There was something incomplete and irreparable for Immy in the fact that she reached New York too late to see her father before he joined her mother in oblivion.
The new New York was beyond her comprehension. She was appalled by the aged look of all her old friends whom she remembered as young friends. She and her mirror had kept such steady company that she could not see the slow changes in her own features. She saw them all at once in the looking-glass of her old companions.
They made her unhappy and she went up to Tuliptree Farm to live, saying that it was more wholesome for her children. Keith’s wife died and his children grew away from him and he felt tired, old, of an evening mood. So he also settled down at Tuliptree Farm, taking care that the restorations after the storm should renew the old lines of the house without disturbing its cellar walls.
He had had a large part in the engineering of the large six-mile siphon that ran four hundred and twenty feet under the oozy bed of the Harlem. He watched the water from the new Croton aqueduct roll into Lake Manahatta in Central Park, and felt that the Croton field was now drained.
All eyes turned further north, but the remaining cis-Hudsonian streams belonged to the State of Connecticut whose sovereign rights were not at the mercy of Albany.
The Catskill Mountains were the nearest source in the trans-Hudsonian territory, and the Ramapo Company bought up all the rights. A tempest of scandal broke out and Governor Roosevelt and Mayors Low and McClellan quashed the company and set on foot the project of the Ashokan reservoir, rivaling the magnitude of the canal cut through the Isthmus of Panama.
A strip of land two hundred feet wide and ninety-two miles long must be secured by condemnation and purchase, from Esopus Creek to New York across thousands of farms, and a siphon must be driven a thousand feet under the Hudson River between Storm King and Breakneck.
The work involved the submersion or removal of sixty-four miles of highways, and eleven miles of railroad, nine villages and thirty-two cemeteries of nearly three thousand graves, some of them more than two centuries old.
And Tuliptree Farm with its graves was only one of this multitude. Keith and Immy fought the city in vain. Nothing they could do could halt the invading army of fifteen hundred workmen that established itself at Valhalla and began to dam the Bronx above White Plains.
The dam was of cyclopean concrete, eighteen hundred feet across, and it was made to hold thirty-eight billion gallons of water. Which was only a fifty-day supply for New York.