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