His descendants have changed nothing there, in that dear little modest nest for a genius! It's close to the front door, as you go in from the deep porch, at the right-hand side of a fascinating corridor. Looking down that corridor you see a vista of rooms, delightful as rooms in dreams. They are furnished, but not crowded, with old and exquisite things—things which must have been intimate friends of the family for generations; and, oh, how much more attractive are the rooms than any royal suites I've seen in palaces!
In the study (I feel sure he called it that, not library) the master of long ago might have walked a moment ago, out into the garden, so entirely does the room seem impressed with his personality. There are his books, his manuscripts, his pens; his desk, and his writing-chair drawn up to it; his little table; the charming old prints he loved, given to him and signed by friends whose names are famous; pictures of the house when it was "Wolfert's Roost," and when it had grown larger. The green and golden light streaming through the windows, front and side, seems just the sort of light that Washington Irving would have loved to write in. He made it greener and more inspiring by bringing from Melrose Abbey slips of the ivy which now curtains the windows; and in the green-gold light he wrote his "Life of Washington" and many other things which we all love.
Coming out of the study when we were ready to go away, I looked through the open door of a beautiful room across the corridor, straight into an old-fashioned mirror. Never was a mirror so becoming. I felt as if I were seeing my own portrait painted by Romney; and behind me for an instant I seemed to catch a fleeting glimpse of another face, as though a man stood on the study threshold, smiling to me a kind good-bye. I adore my own imagination. After Jack, it is my best and dearest chum!
I think even if one didn't know that thrilling things had happened in Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow (heavenly names!) in old days, one would somehow feel it. What's the use of one's subconscious self if it doesn't nudge one's subjective self and whisper that it was born knowing? Why, I could see Sir Vredryck Flypse and his family streaming out of the old Dutch church, as gorgeous in their Sunday best as the church was simple; the ladies' stomachers embroidered with silver and seed pearls, their short, stiff brocade skirts swinging to show their silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, much as ours do now; the men taking a sly pinch of snuff, and brushing it hastily off their blue or gray coats; tie-wigs, silver buttons, and knee breeches glittering in the sunshine of such a day as this, away back in sixteen hundred and something. I can see neat, consciously aristocratic and good Dominie Mutzelius or Dominie Ritzema in irreproachable black, with a touch of white, going as guest to Sunday dinner at Philipsburg Manor, after the "great people" had listened to his eloquence, seated in their cushioned "boxes" in the seven-windowed church. There are only six windows now; but in those days you had to keep your window and weather eye open, even during the dominie's discourse, for Indians might take a fancy to scalp the congregation if it could be taken unawares. Luckily the lord of the manor, and his friends, and the sturdy farmers with their families, were not to be caught napping, even if the sermon were dull and the weather hot. Besides, in case of emergency, they could turn their church into a fort at a few minutes' notice. The walls were nearly three feet thick; the seven windows were barred with iron, and so high up that, if the Indians wanted to peep, they had to climb on each other's shoulders. As for the doors, they could hardly be knocked in with a battering ram; so you had no excuse to stop at home on Sunday, even in "Indian Summer." Of course we went to see the grave where all that is mortal of Washington Irving lies in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery; and the famous bridge—or, rather, the new edition of it built by William Rockefeller.
Do you remember that Major Andre was taken on the Albany Post Road at Tarrytown on his way to New York, with dispatches from the traitor Benedict Arnold hidden in his stockings? I've always had a sneaking sympathy with Andre, because he was gallant and young and good looking, but Tarrytown isn't the place, I find, in which to express any such sentimental feeling. He is still the villain of the piece there, a mere spy, travelling in disguise, a treacherous wretch who long and stealthily worked to corrupt a hitherto honourable general. He is the villain, and David Williams, John Paulding, and Isaac Van Waart, the scouting militiamen who took and searched him, are the heroes of that drama of 1780. Tarrytown people are delighted to this day that Andre was hanged, and they love the monument to his captors who wouldn't be bribed by horse, or watch, or money. I suppose if Andre hadn't offered those bribes, or said he belonged to the "Southern party," they might never have thought of his stockings, he would have got safely to the waiting ship, and on to New York; and Benedict Arnold would have surrendered West Point to the British!
Heaps of other exciting things helped to make Tarrytown historic: an Indian massacre, a big battle in the Revolution, Major Hunt's "bag of British soldiers at Van Tassel's Tavern when he won fame by his shout, 'Gentlemen, clubs are trumps!'" and so on. But we took even more interest in the old legends of Spook Rock, and Andre's ghost and Cuffy's Prophecy and the Flying Dutchman, who of course tacks back and forth across the Tappan Zee. Such things are so much more real than facts! Besides, we had to "get on—get on!" that war cry of motoring men.
We did get on, along the smooth brick road to Ossining, which is really Sing Sing, you know (or ought to, if you don't), only Ossining is the old Indian name, so they took it back to escape the blight. It's such a pretty town that it would have been a shame to associate it only with the state prison, whose high gray walls are the only grim thing in the landscape. It was for the sake of staring at them, though, and shivering down our spines that we took the detour to Ossining. When we had shivered enough we turned back to Tarrytown and drove our motors like docile cattle on board a steam ferryboat which took us across the river to Nyack, the dearest, quaintest of little Dutch towns. It looks as lazy as, and more obstinately old-fashioned than, Tarrytown, though Tarrytown is far more important and impressive.
There's a colony of frame houses in Nyack which makes you feel you've suddenly tripped and stumbled out of the twentieth century back into the early nineteenth; and we lunched in a charming little hotel that gave us things to eat equal to any restaurant in New York.
We had a divine run from Nyack, through a fairy forest, with Hook Mountain in sight and the Ramapo Hills on the horizon. Hook Mountain glowed a bright rose colour wherever its green cloak was torn; and when we came into sudden sight of the river there was a magical effect: a veil of silver mist, with boats big and little moving behind it, like white swans. We had woods all the way to Rockland Lake, where the great icehouses loomed like queer castles, until we ran down to lake-level and lost the illusion. Then we turned in the direction of Haverstraw, going through the nice old-fashioned village of Congers. The hills and tiny valleys were as gay and pretty as the summer day! We could hardly realize that we weren't very far from New York, it all seemed such lovely lost country, private and purposely hidden, as if strangers had no right to be there.
Soon the gay little hills were playing they were mountains, and almost making us believe that they really were. The roadsides were like rock gardens, spangled pink and gold and blue. Far below lay the river, but it looked vast enough to be a wide lake; and always the "surface" was so perfect we had the sensations of flying. At Haverstraw we were by the river, and even the brick-fields contrived to take on a gorgeous, glittering colour in the afternoon sun. Stony Point, a high rocky promontory just above, is the place where "Mad Anthony Wayne" stormed the fortress thought to be impregnable. The British called it "Little Gibraltar." Jack had been looking out for that and the ruins of the old fort, because daredevil Wayne is quite one of his heroes. The whole peninsula here is a public park, so no wonder everything is beautifully kept!