The people hereabouts, while used to all sorts of freaks, can hardly understand how one can idly walk through the country with no higher ambition than the taking of a picture here and there, and many are the questions to be answered as to the whyness of the whichness, the old farmer generally going on with a dubious shake of the head, convinced that there is a screw loose somewhere.
FARMER FOLK.
A farmer, on whose load of potatoes I rode into Kinderhook, thinks farming doesn't pay—would have been better off if he had worked at days' work all this time. He was cheerful, however, and wholly free from care; his horses were not matched, one doing all the pulling, the other all the sojering, and they went their own gait without interference from him. "Apples! Why apples aren't worth picking this year." It happened that I fell in with the other kind near Stone Mill. He made $1,000 from apples alone last year; would not make so much this season, but they were well worth the gathering; there was money in the ground for him. The individual seems to count in farming, same as in everything else.
Just out of Claremont a young fellow was thrown from his runabout, his horse being frightened at an automobile, and it was only the quickness of the chauffeur that saved him from being run over. Did he curse the rich man's machine? Not he! His only idea was to find another and show his "new animal" who was master! Aside from this irritating feature, the whole affair was a huge joke on him. He was as handsome and wholesome looking as good health and an outdoor life could make a man.
LINDENWALD — JESSE MERWIN.
Some two miles out of Kinderhook stands Lindenwald, to which Ex-President Van Buren retired. The house was built by Judge William P. Van Ness, previously mentioned. Washington Irving was a welcome and frequent guest in the Van Ness household, and it was in this neighborhood that he became acquainted with Jesse Merwin, school teacher, prototype of Ichabod Crane in the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow." The two men were the best of friends, and the caricature does not seem to have cooled their pleasant relations. The schoolhouse stands on the roadside, somewhat nearer the village; at least the building pointed out as such is there, but in a letter to Merwin, Irving regrets that the old schoolhouse is torn down "where, after my morning's literary task was over, I used to come and wait for you, occasionally, until school was dismissed. You would promise to keep back the punishment of some little tough, broad-bottomed Dutch boy, until I could come, for my amusement—but never kept your promise."
The following notice of the death of "Ichabod Crane" appeared in the Westchester Herald for November 30, 1852:
"Jesse Merwin died at Kinderhook on the 8th instant, at the age of seventy years. Mr. Merwin was well known in this community as an upright, honorable man, in whom there was no guile. He was for many years a Justice of the Peace, the duties of which office he discharged with scrupulous fidelity and conscientious regard to the just claims of suitors, ever frowning upon those whose vocation it is to "foment discord and perplex right." At an early period of his life, and while engaged in school teaching, he passed much of his time in the society of Washington Irving, then a preceptor in the family of the late Judge Van Ness, of this town.
"Both were engaged in congenial pursuits and, their residences being only a short distance apart, the author of the 'Sketch Book' frequently visited the 'Old Schoolhouse,' in which 'Squire Merwin' was employed in teaching the young idea how to shoot, and subsequently immortalized his name by making him the hero of one of his inimitable tales, 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.'"
KATRINA VAN TASSEL HOUSE.