Continental money; the bold stand of Lord Chatham and Edmund Burke in Parliament, denouncing the method of conducting the war; the sending of cheering words to the struggling colonies by Spain, Holland, Russia and the Vatican; and the paving of the way for France to acknowledge the independence of the United States—all the result, under Providence, of Fraser's indiscreet devotion to duty. In the neighborhood is the great Methodist camp-meeting ground of Round Lake, and farther on Ballston Spa, where the Kayaderosseras Creek winds through a beautifully shaded valley and flows into Saratoga Lake. In the early part of the nineteenth century this was the greatest watering-place in America, its waters being chemically similar to those of Saratoga. Its Sans Souci Hotel, opened in 1804, was then the grandest in the country, and here were hatched most of the political schemes of the days of Presidents Madison, Monroe and Jackson, the "Albany Regency" in its palmiest days flourishing throughout the summer time on its lawns and porches. But much of Ballston's glory has departed, eclipsed by the newer radiance of its great neighbor, six miles away. The Saratoga Lake is three miles east of Ballston, an oval-shaped lake eight miles long, from which Fish Creek meanders off to the Hudson at Schuylerville. As the fishes thus ascended from the river into the lake, the Indians named it Saraghoga, or "the place of the herrings."

SARATOGA.

The famous watering-place, Saratoga, is a comparatively small town upon a level and somewhat barren plateau. A short distance north of Saratoga Lake, with a boulevard and electric road connecting them, is the shallow valley wherein are the famous mineral springs. Their virtues were long known to the Iroquois, and when the renowned French explorer Jacques Cartier ascended the St. Lawrence in 1535, searching for the "northwest passage," the Indians on the river bank told him about these springs and their wonderful cures. The Mohawks, who had these waters in their special keeping, regarded them with veneration. In August, 1767, their great English friend and adopted sachem, Sir William Johnson, who is said to have been the father of a hundred children, was suffering from re-opened wounds received in battle, and the tribe held a solemn council and determined to take him to this "medicine spring of the Great Spirit." They carried him on a litter many miles to the "High Rock Spring," and he was the first white man who saw it. His strength was regained in four days, and he wrote General Schuyler, "I have just returned from a most amazing spring which almost effected my cure." This spring, coming out of its conical rock reservoir, much like a diminutive geyser, and then called the "Round Rock Spring," was the first one known. There were occasional visitors during the Revolution, and the cutting of a road some time afterwards from the Mohawk through the forests to reach it, opened the place to the public. To-day, Saratoga is an aggregation of some of the greatest hotels in the world, with many smaller ones and numerous cottages. There is a permanent population of about twelve thousand, often swollen to fifty thousand in August and September, the "season." A shallow valley contains most of the springs, around which the town clusters, with extensive suburbs of wooden houses, groves and gardens. The valley is crossed by the chief street, Broadway, a magnificent avenue, one hundred and fifty feet wide, with spacious sidewalks shaded by rows of grand old elms and, in the centre of the settlement, bordered by enormous hotels. The greatest of these is the famous Grand Union, a vast structure of iron and brick, fronting eight hundred feet on Broadway, and having over two thousand beds, the largest watering-place hotel in the world. A garden and park are enclosed by its spacious wings, and here fountains plash and bands play, while the visitors promenade or sit and gossip upon the extensive piazzas. Its front piazza, spreading along Broadway, is eight hundred feet long and three stories high. Its dining-hall is two hundred and seventy-five feet long and sixty feet wide, the largest in existence, and seats seventeen hundred people at table. The United States Hotel, north of the Grand Union, and Congress Hall, across Broadway, are also enormous caravansaries, and in busy times these three hotels will accommodate over six thousand guests, the cost of running each of them for one day being $7500 to $10,000. Everything in these gigantic hotels is arranged upon a scale of splendor and immensity almost requiring a railway train to take the visitor about them.

Many of the twenty-eight mineral springs of Saratoga border Broadway or are near it, and the most noted, the "Congress" and the "Hathorn," are on either side of Congress Hall, thus being easy of access. The geologists say these springs rise from a line of "fault," which brings the slaty formations of the Hudson River against the sandstones and limestones that are above. They are generally muriated saline springs of about 50° temperature, the Congress Spring having about the strength of Kissingen Racoczy, but a milder taste, while the Hathorn Spring, its great rival, contains more chloride of sodium and iron. Some of the springs are chalybeate, others sulphurous or iodinous, and all are highly charged with carbonic acid gas. The Saratoga Seltzer resembles the seltzer of Germany, and the Geyser Spring is so highly charged that when drawn from a faucet it foams like soda water. The waters are both tonic and cathartic. The "High Rock Spring" bubbles up through an aperture in a conical rock composed of calcareous tufa, which has been formed by the deposits from the waters. This rock is four feet high, with a rounded top, in the centre of which is a circular opening a foot in diameter. The depth of the spring from the present top of the rock is thirty-two feet. The waters used to overflow occasionally and increase the size of the rock by the deposits, but a tree was blown down and cracked the rock, since which the waters will only rise to about six inches below the top. A pagoda covers it, beneath which water is ladled out to the thirsty. The Congress Spring is in a tasteful park, having this and the Columbian Spring under an elaborate pavilion. This Congress Spring was found by a hunting party who went through the valley in 1792, and named it in honor of a member of Congress who was with them. To this park go the crowds in the morning before breakfast to drink the waters, which are freely furnished either cold or hot, and music plays while the people drink glass after glass. Each pint of Congress water contains about seventy-five grains of mineral constituents and forty-nine cubic inches of carbonic acid gas. It is cathartic and alterative. The Columbian Spring has much more iron, and is a tonic and diuretic. The Hathorn Spring is in a large building adjoining Broadway, and was found when digging for the foundations of a new house. It is a powerful cathartic, containing nearly ninety-four grains of mineral constituents and forty-seven cubic inches of carbonic acid gas in each pint, and it is also a tonic and diuretic. The chief medicinal rivalries of Saratoga have been based upon the respective merits of the Congress and Hathorn waters, and great controversy has at times been thus inspired.

There are other noted springs—the Hamilton, a mild cathartic; the Putnam, chalybeate, and having a bathing establishment; the Pavilion, a cathartic; the United States, a mild, agreeable tonic; and the Seltzer, rising through a tube several feet high, over the rim of which it flows, a sparkling and invigorating drink. The Empire closely resembles Congress water; the Red Spring is charged with much iron; and the Saratoga "A" Spring is a mild cathartic. Then there are the Saratoga Vichy, Saratoga Kissingen, Carlsbad, Magnetic, Imperial, Royal, Star, Excelsior, Eureka, White Sulphur and Geyser Springs, most of them in the outskirts. The Geyser spouts twenty-five feet high, is deliciously cold, and exhilarates like champagne. The Glacier Spring nearby was found by sinking an artesian well three hundred feet; its waters spout high above the tube, and are powerfully cathartic. There are six spouting springs, the Geyser being the best known; but of all the springs of Saratoga, the waters of barely a half-dozen are much used. The Congress, Empire and Hathorn Springs send their bottled waters all over the world. The springs are all wonderfully clear and sparkling, most of the waters pleasant to drink, and it is such a Saratoga fashion to go about imbibing and tasting these waters of rival virtues, that the visitors sometimes get into a plethoric condition that becomes uncomfortable if not dangerous. But the springs are not the chief attraction of Saratoga, and in fact the veteran visitors do not partake of them at all, but freely confess that they come not to drink the waters, but to see the life and be "in the swim," for in the season the crowd at Saratoga, unlike anywhere else, includes the leaders of all sets. The proximity of the Adirondacks gives the bracing ozone of mountain air, and in the cosmopolitan throng is generally included the best the country can show of fashion and wealth. It is a great place for holding all kinds of conventions, and many are the political, corporation and stock-jobbing schemes hatched on the great hotel piazzas. It is also famous for dresses and diamonds, and wonderful is the elaborateness of millinery, gowns and jewels. The glitter of diamonds dazzles at every turn as they sparkle under the brilliant electric lights illuminating the evening scene. It was said not long ago, in a description of Saratoga, that if the Grand Union Hotel should ever perish in the height of the season, with all it contains, the future explorer who might delve in its ruins would come upon the rarest diamond mine the world ever knew.

Upon Saratoga Lake is the famous restaurant where "Saratoga chips" were invented and are served, this route being a favorite drive for the people who attend the numerous conventions, for whose use an elaborate Convention Hall has been erected on Broadway, seating five thousand persons. On the western shore of the lake, just where the Kayaderosseras River flows in from Ballston, is pointed out the battlefield on which the legend says that in the days of the warlike Mohawks and fierce Mohicans they had a deadly combat, a thousand warriors being engaged, when suddenly the Great Spirit sent a miraculous white dove over the lake and battlefield, having such an effect that the conflict ceased, their tomahawks fell useless at their feet, and they smoked the calumet of peace. To the northward of Saratoga is the extensive Woodlawn Park, the home of the late Judge Henry Hilton. Ten miles northward is Mount McGregor, rising twelve hundred feet and giving a magnificent view. It was here that General Grant was taken in his last illness in 1885, and the cottage in which he died is now the property of New York State and open to the public.

FORT EDWARD.

The upper Hudson River has various falls providing good water-power, which are largely availed of by paper-mills. The famous Fort Edward, one of these noted paper-making towns, is but a short distance from Saratoga. The railroad, leading from Saratoga and the south to Lake Champlain and the north, here crosses the Hudson in a region of great historic interest. This was the beginning of the portage in early times between the river and the lake, the railway route following the ancient Indian trail. The two waters are actually connected by the Champlain Canal, and, curiously enough, this makes New England an island, thus realizing the belief of the original explorers. Rev. Robert Cushman, who preached the first sermon before the Massachusetts Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621, afterwards published it with an introduction describing New England, in which he says: "So far as we can find, it is an island, and near about the quantity of England, being cut out from the mainland in America, as England is from the main of Europe, by a great arm of the sea (Hudson's River) which entereth in forty degrees and runneth up northwest and by west, and goeth out either into the South Sea (Pacific Ocean) or else into the Bay of Canada (Gulf of St. Lawrence)." There can still be seen at Fort Edward traces of the ramparts of the old fort commanding the portage, which was held and fought for in the eighteenth century. Originally a noble domain around it of one thousand square miles was granted to "our loving subject, the Reverend Godfridius Dellius, Minister of the Gospell att our city of Albany," for "the annual rent of one Raccoon Skin." The old gentleman, however, fell from grace, and the domain was taken away from him and the New York Legislature suspended him from the ministry for "deluding the Mohawk Indians, and illegal and surreptitious obtaining of said grant." Then it went to his successor, Rev. John Lydius, who lived in the quaint "Lydius House" in Albany. The first fort was built soon after Lydius took possession, and in 1744 he established a fur-trading station. A military road was then constructed from Saratoga to Whitehall on Lake Champlain, here crossing the river, and it was commanded by three forts, one at this crossing. The French destroyed the first fort, but Sir William Johnson made a successful expedition into the Lake Champlain district in 1755, and built here the strong post of Fort Edward. It was an important work during the whole French and Indian War, lasting seven years, and it was here that Lord Amherst organized the army which conquered Canada in 1759.

At Fort Edward first appeared as a British soldier one of the greatest heroes of the Revolution, Israel Putnam. He had joined Sir William Johnson's expedition as captain in a Connecticut regiment. He performed here a daring exploit; the wooden barracks had caught fire and the garrison vainly tried to subdue the flames, which approached the powder magazine, and the danger was frightful. The water-gate was opened, and the soldiers in line passed buckets of water up from the river, when Putnam mounted the roof of the next building to the magazine and threw the water on the fire. The commander, fearing for his life, ordered him to desist, but he would not leave until he felt the roof giving away. Then he got alongside the magazine, its timbers already charred, and hurled bucket after bucket upon it, with final success, the magazine being saved and an explosion prevented. The fire was quenched, but the burnt and blistered hero was for a month a sufferer in the hospital. Putnam had an adventure at the rapids a few miles below Fort Edward, where he was out with a scouting party, and being alongside the bank alone in his boat, was surprised by the Indians. He could not cross the river above the rapids quickly enough to elude their muskets, and the only escape was down the cataract. Without hesitation, to the astonishment of the savages, his boat shot directly down the foaming, whirling current, amid eddies and over rugged rocks, and in a few moments he had escaped them, and was floating on the tranquil river below. Believing him to be protected by the Great Spirit, they dared not follow. Shortly afterwards, returning from a scout on Lake Champlain, Putnam's party was surprised, and the Indians captured and bound him to a tree. While thus situated, a battle between his friends and the enemy raged for an hour around the tree, he being under the hottest fire, but he was unscathed. The Indians were beaten and had to retreat, but they took their captive along, determined to have vengeance by roasting him alive. He was again tied to a tree, and the fire had been kindled and was blazing when the French commander, Molang, discovered and rescued him. Thus was Putnam seasoned for his great work in the Revolution.

The tragic murder of poor Jenny McCrea is also associated with Fort Edward. This post in the Revolution was held in 1777 by an American garrison, who retired before the advance of Burgoyne's army southward. Jenny McCrea, the graceful and winning daughter of a Presbyterian clergyman, who was betrothed to an officer in Burgoyne's army, was visiting a widow lady at Fort Edward. In order to secure Indian co-operation, Burgoyne had offered bounties for prisoners and scalps, at the same time forbidding the killing of unarmed persons. He found it difficult, however, to restrain the savages, who went about in small bodies seeking captives, and one of these parties, prowling around Fort Edward, entered the house where Jenny was staying and carried off Jenny and her friend. An alarm was given, and troops sent after them. The Indians had caught two horses, on one of which Jenny was mounted, when the pursuers assailed them with a volley of bullets. The Indians were unhurt, but the fair captive was mortally wounded and fell, and, as tradition relates, expired at the foot of a huge pine tree, which remained a memorial of the tragedy for nearly a century. The savages thus lost their prisoner, but they quickly scalped her, and taking her long black tresses, bathed in blood, to Burgoyne's camp, they claimed reward. They were accused of her murder, but denied it, and the horrid tale, magnified by repetition, caused the greatest indignation. General Gates issued an address, charging Burgoyne with hiring savages to scalp Europeans and their descendants, and describing Jenny as having been "dressed to meet her promised husband, but met her murderers." For this crime, it was added, Burgoyne had "paid the price of blood." Poor Jenny's murder, with Burgoyne's defeat, was employed most effectively by the opposition in the British House of Commons, Chatham and Burke eloquently denouncing the barbarity and merciless cruelties of his unfortunate campaign. Her lover declined longer to stay in Burgoyne's army, but retired to Canada, living there till old age. Jenny's remains are interred in the beautiful cemetery overlooking the Hudson above Fort Edward, marked by a monument recording her murder by a band of Indians at the age of seventeen, and reciting that the memorial was erected "To record one of the most thrilling incidents in the annals of the American Revolution; to do justice to the fame of the gallant British officer to whom she was affianced; and as a simple tribute to the memory of the departed." This gentle maiden's sacrifice was of priceless value in producing the revulsion of sentiment in Europe that had so much to do with the final success of the Revolution.

BAKER'S FALLS AND GLEN'S FALLS.

In coming to Fort Edward, the Hudson River sweeps around a grand curve from the west towards the south, much of its course over cascades and down rapids that are lined with mills. In a mile it descends eighty feet, these rapids being known as Baker's Falls, and just above is the village of Sandy Hill, having in its centre a pleasant elm-shaded green. Here was enacted a tragedy, in some respects rivalling the tale of Pocahontas. A party of sixteen, carrying supplies to Lake George, was surprised and captured by Indians, and taken to the trunk of a fallen tree on the spot where is now the village green, bound by hickory withes and seated in a row. The savages then began at the end of the row and tomahawked them one after another until only two remained, Lieutenant McGinnis commanding the party and a young teamster named Quackenboss. The tomahawk was brandished over the former, when he threw himself backward and tried to break his bonds. A dozen tomahawks instantly gleamed over him, and lying on his back he defended himself with his heels, but he was soon hacked to death. Quackenboss alone remained, and the deadly hatchet was raised over his head, when suddenly the arm of the savage was seized by a squaw, who cried, "You shall not kill him; he no fighter; he my dog." They spared him to become a beast of burden. Staggering under a pack of plunder almost too heavy to carry, they marched him towards Canada, the Indians bearing his companions' scalps as trophies. They sailed along Lake Champlain in canoes, and at the first Indian village at which they halted he was compelled to "run the gauntlet." He ran between rows of savages armed with heavy clubs, who beat him, an ordeal in which he was severely injured. The Indian woman, however, took him to her wigwam, bound up his wounds, and carefully nursed him until he recovered. He was ultimately ransomed, obtaining employment in Montreal. Finally returning to his home, he lived to a ripe old age, telling of his adventures until he died in 1820.

Following the curving Hudson River bank around to the westward, another series of rapids and cascades is ascended to the thriving manufacturing town of Glen's Falls. This magnificent cataract pours through a wild ravine having over seventy feet descent, the water flowing upon rough masses of black marble composing the rocky terraces the stream has broken down. The Mohicans had significant names for this famous cataract. One was Kayandorossa, meaning the "long deep hole," applied to the ravine; and another, Che-pon-tuc, or "hard climbing; a difficult place to get around." Along the north side of the ravine, upon a beautiful plain, is the manufacturing settlement of about ten thousand people, who use the admirable water-power and get the black marble out of adjacent quarries. Vast numbers of logs coming down the Hudson are gathered in a boom above the town, and sawmills cut them into lumber. Paper-mills cluster about the falls, and marble-saws work up the black rocks. In the centre of the ravine, above the falls, a cavern is hewn where a rocky islet makes a rude abutment for a bridge pier. Father Jogues, who came over from Lake George in 1645, was the first white man who saw this attractive region, and he wrote that the Indians then called the Hudson "Oi-o-gue" or "the beautiful river," while the Hollanders, settled on it farther down, had named it the "river Van Maurice." When the Dutch made their first explorations they found that the lower Mohawk and the upper valley of the Hudson, with the country northward extending into the Adirondacks, was the home of the Mohicans, an Algonquin tribe, and always at war with the Mohawks, their western neighbors higher up that valley. It was thought probable that with a view of securing assistance in this inveterate feud, the Mohicans received the Dutch settlers so amicably and gave them lands.

James Fenimore Cooper located around Glen's Falls the scene of his novel, the Last of the Mohicans, in which Hawkeye, looking out of the cavern in the ravine, gives his admirable description of the cataract as it appeared in the French and Indian War, before the millwright had come along to disturb the scenery. "Ay," he said, "there are the falls on two sides of us, and the river above and below. If you had daylight it would be worth the trouble to step up on the height of this rock and look at the perversity of the water. It falls by no rule at all; sometimes it leaps, sometimes it tumbles; there it skips; here it shoots; in one place 'tis as white as snow, and in another 'tis as green as grass; hereabouts it pitches into deep hollows that rumble and quake the 'arth, and thereaway it ripples and sings like a brook, fashioning whirlpools and gullies in the old stone as if 'twere no harder than trodden clay. The whole design of the river seems disconnected. First it runs smoothly as if meaning to go down the descent as things were ordered; then it angles about and faces the shores; nor are there places wanting where it looks backward, as if unwilling to leave the wilderness to mingle with the salt!"

SOURCES OF THE HUDSON.

The noble Hudson River, which we have ascended to Glen's Falls, flows out of the great Adirondack wilderness of Northern New York, the headwaters draining its extensive southern declivity. Among these virgin Adirondack woods and mountains, near the Long Lake, is the remote source of the western branch of the Hudson, the "Hendrick Spring." Surrounded by forest and swamp, this cool and shallow pool, about five feet in diameter, fringed by delicate ferns, and overhung with vines and shrubbery, is the beginning of the great river, and named in honor of its discoverer and first explorer:

"Far up in the dim mountain glade,

Wrapped in the myst'ry of its shade,

On a cold rock, a dewdrop fell,

And slumbered in its stony shell,

Till brewed within its rocky bed,

There trickled out a silver thread,

A little, shy, lost waterling,

That marks the cradled mountain spring."

The Hendrick Spring is within a half-mile of Long Lake and upon the same summit, the latter discharging its waters northward into the St. Lawrence. The little stream from this source gathers force, and flows through a chain of brooks and ponds to the lovely Catlin Lake. High peaks environ them, and their swelling waters make much of the river on coming to the confluence with the northern branch of the Hudson at the outlet of Harris Lake. Here there blooms, all about, the splendid cardinal plant, its showy flower glowing like a flame.

The most elevated fountain head of the Hudson is upon the northern branch. Within the inmost recesses of the mountain wilderness, in a ravine between two of the highest peaks, the river has its spring nearest the sky, known as "The Tear of the Clouds," a lofty pool, adjacent to one of the noted Adirondack portages, the Indian Pass, at about forty-three hundred feet elevation above the sea. From this pool the water flows out through the Feldspar Brook into the Opalescent River, which does not go far before it tumbles down the picturesque cascade of the Hanging Spear, leaping fifty feet into a narrow abyss between perpendicular walls, and emerging among a mass of huge boulders. All these rocks, like the greater part of the Aganus-chion, or Black Mountains, as the Indians often called the Adirondacks, are composed largely of the labradorite or opalescent feldspar, which fills the stream-bed with beautiful pebbles of blue or green or gold, many of them having all the colors. Thus glittering with the splendors of its rich coloring under the sunlight, the Opalescent River falls into Sandford Lake. A visitor to the Indian Pass says the explorers entered the rocky gorge between the steep slopes of Mount McIntyre and the cliffs of Wallface Mountain to the westward. Clambering high above the bottom of the canyon, they could see the famous Indian Pass between these mountains in all its wild grandeur. Before them rose a perpendicular cliff nearly twelve hundred feet from base to summit, its face being apparently as raw as if only just cleft. Above sloped Mount McIntyre, still more lofty than the cliff of Wallface, and in the gorge between lay piles of rocks, grand in dimensions and awful in aspect, as if hurled there by some terrible convulsion. Through these came the little stream going to the Hudson, bubbling along from its source close by a fountain of the Ausable. In spring freshets their waters commingle, part finding their way to the ocean at New York and part at Newfoundland.

Still another spring of clear cold water is a source of the Hudson, sending down the mountain side a vigorous rivulet, falling into the Opalescent. This fountain bubbles from a mass of loose rocks, some weighing a thousand tons apiece, about a hundred feet from the summit of the noble Mount Marcy, which the Indians called Tahawus, the "Sky-piercer." From these sources among the Adirondacks flows the most important river of New York, uniting the waters of myriads of lakes and springs to form the noble stream which is picturesque and attractive throughout the whole of its course of three hundred miles to the sea. The main branches of the upper Hudson unite almost under the shadow of Tahawus, and flowing a tortuous course, it receives the outlet of Schroon Lake, the largest in the Adirondacks, covering about twenty square miles, the junction-point being but a short distance west of Lake George. Then flowing southward and turning eastward, it emerges from the mountain wilderness, and in about a hundred miles reaches its great cataract at Glen's Falls. Sweeping around the grand bend below, and tumbling down Baker's Falls, past Fort Edward and the rapids of Fort Miller, it receives the largest tributary from the eastward, the Battenkill, a rapid shallow stream flowing from the Green Mountains of Vermont. Thence its course is southward, every mile from the wilderness to the sea being replete with historic and scenic attractions: