In the lower edge of the village of Greenbush and on the River Road which we are following stands the most interesting building of the region, old Fort Cralo, built in 1642 for protection against the Indians. Its white oak beams are said to be eighteen inches square and its walls two to three feet thick. Some of its portholes still remain as reminders of the times of the war whoop and scalp dance. It is said there were once secret passages to the river, which is just across the road. During the last of the French and Indian wars Major-General James Abercrombie had his headquarters here—1758; and YANKEE DOODLE.it was here that Yankee Doodle came into being. Among the Colonial regiments which joined the regulars at this point were some from Connecticut whose appearance became a by-word among the well-kept British troops. The song was composed by a surgeon attached to the army, as a satire on these ragged provincials; less than twenty years later the captured soldiers of Burgoyne marched between the lines of the victorious Yankees to the same tune.
It is but a step to the trolley, and in a brief five minutes we are across "The Great River of the Mountains" as Hudson called it, and at our journey's end.
SCHUYLER—VAN RENSSELAER.
The man who can rise superior to feelings of personal grievance, or even just anger, is the man we all admire. Such, history says, was Gen. Philip Schuyler who, when Burgoyne had wantonly burned his country seat near Saratoga, entertained that same Burgoyne after his capture in his town house, which still stands at the head of Schuyler Street, Albany, in so hospitable a fashion that the British General, struck with the American's generosity, said to him: "You show me great kindness though I have done you much injury," whereupon Schuyler returned: "That was the fate of war; let us say no more about it." This house was erected about 1765, and General Schuyler lived here with his family for nearly forty years, dispensing such notable hospitality as to call down the blessings of many a traveler to and from Canada or the West.
The Van Rensselaer Manor House stood on the river bank, but nothing is now left of it but the little old brick office, which stands disconsolate along the street, watching through half-closed blinds the great woodworking plant which occupies the site of the old home of the Patroon.
One other reminder of the days gone by still survives in the Peter Schuyler house in the northern limits of Albany, at the Flats. Lossing says of this: "It is famous in Colonial history as the residence of Col. Peter Schuyler, of the Flats, the first mayor of Albany, and who, as Indian Commissioner in after years took four kings or sachems of the Mohawks to England and presented them at the court of Queen Anne."
IT IS FINISHED.
And now we have finished, and there is naught to do but return home, and various are the ways of doing it. If time is of no moment there is the west bank of the Hudson to explore all the way down to Paulus Hook, from whence the ferry will easily land one once more on the Island of Manhattan. If time counts, the night boat is a simple solution of the problem.
