The west bank is the poor man's side of the Hudson, and such it has been ever since the first white settlers made their homes there. From Albany southward to Kingston, and back to the Catskills, it was settled by the Dutch and a handful of impoverished Huguenots, — farmers and farm laborers who took up small holdings, which have been held by their descendants for upward of two hundred years. It is a country with many school-houses but few churches, and more drug stores than saloons. The wise man rambling through it avoids the more modern hotels to stop at the old Dutch inns, where he will see gray-haired, smooth-shaven hotel clerks, the register on the bar, the floor clean from its morning scrubbing, a dinner at twelve o'clock with two kinds of meat, three kinds of vegetables, and four kinds of dessert, and after dinner can hear the venerable citizens, standing out on the porch, talk of things that happened during the Revolution, with occasional anecdotes about the French and Indian wars.

The people of the west bank are a slow-going folk. The telegraph and telephone wires pass their doors, but they are not generally used by the old citizens. Neither is the railroad, the construction of which is within the recollection of the children of this generation. They prefer the boats which go from one town to another at intervals to accommodate the inhabitants, and count them good enough to travel by if any one wants a change from driving in a buggy. There is absence of poverty and little crime and few tramps. Tramps prefer the cast bank, where the fine country-places are. In the winter when the big ice-houses are being filled there is more of a turbulent element, but that causes little trouble, and comes from the east bank more than the west. Cutting ice along the west bank is the winter work for the farmers who care to piece out their income of the summer. The little graveyards are more frequent than the little villages. The gravestones are close together under a few trees in the corner of a big field, the way that a brood of chickens cluster in the yard of a house. The graveyards contain the records of the family from the time its founders settled in Ulster County to escape religious persecution at their birthplace or factional disturbances in Albany.

Despite their comparative poverty the people of the west bank have brought forth many strong and brainful men, and have made their share of history, — a fact vividly brought home to the mind of the wayfarer southward bound when he reaches the quaint and beautiful old hamlet of Leeds, four miles back from the town of Catskill and upon the right bank of the river of that name. The low plain on which Leeds stands was once the dwelling-place of a tribe of Algonquin Indians, whose sachems in 1678 sold it, with the surrounding territory, for four miles in every direction, to Marten Van Bergen, justice of the peace and ruling elder in the Dutch church at Albany, and Sylvester Salisbury, captain in the British army and commander of his majesty's forces upon the Upper Hudson. Neither of these men lived upon the estate thus acquired, but their sons, when grown to manhood, took up their residence on their patrimony, and the houses which they built thereon are still standing, as sound in foundations, walls, and roof-beams as on the day, now nearing two centuries agone, when they were finished.

At first the younger Salisbury and Van Bergen dwelt in a wilderness, but in 1732 some eighty persons had settled on their lands, and thereafter the village had a slow but steady growth. The first care of these settlers, Hollanders and Germans from the Lower Palatinate, was to clear out and plant a few acres and to build houses for themselves and barns for their cattle. These needful tasks finished, their second care was to found a church, of which, in 1753, Dominie Johannes Schuneman became pastor, ministering faithfully to his flock until his death forty years later. Very early in his ministry the dominie won the heart and hand of one of the daughters of rich Marten Van Bergen, and the house, known as the Parsonage, in which he dwelt with his bride still stands at the farther side of a fine old orchard in the outskirts of Leeds. Built of gray sandstone, and a story and a half high, a hall on the ground-floor gives access to two rooms on one side and to a larger room on the other. The study of the dominie was the southeastern room. Here he kept his scanty library, wrote his sermons, and received his neighbors when they came to him for friendly gossip or for advice.

During the Revolution Dominie Schuneman was an ardent supporter of the patriot cause. Not content with preaching from his pulpit the high duty of strenuous defence, lie became a member of the local Committee of Safety, and made his house a shelter for the soldiers who passed by on their way to the front, and a hospital when they came back sick with fever. The worthy man's enthusiasm aroused the wrath of his Tory neighbors, who would gladly have set the Mohawks upon him, but lie went about armed by day and slept at night with his gun by his side, and so escaped harm. Moreover, his congregation were in full sympathy with his high-wrought patriotism. They were slow-witted men and cautious, but during the Revolution their ardor glowed against Great Britain as two hundred years before that of their ancestors had glowed against Spain and Alva. One in six of the men of Catskill, as Leeds was then called, became soldiers. Some received commissions in the New York line; others enlisting as privates, walked with their muskets upon their shoulders to Fort George and Stillwater; others became scouts upon the Mohawk; and others, through fear of the Iroquois, patrolled the roads along the Kaaterskill and in the valley of the Kiskatom.

Mention has been made of the house built by Francis Salisbury in 1705. After his occupancy there lived in it a man whose life formed a subject for a romance such as Poe would have loved to write. Malevolent and arbitrary, he is said to have so ill-used a bound girl in his service that she fled from the old house, aided, it was supposed, by her lover, a young Dutch settler. Her master rode into the mountains in search of her, and discovering her at nightfall, tied her to the tail of his horse and started furiously back to Leeds. The horse dashed the girl to pieces on the rocks, and her murderer was arrested and brought to trial. His family united political influence with great wealth, and when he was justly condemned to death they obtained a respite of the sentence. The curious decree of the magistrates was that he should be publicly hung in his ninety-ninth year, and meanwhile he was condemned to wear about his neck a halter, that all might know him to be a murderer doomed to death. From this time forth the criminal lived in seclusion, rarely coming into the village, isolating himself from his fellows, but doggedly wearing his halter, which on certain occasions had to be shown in public. When King George ceased to rule his American colonies the new order of things seems to have swept into oblivion the strange decree of the colonial magistrates, and the hapless owner of the Salisbury House was left to die in his bed; but his singular story affected the neighborhood, as might be expected, with a belief that the house was haunted, and moving tales used to be told of a spectral horse and rider, with the shrieking figure of a girl flung from it. Leeds's aged people will tell you that in childhood they lived in terror of the spot where the Salisbury House stands, firmly believing that its ghostly occupant, with a halter about his shrivelled neck, could at any moment appear.

In these days, however, the old house wears a peaceful and sunny look, foreign to all that is ghostly and uncanny, yet pleasantly reminiscent of bygone folk and days. Indeed, in and all about Leeds time and nature have touched things with a gentle hand, and the little village, embosomed by hills and dales, remains an almost perfect relic of a past fast becoming too traditional to seem our own. On the other hand, the riverside town four miles to the eastward, now called Catskill, but known in earlier years as the Strand or the Landing, seems to have forgotten its plodding and quiet Dutch founders and has become a bustling and thriving burg, its only reminders of colonial times being a few olden houses, which seem to regard with stately, highbred indifference the activity of the noisy town that has grown up around them.

None of these fine specimens of early architecture has a history more romantically interesting than a house at the water's edge. It is built of graystone, with a fine porch and generous entrance and hallway, and its story begins before the Revolution, when Major John Dies, a British officer, married Miss Jane Goelet, and at the same time deserted and “fled” to Catskill, where he spent lavish sums upon the stone mansion still known as “Dies's Folly.” Tradition has it that in spite of his gay and reckless life he lived in constant fear of being arrested as a deserter, and at the first appearance of British troops betaking himself to the garret, would hide in a hollow of the chimney-stack, whose existence was known only to his wife, and to which she brought him food and drink in secret until the danger was over. When Madam Dies's father died he left his money in such a way that her husband could not squander it, and so after his death the lady lived in quiet comfort and much dignity of state, dying at a ripe old age in the last years of the last century. Wandering about the fine rooms of the old house, it is easy to people it with figures of the dashing major's period; for it, like many other famous dwellings in the neighborhood, has suffered little from change. The heavy rafters are untouched, walls and windows remain as of old, and the house itself, although near the town and the varying elements of the shore, seems set in a certain seclusion of its own, and gives a tinge of dignity to its surroundings.

Yet for the sentimental pilgrim lingering in Catskill there is a more winsome interest abiding in a house which stands on a hilly street about a mile from the village, and which was long the home of the most gifted and lovable of our early landscape painters. It was in a golden, glowing October of the early 20's that Thomas Cole, journeying up the Hudson in search of motives for his brush, was taken captive by the beauty of the hills and coves of Catskill, and finding a home and, later, a wife in the village, lived and worked there until his death. The painter's house stands in a garden full of old-fashioned blossoms and fragrance; its walls of yellow stone show in summer-time against a gorgeous garden of hollyhocks; the gateway is overhung with verdure; and below the ancient garden-beds are the pine woods reaching down, skirted by farm lands to the river. Near the entrance to the upper woods Cole built his first studio, where he worked upon the “Course of Empire” and other pictures belonging to that period; but nearer to the road stands his latest workshop, where the busy hand was arrested midway in his last effort, the “Cross and the World.”

Cole, dying at the early age of forty-seven, rests now in the village cemetery at Catskill, and in the old Wilt Wyck burial-ground at Kingston, the next halting-place in our journey southward, is the grave of John Vanderlyn, who in his time filled, like Cole, a large place in the world of art, and than whom no American painter of the first half of the century was the hero of a more brilliant and varied and, one might add, more troubled career. A native of Kingston and a protégé of Aaron Burr, Vanderlyn was the fellow-student in Rome of Washington Allston; at Paris in 1808 he carried off the first honors of the Salon, and some of the figure pieces which he painted at this period remain the glory of our early art. However, his after-career in America, whence he returned in 1815, was a long disappointment both to Vanderlyn and his friends, for more tactful men elbowed him rudely in an overcrowded field, and neglect and poverty were the constant comrades of his last days.

Singularly touching, when it came, was Vanderlyn's end. One morning in September, 1852, he landed from a Hudson River steamboat in a feeble condition and set out to walk to Kingston. Fatigue quickly overcame him, and he was found sitting by the roadside by a friend, from whom he begged a shilling for the transportation of his trunk, adding that he was sick and penniless. He secured a small back room at an inn in the village, and the friend spoken of went quietly about among a few of his acquaintances with a subscription list for the ailing man's maintenance. Funds for the purpose were promptly pledged, but they were never needed. A few mornings after his arrival Vanderlyn was found dead in bed. Death, merciful in its summons to the veteran, had come to him while he slept.

Love of his native village seems to have been Vanderlyn's master passion, and there was reason for it. Kingston, with its leaf-embowered streets and its noble old-time air, is one of the most beautiful and restful towns along the Hudson. Founded in 1656 by a band of steadfast and thrifty Hollanders, and called by turns Wilt Wyck, Æsopus, and Kingston, the village when Vanderlyn was born in 1776 had already taken on the dignity and charm of age. Much of its early history centres about its old Dutch church, in the shadow of which Vanderlyn is taking his rest, and the records of which, dating back to 1657, give piquant and amusing glimpses of the customs, manners, and condition of Kingston's first settlers. When the church wanted a bell, the pastor sent word that everybody who had had a child baptized at the church should bring a contribution. The congregation brought offerings of silver spoons, buttons, buckles, and ornaments of various kinds, which were sent to Holland and melted into the present bell that, now attached to the clock, strikes the hours from the church steeple. Travelling was a serious thing in those days. When Harmanus Meyer, the pastor in 1762, made a trip to Albany, fifty miles away, the congregation held a meeting before he started; the consistory prepared the form of prayers of the congregation “for the special protection of the pastor during his long and perilous journey to Albany,” and two elders accompanied him as far as Catskill to protect him. It now takes about an hour to go from Kingston to Albany by rail.

The building, near the centre of the town, in which the congregation at present worship is the fourth that has stood on the same spot. One of its predecessors was burned by the British in 1777, and this fact calls to mind the part played by Kingston during the Revolution. There the convention sat which framed the first constitution of the State of New York; there the new commonwealth was organized in the summer of 1777, and there the first Legislature was in session when Forts Clinton and Montgomery fell. When news of that event and the coming of a squadron under Sir James Wallace with several thousand soldiers under General Vaughan reached Kingston, the members of the Legislature fled. They supposed that the then capital of the State would feel most cruelly the strong arm of the enemy; and so it did. The British frigates anchored above Kingston Point, and large detachments of soldiers marching upon the town, laid nearly every house in ashes.

One of the few buildings which escaped in part the torch of the British and Tory was the old Senate House, now the property of the State. Built in 1676, the Senate House was already an old building when the Revolution came. Within its walls John Jay drew the draft of the constitution of the State and the Senate for a time held its sessions. Partly burned by the troops of General Vaughan, it was rebuilt soon afterwards, and occupied for years by men whose names are still remembered beyond the confines of their own town. Later still it passed into the possession of the State, and, carefully restored, now stands as it did in former days. Its first owner, Wessel Ten Braeck, was a man of wealth and standing, and the house in his time was doubtless considered a building of the most aristocratic proportions, being seventy feet long, and having ceilings two feet higher than those in most houses of the period. Inside of the old building, few changes have been made by the restorer, and there is a delightful air of antiquity about the rooms.

Besides the Senate House, Kingston holds other interesting relics of the Revolution, and all the way south to West Point, by way of Newburgh, New Windsor, and Cornwall, one comes at every turn on moving reminders of the great struggle waged nowhere more fiercely than on the west bank of the Hudson. As the steamboat approaches the wharf at Newburgh, over the broad expanse of the bay of the same name one descries near the southern end of the city a low broad-roofed house, built of stone, with a flagstaff near, and the grounds around garnished with cannon. That is the famous house built by Colonel Hasbrouck in 1750 and occupied as head-quarters by Washington during one of the most interesting periods of the war and at its close. Then the camp was graced by the presence of Mrs. Washington a greater part of the time and the wives of several of the officers, and until a time remembered by men not yet old the remains of the borders around the beds of a little garden cultivated by Mrs. Washington for amusement might have been seen in front of the mansion, which, now the property of the State, is preserved in the form it bore when Washington left it.

Old Senate House, Kingston, New York

Interest in the building centres, perhaps, in the room, with seven doors and one window, used by the owner for a parlor and by the commander-in-chief for a dining-room, and in which at different times most of the chief officers of the Continental army, native and foreign, and many eminent civilians were entertained by Washington. Half a century after the Revolution a counterfeit of that room was produced in Paris. Lafayette, a short time before his death, was invited, with the American minister and several of the latter's countrymen, to a banquet given by the old Count de Marbois, secretary to the first French legation in this country during the Revolution. At the hour for the repast the company were led to a room which contrasted strangely in appearance with the splendors of the mansion they were in, — low-boarded, with large projecting beams overhead; a huge fireplace, with a broad-throated chimney; a single small uncurtained window, and numerous small doors, the whole having the appearance of a Dutch or Belgian kitchen. Upon a long rough table was spread a frugal meal, with wine and decanters and bottles and glasses and silver goblets, such as indicated the habits of other times. “Do you know where we are now?” Marbois asked the marquis and the American guests. They paused for a moment, when Lafayette exclaimed, “Ah! the seven doors and one window, and the silver camp goblets, such as the marshals of France used in my youth. We are at Washington's head-quarters on the Hudson, fifty years ago!”

The room thus vividly recalled by Lafayette has, as I have stated, seven doors. The one on the northeast gives access to the former bedroom of Washington; a small room adjoining was his office, and is historic, because at a little desk here, in May, 1782, he wrote the letter declining the crown some of his field officers had planned to confer upon him, the masterly address to his disaffected officers, and finally the pæan of joy and thanksgiving that announced to the army the return of peace. On the west is a door opening into a moderate-sized hall, in which is a stairway leading to the chambers above, and an outer door opening on the grounds on the west. On the south and southwest are doors giving access to the apartments occupied by the Hasbrouck family, and which were in no way connected with Washington's occupancy. The parlor in which Madam Washington received her guests was the northwest room, adjoining the office, and opening into the hall before mentioned.

Following the acquisition of the headquarters by the State in 1849, citizens of Newburgh and its vicinity began forming here a museum of Revolutionary relics, which in the process of time has become one of the most interesting collections of its kind in existence. The old arm-chair of Washington has resumed its former post in his bedroom; portraits of General and Madam Washington and of Lafayette hang on the walls of the former office; the watch with which Madam Washington timed the coming of her guests is one of the trophies of the dining-room; so also is the battered copper tea-kettle in the fireplace, which once formed a part of the camp equipage of Lafayette; Aaron Burr's sword hangs in its iron scabbard in the southeast room; while a collection of several hundred letters and private papers reveals to the student the whole minutiæ of the Revolution and acquaints him with the secret thoughts and purposes of its leaders.

The printed catalogue of the collection enumerates upward of eight hundred articles. To the lover of Washington the most impressive of these are the letters and papers dealing with what is known as the Gates conspiracy, in the suppression of which the patriot commander gave shining proof of his almost perfect mastery of men. When the Continental army was about to be disbanded in the spring of 1783 Gates and a few other officers had inflammatory appeals distributed among the troops urging them to demand their pay and get it or overthrow the government. They had fixed a date for a convention of the disaffected elements, and the danger was serious.

The convention was largely attended, and Gates was chosen as its chairman. Before the proceedings had gone far Washington entered, unattended and unannounced, his face wearing a sad and troubled look. He began a short speech, admitting the justice of their claims, and expressing deep sympathy for their sufferings, but appealed to them not to desert their country's cause after covering themselves with scars in its defence; and, above all, not to become the dupes of British intrigues, as the appeals that had aroused them had doubtless been the work of crafty emissaries of England, “eager to disgrace the army they had not been able to vanquish.” He assured them that Congress would do them justice, and took from his pocket a letter to sustain this assurance, which he attempted to read, but could not without putting on his glasses. Slowly raising them, he said, with quiet pathos, “My brothers, I have grown gray in your service, and now I find myself becoming blind.” At the conclusion he walked slowly out, but there was no more of the meeting. Those who remained did so only to pass a resolution professing implicit faith in Congress and loyalty to their country.

A few weeks after this incident just related, on April 19, 1783, came the last event of importance in the history of the patriot camp at Newburgh, — the publishing of the proclamation of Congress announcing the cessation of hostilities. Washington had been in receipt of news of peace for some days, but hesitated to publish it to the army lest the troops who had enlisted for the war should consider their engagement filled and demand a discharge. But on the 18th, unable longer to conceal the good news, he issued his orders, directing that the proclamation of Congress should be published on the 19th, in the presence of the several brigades. By a happy coincidence it was the anniversary of the battle of Lexington, fought eight years before. When the day arrived, it was ushered in by salvoes of artillery, and at noon the nine brigades of the army, drawn up on dress parade, received from the lips of their commander-in-chief the news of the war's termination. This gathering, however, was but the precursor of a grand jubilee in honor of peace, which occurred some days later, and which was celebrated by the entire army at Newburgh, Fishkill, West Point, and at all the scattered outposts farther down the river. Early in June the army was removed to West Point, and there, and not at Newburgh, Washington's Farewell Address was read and the war-worn ranks formally disbanded.

Cornwall, four miles below Newburgh, is a growth of the present century, but New Windsor, lying between them, was long the head-quarters of Generals Knox and Greene, and Cornwall itself borrows a lively interest for the wanderer from the fact that it is closely associated with the closing years of Nathaniel Parker Willis. The house to which he gave the name of Idlewild stands a little way from the village, and is still green to the memory of the poet. Since Willis's death the place has passed in turn into various hands, until now it is the home of a wealthy New York business man.

Here and there in the grounds remains a suggestion of the times of Willis. The pine drive leading to the house, along which the greatest literary lights of the Knickerbocker period passed during its palmy days, still remains intact, the dense growth of the trees only making the road the more picturesque, and the brook by which Willis often sat still runs on through the grounds as of yore, but in the house everything is remodelled and modernized. The room from whose windows Willis was wont to look over the Hudson, and where he did most of his charming writing, is now a bedchamber modern in its every appointment and suggesting its age only by the high ceiling and curious mantel.

Cornwall has other literary memories than those associated with Willis. Only a few city blocks from Idlewild is the house in which Edward Payson Roe lived and wrote his books and passed away, and the novelist's grave is in the little Presbyterian cemetery of the village, close to the bank of the Hudson, — a spot of exceeding beauty and just the niche in a noble country where a lover of nature should take his rest. Everything about the plot proves that the place is not forgotten. A large block of granite marks the burial-place of the romancer, while on it his name is carved twice, the first, “Edward Payson Roe,” as a family record, while the second, “E. P. Roe,” at the base of the stone, indicates the public man.

Journeying southward from Cornwall, as the boat nears West Point one descries, in a house set on a rocky promontory jutting out from the bank of the river, another of the literary landmarks of the Hudson. In this house, a low, straggling structure with tiny windows and tinier panes of glass, which tell, even at a distance, of colonial times, Susan Warner lived and did her literary work, work which for the time being made her name a household word throughout the length and breadth of the land. Few women were more popular in her time, and yet to-day the author of “The Wide, Wide World” is almost forgotten. I thought of this as I stood beside her grave. It is in the military cemetery, close by the Cadet's monument, where she was buried in the spot she herself selected. The grave is kept abloom by the sister of the authoress, Anna Warner, herself a writer. A close affection existed between the Warner sisters, and it is the fragrance of this, and almost only this, that indicates to the visitor at the West Point grave that the author of some of the best-known novels ever written has not entirely passed from memory.

Yet in and about West Point there are not wanting a hundred proofs that the dead are not forgotten. Crowning the summit of Mount Independence, nature's guardian of our national military school, are the gray ruins of Fort Putnam, built under the direction of Kosciusko, and during the Revolution the most important of the military works along the Hudson. On the extremity of the promontory of West Point are the ruins of Fort Clinton, now sheltering a monument to the memory of Kosciusko; and plainly visible a little way to the northward is the former site of Fort Montgomery, and on a plateau directly across the river stands the Beverley Robinson House, in which Benedict Arnold planned the betrayal of his country.

Forts Clinton and Montgomery and the intervening ground were the theatre of one of the most fiercely contested conflicts of the Revolution. The forts were built to defend the entrance to the Highlands against fleets of the enemy that might ascend the river, for it was known from the beginning that it was the purpose of the British to get possession, if possible, of the valley of the Hudson, and so separate New England from the other colonies. In addition to these forts, a boom and chain were stretched across the river from Fort Montgomery to Anthony's Nose to obstruct navigation. On the 7th of October, 1777, the British general Clinton swept around the towering Donderberg with a part of his army and fell upon the forts, where George and James Clinton commanded the little garrisons.

It was not an easy task for the enemy to approach the forts through the rugged mountain passes. They had divided, one party, accompanied by Clinton, making their way towards evening between Lake Sinnipink, in the rear of the lower fort, and the river. There they encountered abatis covering a detachment of Americans, and a severe fight ensued, after which both divisions pressed towards the forts and closely invested them, being supported by a heavy cannonade from the British flotilla. The battle raged until nightfall, but finally overwhelming numbers caused the Americans to abandon their works and flee to the mountains. The conflict ended in the breaking of the boom and chain, and the passage up the river of a British squadron with marauding troops, who laid in ashes many a fair homestead belonging to patriots as far north as Livingston's manor, on the lower verge of Columbia County.

Twelve miles south of West Point the steamboat comes abreast of another stirring Revolutionary landmark, a rocky height advancing far into the river and known as Stony Point. Its capture on the 16th of July, 1779, was one of the most brilliant incidents in the brilliant career of “Mad Anthony” Wayne. Following the loss of Forts Montgomery and Clinton, Washington had projected two works, at Stony Point and Verplanck's Point, as outworks of the mountain passes above. A small but strong fort had been erected at Verplanck's Point and garrisoned by seventy men, and a more important work was in progress at Stony Point when the British, under Clinton, advanced up the Hudson; the men in the unfinished fort abandoned it on the approach of the enemy, and the latter took possession. The garrison on the eastern bank at the same time surrendered to General Vaughan. Sir Henry stationed garrisons in both posts and completed the fortifications at Stony Point.

The chances for success in a night assault upon the Point were talked over at the headquarters of Washington at West Point. General Wayne was then in command of troops in that vicinity. “Can you take the fort by assault?” Washington asked Wayne. “I'll storm hell, general, if you'll plan it!” was the prompt reply. Washington smiled, and bade him attempt the recapture of the Point, which the British had garrisoned with six hundred men and crowned with strong works, furnished with heavy ordnance, commanding the morass and causeway that connected the Point with the mainland.

On the night of July 15, 1779, a negro of the neighborhood guided Wayne and his men to the Point, and by giving the countersign to the sentinel they were enabled to cross the causeway without alarm. At the foot of the promontory the troops were divided into two columns, for simultaneous attacks on opposite sides of the works. The Americans were close upon the outworks before they were discovered; there was then severe skirmishing at the pickets.

The Americans used only the bayonet, the others discharged their muskets. The reports roused the garrison, and Stony Point was instantly in an uproar. Notwithstanding a tremendous fire of grape-shot and musketry on the assailants, the two columns forced their way with the bayonet. Colonel Fleury entered the fort and struck the British flag. Major Posey sprang to the ramparts and shouted, “The fort is our own!” Wayne had received a contusion on the head from a musket-ball, and believing it was a death-wound, begged his aides to carry him into the fort that he might die at the head of his column, but he soon recovered his self-possession. The two columns arrived nearly at the same time, met at the centre of the works, and the garrison surrendered at discretion. The American loss was less than a hundred killed and wounded, while of the British more than six times that number were slain and taken prisoners.

With Stony Point left astern, the boat enters the broad expanse of Haverstraw Bay, and touches at the town of the same name, whence a road passes among the hills to the village of Tappan, near which André was tried and executed, and which we had planned to make the last halt in our journey down the west bank of the Hudson. It was the second day after his ill-timed meeting with Arnold at Haverstraw, to arrange for the surrender of West Point, that André, hurrying southward to New York, was arrested near Tarrytown, and without delay conveyed to Tappan, the head-quarters of the American army. Here, Arnold having meanwhile fled to the British camp, André was tried, condemned as a spy, and two days later put to death. The old graystone Dutch farm-house then used as a prison, in which he passed the last days of his short life, still stands in the outskirts of Tappan, and has lately been restored to its original form. The room in which André spent his waking hours and was visited by Alexander Hamilton and others is in the front of the house. Back of it is a smaller apartment in which he slept, and which has a window looking out to the west, where, tradition has it, he saw them rear the scaffold for his execution. From the house a gentle slope carries one up the hill, where André was hanged at mid-day of October 2, 1780, “reconciled to death, but detesting its mode,” and begging those present “to bear witness that he met his death like a brave man.” His body was buried at the foot of the gallows, where it lay until 1821, when, by order of the Duke of York, the British consul at New York caused it to be disinterred and sent to England for final burial near a mural monument which George III. had erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey.

Americans, generous always in their sympathy for the unfortunate, have never forgotten André's dying request. He should have been left to sleep undisturbed in the spot where kindly nature had already claimed him for her own.

END OF VOL. I.