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Title: Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land (The Hudson And Its Hills)

Author: Charles M. Skinner

Release Date: October, 2004  [EBook #6606]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on December 31, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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                           MYTHS AND LEGENDS
                                   OF
                              OUR OWN LAND

                                   By
                           Charles M. Skinner

                                Vol. 1.


                        THE HUDSON AND ITS HILLS



                                 PREFACE

It is unthinkingly said and often, that America is not old enough to
have developed a legendary era, for such an era grows backward as a
nation grows forward.  No little of the charm of European travel is
ascribed to the glamour that history and fable have flung around old
churches, castles, and the favored haunts of tourists, and the Rhine and
Hudson are frequently compared, to the prejudice of the latter, not
because its scenery lacks in loveliness or grandeur, but that its beauty
has not been humanized by love of chivalry or faerie, as that of the
older stream has been.  Yet the record of our country's progress is of
deep import, and as time goes on the figures seen against the morning
twilight of our history will rise to more commanding stature, and the
mists of legend will invest them with a softness or glory that shall
make reverence for them spontaneous and deep.  Washington hurling the
stone across the Potomac may live as the Siegfried of some Western saga,
and Franklin invoking the lightnings may be the Loki of our mythology.
The bibliography of American legends is slight, and these tales have
been gathered from sources the most diverse: records, histories,
newspapers, magazines, oral narrative--in every case reconstructed.  The
pursuit of them has been so long that a claim may be set forth for some
measure of completeness.

But, whatever the episodes of our four historic centuries may furnish to
the poet, painter, dramatist, or legend-building idealist of the future,
it is certain that we are not devoid of myth and folk-lore.  Some
characters, prosaic enough, perhaps, in daily life, have impinged so
lightly on society before and after perpetrating their one or two great
deeds, that they have already become shadowy and their achievements have
acquired a color of the supernatural.  It is where myth and history
combine that legend is most interesting and appeals to our fancy or our
sympathy most strongly; and it is not too early for us to begin the
collation of those quaint happenings and those spoken reports that gain
in picturesqueness with each transmission.  An attempt has been made in
this instance to assemble only legends, for, doubtful as some historians
profess to find them, certain occurrences, like the story of Captain
Smith and Pocahontas, and the ride of General Putnam down Breakneck
Stairs, are taught as history; while as to folk-lore, that of the Indian
tribes and of the Southern negro is too copious to be recounted in this
work.  It will be noted that traditions do not thrive in brick and
brownstone, and that the stories once rife in the colonial cities have
almost as effectually disappeared as the architectural landmarks of last
century.  The field entered by the writer is not untrodden.  Hawthorne
and Irving have made paths across it, and it is hoped that others may
deem its farther exploration worthy of their efforts.




CONTENTS:

Rip Van Winkle
Catskill Gnomes
The Catskill Witch
The Revenge of Shandaken
Condemned to the Noose
Big Indian
The Baker's Dozen
The Devil's Dance-Chamber
The Culprit Fay
Pokepsie
Dunderberg
Anthony's Nose
Moodua Creek
A Trapper's Ghastly Vengeance
The Vanderdecken of Tappan Zee
The Galloping Hessian
Storm Ship on the Hudson
Why Spuyten Duyvil is so Named
The Ramapo Salamander
Chief Croton
The Retreat from Mahopac
Niagara
The Deformed of Zoar
Horseheads
Kayuta and Waneta
The Drop Star
The Prophet of Palmyra
A Villain's Cremation
The Monster Mosquito
The Green Picture
The Nuns of Carthage
The Skull in the Wall
The Haunted Mill
Old Indian Face
The Division of the Saranacs
An Event in Indian Park
The Indian Plume
Birth of the Water-Lily
Rogers's Slide
The Falls at Cohoes
Francis Woolcott's Night-Riders
Polly's Lover
Crosby, the Patriot Spy
The Lost Grave of Paine
The Rising of Gouverneur Morris




                         THE HUDSON AND ITS HILLS


                              RIP VAN WINKLE

The story of Rip Van Winkle, told by Irving, dramatized by Boucicault,
acted by Jefferson, pictured by Darley, set to music by Bristow, is the
best known of American legends.  Rip was a real personage, and the Van
Winkles are a considerable family at this day.  An idle, good-natured,
happy-go-lucky fellow, he lived, presumably, in the village of Catskill,
and began his long sleep in 1769.  His wife was a shrew, and to escape
her abuse Rip often took his dog and gun and roamed away to the
Catskills, nine miles westward, where he lounged or hunted, as the humor
seized him.  It was on a September evening, during a jaunt on South
Mountain, that he met a stubby, silent man, of goodly girth, his round
head topped with a steeple hat, the skirts of his belted coat and flaps
of his petticoat trousers meeting at the tops of heavy boots, and the
face--ugh!--green and ghastly, with unmoving eyes that glimmered in the
twilight like phosphorus.  The dwarf carried a keg, and on receiving an
intimation, in a sign, that he would like Rip to relieve him of it, that
cheerful vagabond shouldered it and marched on up the mountain.

At nightfall they emerged on a little plateau where a score of men in
the garb of long ago, with faces like that of Rip's guide, and equally
still and speechless, were playing bowls with great solemnity, the balls
sometimes rolling over the plateau's edge and rumbling down the rocks
with a boom like thunder.  A cloaked and snowy-bearded figure, watching
aloof, turned like the others, and gazed uncomfortably at the visitor
who now came blundering in among them.  Rip was at first for making off,
but the sinister glare in the circle of eyes took the run out of his
legs, and he was not displeased when they signed to him to tap the keg
and join in a draught of the ripest schnapps that ever he had tasted,--
and he knew the flavor of every brand in Catskill.  While these strange
men grew no more genial with passing of the flagons, Rip was pervaded by
a satisfying glow; then, overcome by sleepiness and resting his head on
a stone, he stretched his tired legs out and fell to dreaming.

Morning.  Sunlight and leaf shadow were dappled over the earth when he
awoke, and rising stiffly from his bed, with compunctions in his bones,
he reached for his gun.  The already venerable implement was so far gone
with rot and rust that it fell to pieces in his hand, and looking down
at the fragments of it, he saw that his clothes were dropping from his
body in rags and mould, while a white beard flowed over his breast.
Puzzled and alarmed, shaking his head ruefully as he recalled the
carouse of the silent, he hobbled down the mountain as fast as he might
for the grip of the rheumatism on his knees and elbows, and entered his
native village.  What!  Was this Catskill?  Was this the place that he
left yesterday?  Had all these houses sprung up overnight, and these
streets been pushed across the meadows in a day?  The people, too: where
were his friends?  The children who had romped with him, the rotund
topers whom he had left cooling their hot noses in pewter pots at the
tavern door, the dogs that used to bark a welcome, recognizing in him a
kindred spirit of vagrancy: where were they?

And his wife, whose athletic arm and agile tongue had half disposed him
to linger in the mountains how happened it that she was not awaiting him
at the gate?  But gate there was none in the familiar place: an unfenced
yard of weeds and ruined foundation wall were there.  Rip's home was
gone.  The idlers jeered at his bent, lean form, his snarl of beard and
hair, his disreputable dress, his look of grieved astonishment.  He
stopped, instinctively, at the tavern, for he knew that place in spite
of its new sign: an officer in blue regimentals and a cocked hat
replacing the crimson George III. of his recollection, and labelled
"General Washington."  There was a quick gathering of ne'er-do-weels, of
tavern-haunters and gaping 'prentices, about him, and though their faces
were strange and their manners rude, he made bold to ask if they knew
such and such of his friends.

"Nick Vedder?  He's dead and gone these eighteen years."  "Brom Dutcher?
He joined the army and was killed at Stony Point."  "Van Brummel?
He, too, went to the war, and is in Congress now."

And Rip Van Winkle?"

"Yes, he's here.  That's him yonder."

And to Rip's utter confusion he saw before him a counterpart of himself,
as young, lazy, ragged, and easy-natured as he remembered himself to be,
yesterday--or, was it yesterday?

"That's young Rip," continued his informer.  "His father was Rip Van
Winkle, too, but he went to the mountains twenty years ago and never
came back.  He probably fell over a cliff, or was carried off by
Indians, or eaten by bears."

Twenty years ago!  Truly, it was so.  Rip had slept for twenty years
without awaking.  He had left a peaceful colonial village; he returned
to a bustling republican town.  How he eventually found, among the
oldest inhabitants, some who admitted that they knew him; how he found a
comfortable home with his married daughter and the son who took after
him so kindly; how he recovered from the effect of the tidings that his
wife had died of apoplexy, in a quarrel; how he resumed his seat at the
tavern tap and smoked long pipes and told long yarns for the rest of his
days, were matters of record up to the beginning of this century.

And a strange story Rip had to tell, for he had served as cup-bearer to
the dead crew of the Half Moon.  He had quaffed a cup of Hollands with
no other than Henry Hudson himself.  Some say that Hudson's spirit has
made its home amid these hills, that it may look into the lovely valley
that he discovered; but others hold that every twenty years he and his
men assemble for a revel in the mountains that so charmed them when
first seen swelling against the western heavens, and the liquor they
drink on this night has the bane of throwing any mortal who lips it into
a slumber whence nothing can arouse him until the day dawns when the
crew shall meet again.  As you climb the east front of the mountains by
the old carriage road, you pass, half-way up the height, the stone that
Rip Van Winkle slept on, and may see that it is slightly hollowed by his
form.  The ghostly revellers are due in the Catskills in 1909, and let
all tourists who are among the mountains in September of that year
beware of accepting liquor from strangers.




                             CATSKILL GNOMES

Behind the New Grand Hotel, in the Catskills, is an amphitheatre of
mountain that is held to be the place of which the Mohicans spoke when
they told of people there who worked in metals, and had bushy beards and
eyes like pigs.  From the smoke of their forges, in autumn, came the
haze of Indian summer; and when the moon was full, it was their custom
to assemble on the edge of a precipice above the hollow and dance and
caper until the night was nigh worn away.  They brewed a liquor that had
the effect of shortening the bodies and swelling the heads of all who
drank it, and when Hudson and his crew visited the mountains, the
pygmies held a carouse in his honor and invited him to drink their
liquor.  The crew went away, shrunken and distorted by the magic
distillation, and thus it was that Rip Van Winkle found them on the eve
of his famous sleep.




                            THE CATSKILL WITCH

When the Dutch gave the name of Katzbergs to the mountains west of the
Hudson, by reason of the wild-cats and panthers that ranged there, they
obliterated the beautiful Indian Ontiora, "mountains of the sky."  In
one tradition of the red men these hills were bones of a monster that
fed on human beings until the Great Spirit turned it into stone as it
was floundering toward the ocean to bathe.  The two lakes near the
summit were its eyes.  These peaks were the home of an Indian witch, who
adjusted the weather for the Hudson Valley with the certainty of a
signal service bureau.  It was she who let out the day and night in
blessed alternation, holding back the one when the other was at large,
for fear of conflict.  Old moons she cut into stars as soon as she had
hung new ones in the sky, and she was often seen perched on Round Top
and North Mountain, spinning clouds and flinging them to the winds.  Woe
betide the valley residents if they showed irreverence, for then the
clouds were black and heavy, and through them she poured floods of rain
and launched the lightnings, causing disastrous freshets in the streams
and blasting the wigwams of the mockers.  In a frolic humor she would
take the form of a bear or deer and lead the Indian hunters anything but
a merry dance, exposing them to tire and peril, and vanishing or
assuming some terrible shape when they had overtaken her.  Sometimes she
would lead them to the cloves and would leap into the air with a mocking
"Ho, ho!"  just as they stopped with a shudder at the brink of an abyss.
Garden Rock was a spot where she was often found, and at its foot a lake
once spread.  This was held in such awe that an Indian would never
wittingly pursue his quarry there; but once a hunter lost his way and
emerged from the forest at the edge of the pond.  Seeing a number of
gourds in crotches of the trees he took one, but fearing the spirit he
turned to leave so quickly that he stumbled and it fell.  As it broke, a
spring welled from it in such volume that the unhappy man was gulfed in
its waters, swept to the edge of Kaaterskill clove and dashed on the
rocks two hundred and sixty feet below.  Nor did the water ever cease to
run, and in these times the stream born of the witch's revenge is known
as Catskill Creek.




                         THE REVENGE OF SHANDAKEN

On the rock platform where the Catskill Mountain House now stands,
commanding one of the fairest views in the world, old chief Shandaken
set his wigwam,--for it is a mistake to suppose that barbarians are
indifferent to beauty,--and there his daughter, Lotowana, was sought in
marriage by his braves.  She, however, kept faith to an early vow
exchanged with a young chief of the Mohawks.  A suitor who was
particularly troublesome was Norsereddin, proud, morose, dark-featured,
a stranger to the red man, a descendant, so he claimed, from Egyptian
kings, and who lived by himself on Kaaterskill Creek, appearing among
white settlements but rarely.

On one of his visits to Catskill, a tavern-lounging Dutchman wagered him
a thousand golden crowns that he could not win Lotowana, and, stung by
avarice as well as inflamed by passion, Norsereddin laid new siege to
her heart.  Still the girl refused to listen, and Shandaken counselled
him to be content with the smiles of others, thereby so angering the
Egyptian that he assailed the chief and was driven from the camp with
blows; but on the day of Lotowana's wedding with the Mohawk he returned,
and in a honeyed speech asked leave to give a jewel to the bride to show
that he had stifled jealousy and ill will.  The girl took the handsome
box he gave her and drew the cover, when a spring flew forward, driving
into her hand the poisoned tooth of a snake that had been affixed to it.
The venom was strong, and in a few minutes Lotowana lay dead at her
husband's feet.

Though the Egyptian had disappeared into the forest directly on the
acceptance of his treacherous gift, twenty braves set off in pursuit,
and overtaking him on the Kalkberg, they dragged him back to the rock
where father and husband were bewailing the maid's untimely fate.  A
pile of fagots was heaped within a few feet of the precipice edge, and
tying their captive on them, they applied the torch, dancing about with
cries of exultation as the shrieks of the wretch echoed from the cliffs.
The dead girl was buried by the mourning tribe, while the ashes of
Norsereddin were left to be blown abroad.  On the day of his revenge
Shandaken left his ancient dwelling-place, and his camp-fires never
glimmered afterward on the front of Ontiora.




                          CONDEMNED TO THE NOOSE

Ralph Sutherland, who, early in the last century, occupied a stone house
a mile from Leeds, in the Catskills, was a man of morose and violent
disposition, whose servant, a Scotch girl, was virtually a slave,
inasmuch as she was bound to work for him without pay until she had
refunded to him her passage-money to this country.  Becoming weary of
bondage and of the tempers of her master, the girl ran away.  The man
set off in a raging chase, and she had not gone far before Sutherland
overtook her, tied her by the wrists to his horse's tail, and began the
homeward journey.  Afterward, he swore that the girl stumbled against
the horse's legs, so frightening the animal that it rushed off madly,
pitching him out of the saddle and dashing the servant to death on rocks
and trees; yet, knowing how ugly-tempered he could be, his neighbors
were better inclined to believe that he had driven the horse into a
gallop, intending to drag the girl for a short distance, as a
punishment, and to rein up before he had done serious mischief.  On this
supposition he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to die on the
scaffold.

The tricks of circumstantial evidence, together with pleas advanced by
influential relatives of the prisoner, induced the court to delay
sentence until the culprit should be ninety-nine years old, but it was
ordered that, while released on his own recognizance, in the interim, he
should keep a hangman's noose about his neck and show himself before the
judges in Catskill once every year, to prove that he wore his badge of
infamy and kept his crime in mind.  This sentence he obeyed, and there
were people living recently who claimed to remember him as he went about
with a silken cord knotted at his throat.  He was always alone, he
seldom spoke, his rough, imperious manner had departed.  Only when
children asked him what the rope was for were his lips seen to quiver,
and then he would hurry away.  After dark his house was avoided, for
gossips said that a shrieking woman passed it nightly, tied at the tail
of a giant horse with fiery eyes and smoking nostrils; that a skeleton
in a winding sheet had been found there; that a curious thing, somewhat
like a woman, had been known to sit on his garden wall, with lights
shining from her finger-tips, uttering unearthly laughter; and that
domestic animals reproached the man by groaning and howling beneath his
windows.

These beliefs he knew, yet he neither grieved, nor scorned, nor answered
when he was told of them.  Years sped on.  Every year deepened his
reserve and loneliness, and some began to whisper that he would take his
own way out of the world, though others answered that men who were born
to be hanged would never be drowned; but a new republic was created; new
laws were made; new judges sat to minister them; so, on Ralph
Sutherland's ninety-ninth birthday anniversary, there were none who
would accuse him or execute sentence.  He lived yet another year, dying
in 1801.  But was it from habit, or was it in self-punishment and
remorse, that he never took off the cord?  for, when he drew his last
breath, though it was in his own house, his throat was still encircled
by the hangman's rope.




                               BIG INDIAN

Intermarriages between white people and red ones in this country were
not uncommon in the days when our ancestors led as rude a life as the
natives, and several places in the Catskills commemorate this fact.
Mount Utsayantha, for example, is named for an Indian woman whose life,
with that of her baby and her white husband, was lost there.  For the
white men early found friends among these mountains.  As far back as
1663 they spared Catherine Dubois and her three children, after some
rash spirits had abducted them and carried them to a place on the upper
Walkill, to do them to death; for the captives raised a Huguenot hymn
and the hearts of their captors were softened.

In Esopus Valley lived Winnisook, whose height was seven feet, and who
was known among the white settlers as "the big Indian."  He loved a
white girl of the neighborhood, one Gertrude Molyneux, and had asked for
her hand; but while she was willing, the objections of her family were
too strong to be overcome, and she was teased into marriage with Joseph
Bundy, of her own race, instead.  She liked the Indian all the better
after that, however, because Bundy proved to be a bad fellow, and
believing that she could be happier among barbarians than among a people
that approved such marriages, she eloped with Winnisook.  For a long
time all trace of the runaway couple was lost, but one day the man
having gone down to the plain to steal cattle, it was alleged, was
discovered by some farmers who knew him, and who gave hot chase, coming
up with him at the place now called Big Indian.

Foremost in the chase was Bundy.  As he came near to the enemy of his
peace he exclaimed, "I think the best way to civilize that yellow
serpent is to let daylight into his heart," and, drawing his rifle to
his shoulder, he fired.  Mortally wounded, yet instinctively seeking
refuge, the giant staggered into the hollow of a pine-tree, where the
farmers lost sight of him.  There, however, he was found by Gertrude,
bolt upright, yet dead.  The unwedded widow brought her dusky children
to the place and spent the remainder of her days near his grave.  Until
a few years ago the tree was still pointed out, but a railroad company
has now covered it with an embankment.




                            THE BAKER'S DOZEN

Baas [Boss] Volckert Jan Pietersen Van Amsterdam kept a bake-shop in
Albany, and lives in history as the man who invented New Year cakes and
made gingerbread babies in the likeness of his own fat offspring.  Good
churchman though he was, the bane of his life was a fear of being
bewitched, and perhaps it was to keep out evil spirits, who might make
one last effort to gain the mastery over him, ere he turned the
customary leaf with the incoming year, that he had primed himself with
an extra glass of spirits on the last night of 1654. His sales had been
brisk, and as he sat in his little shop, meditating comfortably on the
gains he would make when his harmless rivals--the knikkerbakkers (bakers
of marbles)--sent for their usual supply of olie-koeks and mince-pies on
the morrow, he was startled by a sharp rap, and an ugly old woman
entered.  "Give me a dozen New Year's cookies!"  she cried, in a shrill
voice.

"Vell, den, you needn' sbeak so loud.  I aind teaf, den."

"A dozen!"  she screamed.  "Give me a dozen.  Here are only twelve."

"Vell, den, dwalf is a dozen."

"One more!  I want a dozen."

"Vell, den, if you vant anodder, go to de duyvil and ged it."

Did the hag take him at his word?  She left the shop, and from that time
it seemed as if poor Volckert was bewitched, indeed, for his cakes were
stolen; his bread was so light that it went up the chimney, when it was
not so heavy that it fell through the oven; invisible hands plucked
bricks from that same oven and pelted him until he was blue; his wife
became deaf, his children went unkempt, and his trade went elsewhere.
Thrice the old woman reappeared, and each time was sent anew to the
devil; but at last, in despair, the baker called on Saint Nicolaus to
come and advise him.  His call was answered with startling quickness,
for, almost while he was making it, the venerable patron of Dutch feasts
stood before him.  The good soul advised the trembling man to be more
generous in his dealings with his fellows, and after a lecture on
charity he vanished, when, lo! the old woman was there in his place.

She repeated her demand for one more cake, and Volckert Jan Pietersen,
etc., gave it, whereupon she exclaimed, "The spell is broken, and from
this time a dozen is thirteen!"  Taking from the counter a gingerbread
effigy of Saint Nicolaus, she made the astonished Dutchman lay his hand
upon it and swear to give more liberal measure in the future.  So, until
thirteen new States arose from the ruins of the colonies,--when the
shrewd Yankees restored the original measure,--thirteen made a baker's
dozen.




                        THE DEVIL'S DANCE-CHAMBER.

Most storied of our New World rivers is the Hudson.  Historic scenes
have been enacted on its shores, and Indian, Dutchman, Briton, and
American have invested it with romance.  It had its source, in the red
man's fancy, in a spring of eternal youth; giants and spirits dwelt in
its woods and hills, and before the river-Shatemuc, king of streams, the
red men called it--had broken through the highlands, those mountains
were a pent for spirits who had rebelled against the Manitou.  After the
waters had forced a passage to the sea these evil ones sought shelter in
the glens and valleys that open to right and left along its course, but
in time of tempest, when they hear Manitou riding down the ravine on
wings of storm, dashing thunderbolts against the cliffs, it is the fear
that he will recapture them and force them into lightless caverns to
expiate their revolt, that sends them huddling among the rocks and makes
the hills resound with roars and howls.

At the Devil's Dance-Chamber, a slight plateau on the west bank, between
Newburg and Crom Elbow, the red men performed semi-religious rites as a
preface to their hunting and fishing trips or ventures on the war-path.
They built a fire, painted themselves, and in that frenzy into which
savages are so readily lashed, and that is so like to the action of mobs
in trousers, they tumbled, leaped, danced, yelled, sang, grimaced, and
gesticulated until the Manitou disclosed himself, either as a harmless
animal or a beast of prey.  If he came in the former shape the augury
was favorable, but if he showed himself as a bear or panther, it was a
warning of evil that they seldom dared to disregard.

The crew of Hudson's ship, the Half Moon, having chanced on one of these
orgies, were so impressed by the fantastic spectacle that they gave the
name Duyvels Dans-Kamer to the spot.  Years afterwards, when Stuyvesant
ascended the river, his doughty retainers were horrified, on landing
below the Dans-Kamer, to discover hundreds of painted figures frisking
there in the fire-light.  A few surmised that they were but a new
generation of savages holding a powwow, but most of the sailors fancied
that the assemblage was demoniac, and that the figures were spirits of
bad Indians repeating a scalp-dance and revelling in the mysterious
fire-water that they had brought down from the river source in jars and
skins.  The spot was at least once profaned with blood, for a young
Dutchman and his wife, of Albany, were captured here by an angry Indian,
and although the young man succeeded in stabbing his captor to death, he
was burned alive on the rock by the friends of the Indian whose wrath he
had provoked.  The wife, after being kept in captivity for a time, was
ransomed.




                             THE CULPRIT FAY

The wood-tick's drum convokes the elves at the noon of night on Cro'
Nest top, and, clambering out of their flower-cup beds and hammocks of
cobweb, they fly to the meeting, not to freak about the grass or banquet
at the mushroom table, but to hear sentence passed on the fay who,
forgetting his vestal vow, has loved an earthly maid.  From his throne
under a canopy of tulip petals, borne on pillars of shell, the king
commands silence, and with severe eye but softened voice he tells the
culprit that while he has scorned the royal decree he has saved himself
from the extreme penalty, of imprisonment in walnut shells and cobweb
dungeons, by loving a maid who is gentle and pure.  So it shall be
enough if he will go down to the Hudson and seize a drop from the bow of
mist that a sturgeon leaves when he makes his leap; and after, to kindle
his darkened flame-wood lamp at a meteor spark.  The fairy bows, and
without a word slowly descends the rocky steep, for his wing is soiled
and has lost its power; but once at the river, he tugs amain at a mussel
shell till he has it afloat; then, leaping in, he paddles out with a
strong grass blade till he comes to the spot where the sturgeon swims,
though the watersprites plague him and toss his boat, and the fish and
the leeches bunt and drag; but, suddenly, the sturgeon shoots from the
water, and ere the arch of mist that he tracks through the air has
vanished, the sprite has caught a drop of the spray in a tiny blossom,
and in this he washes clean his wings.

The water-goblins torment him no longer.  They push his boat to the
shore, where, alighting, he kisses his hand, then, even as a bubble, he
flies back to the mountain top, dons his acorn helmet, his corselet of
bee-hide, his shield of lady-bug shell, and grasping his lance, tipped
with wasp sting, he bestrides his fire-fly steed and off he goes like a
flash.  The world spreads out and then grows small, but he flies
straight on.  The ice-ghosts leer from the topmost clouds, and the mists
surge round, but he shakes his lance and pipes his call, and at last he
comes to the Milky Way, where the sky-sylphs lead him to their queen,
who lies couched in a palace ceiled with stars, its dome held up by
northern lights and the curtains made of the morning's flush.  Her
mantle is twilight purple, tied with threads of gold from the eastern
dawn, and her face is as fair as the silver moon.

She begs the fay to stay with her and taste forever the joys of heaven,
but the knightly elf keeps down the beating of his heart, for he
remembers a face on earth that is fairer than hers, and he begs to go.
With a sigh she fits him a car of cloud, with the fire-fly steed chained
on behind, and he hurries away to the northern sky whence the meteor
comes, with roar and whirl, and as it passes it bursts to flame.  He
lights his lamp at a glowing spark, then wheels away to the fairy-land.
His king and his brothers hail him stoutly, with song and shout, and
feast and dance, and the revel is kept till the eastern sky has a ruddy
streak.  Then the cock crows shrill and the fays are gone.




                                 POKEPSIE

The name of this town has forty-two spellings in old records, and with
singular pertinacity in ill-doing, the inhabitants have fastened on it
the longest and clumsiest of all.  It comes from the Mohegan words Apo-
keep-sink, meaning a safe, pleasant harbor.  Harbor it might be for
canoes, but for nothing bigger, for it was only the little cove that was
so called between Call Rock and Adder Cliff,--the former indicating
where settlers awaiting passage hailed the masters of vessels from its
top, and the latter taking its name from the snakes that abounded there.

Hither came a band of Delawares with Pequot captives, among them a young
chief to whom had been offered not only life but leadership if he would
renounce his tribe, receive the mark of the turtle on his breast, and
become a Delaware.  On his refusal, he was bound to a tree, and was
about to undergo the torture, when a girl among the listeners sprang to
his side.  She, too, was a Pequot, but the turtle totem was on her
bosom, and when she begged his life, because they had been betrothed,
the captors paused to talk of it.  She had chosen well the time to
interfere, for a band of Hurons was approaching, and even as the talk
went on their yell was heard in the wood.  Instant measures for defence
were taken, and in the fight that followed both chief and maiden were
forgotten; but though she cut the cords that bound him, they were
separated in the confusion, he disappearing, she falling captive to the
Hurons, who, sated with blood, retired from the field.  In the fantastic
disguise of a wizard the young Pequot entered their camp soon after, and
on being asked to try his enchantments for the cure of a young woman, he
entered her tent, showing no surprise at finding her to be the maiden of
his choice, who was suffering from nothing worse than nerves, due to the
excitement of the battle.  Left alone with his patient, he disclosed his
identity, and planned a way of escape that proved effective on that very
night, for, though pursued by the angry Hurons, the couple reached "safe
harbor," thence making a way to their own country in the east, where
they were married.




                                DUNDERBERG

Dunderberg, "Thunder Mountain," at the southern gate of the Hudson
Highlands, is a wooded eminence, chiefly populated by a crew of imps of
stout circumference, whose leader, the Heer, is a bulbous goblin clad in
the dress worn by Dutch colonists two centuries ago, and carrying a
speaking-trumpet, through which he bawls his orders for the blowing of
winds and the touching off of lightnings.  These orders are given in Low
Dutch, and are put into execution by the imps aforesaid, who troop into
the air and tumble about in the mist, sometimes smiting the flag or
topsail of a ship to ribbons, or laying the vessel over before the wind
until she is in peril of going on beam ends.  At one time a sloop
passing the Dunderberg had nearly foundered, when the crew discovered
the sugar-loaf hat of the Heer at the mast-head.  None dared to climb
for it, and it was not until she had driven past Pollopel's Island--the
limit of the Heer's jurisdiction--that she righted.  As she did so the
little hat spun into the air like a top, creating a vortex that drew up
the storm-clouds, and the sloop kept her way prosperously for the rest
of the voyage.  The captain had nailed a horse-shoe to the mast.  The
"Hat Rogue" of the Devil's Bridge in Switzerland must be a relative of
this gamesome sprite, for his mischief is usually of a harmless sort;
but, to be on the safe side, the Dutchmen who plied along the river
lowered their peaks in homage to the keeper of the mountain, and for
years this was a common practice.  Mariners who paid this courtesy to
the Heer of the Donder Berg were never molested by his imps, though
skipper Ouselsticker, of Fishkill,--for all he had a parson on board,--
was once beset by a heavy squall, and the goblin came out of the mist
and sat astraddle of his bowsprit, seeming to guide his schooner
straight toward the rocks.  The dominie chanted the song of Saint
Nicolaus, and the goblin, unable to endure either its spiritual potency
or the worthy parson's singing, shot upward like a ball and rode off on
the gale, carrying with him the nightcap of the parson's wife, which he
hung on the weathercock of Esopus steeple, forty miles away.




                              ANTHONY'S NOSE

The Hudson Highlands are suggestively named Bear Mountain, Sugar Loaf,
Cro' Nest, Storm King, called by the Dutch Boterberg, or Butter Hill,
from its likeness to a pat of butter; Beacon Hill, where the fires
blazed to tell the country that the Revolutionary war was over;
Dunderberg, Mount Taurus, so called because a wild bull that had
terrorized the Highlands was chased out of his haunts on this height,
and was killed by falling from a cliff on an eminence to the northward,
known, in consequence, as Breakneck Hill.  These, with Anthony's Nose,
are the principal points of interest in the lovely and impressive
panorama that unfolds before the view as the boats fly onward.

Concerning the last-named elevation, the aquiline promontory that abuts
on the Hudson opposite Dunderberg, it takes title from no resemblance to
the human feature, but is so named because Anthony Van Corlaer, the
trumpeter, who afterwards left a reason for calling the upper boundary
of Manhattan Island Spuyten Duyvil Creek, killed the first sturgeon ever
eaten at the foot of this mountain.  It happened in this wise: By
assiduous devotion to keg and flagon Anthony had begotten a nose that
was the wonder and admiration of all who knew it, for its size was
prodigious; in color it rivalled the carbuncle, and it shone like
polished copper.  As Anthony was lounging over the quarter of Peter
Stuyvesant's galley one summer morning this nose caught a ray from the
sun and reflected it hissing into the water, where it killed a sturgeon
that was rising beside the vessel.  The fish was pulled aboard, eaten,
and declared good, though the singed place savored of brimstone, and in
commemoration of the event Stuyvesant dubbed the mountain that rose
above his vessel Anthony's Nose.




                               MOODUA CREEK

Moodua is an evolution, through Murdy's and Moodna, from Murderer's
Creek, its present inexpressive name having been given to it by N. P.
Willis.  One Murdock lived on its shore with his wife, two sons, and a
daughter; and often in the evening Naoman, a warrior of a neighboring
tribe, came to the cabin, caressed the children, and shared the
woodman's hospitality.  One day the little girl found in the forest an
arrow wrapped in snake-skin and tipped with crow's feather; then the boy
found a hatchet hanging by a hair from a bough above the door; then a
glare of evil eyes was caught for an instant in a thicket.  Naoman, when
he came, was reserved and stern, finding voice only to warn the family
to fly that night; so, when all was still, the threatened family made
its way softly, but quickly, to the Hudson shore, and embarked for
Fisher's Kill, across the river.

The wind lagged and their boat drew heavily, and when, from the shade of
Pollopel's Island, a canoe swept out, propelled by twelve men, the
hearts of the people in the boat sank in despair.  The wife was about to
leap over, but Murdock drew her back; then, loading and firing as fast
as possible, he laid six of his pursuers low; but the canoe was savagely
urged forward, and in another minute every member of the family was a
helpless captive.  When the skiff had been dragged back, the prisoners
were marched through the wood to an open spot where the principal
members of the tribe sat in council.

The sachem arose, twisted his hands in the woman's golden hair, bared
his knife, and cried, "Tell us what Indian warned you and betrayed his
tribe, or you shall see husband and children bleed before your eyes."
The woman answered never a word, but after a little Naoman arose and
said, "'Twas I;" then drew his blanket about him and knelt for
execution.  An axe cleft his skull.  Drunk with the sight of blood, the
Indians rushed upon the captives and slew them, one by one.  The
prisoners neither shrank nor cried for mercy, but met their end with
hymns upon their lips, and, seeing that they could so meet death, one
member of the band let fall his arm and straight became a Christian.
The cabin was burned, the bodies flung into the stream, and the stain of
blood was seen for many a year in Murderer's Creek.




                      A TRAPPER'S GHASTLY VENGEANCE

About a mile back from the Hudson, at Coxsackie, stood the cabin of Nick
Wolsey, who, in the last century, was known to the river settlements as
a hunter and trapper of correct aim, shrewdness, endurance, and taciturn
habit.  For many years he lived in this cabin alone, except for the
company of his dog; but while visiting a camp of Indians in the
wilderness he was struck with the engaging manner of one of the girls of
the tribe; he repeated the visit; he found cause to go to the camp
frequently; he made presents to the father of the maid, and at length
won her consent to be his wife.  The simple marriage ceremony of the
tribe was performed, and Wolsey led Minamee to his home; but the wedding
was interrupted in an almost tragic manner, for a surly fellow who had
loved the girl, yet who never had found courage to declare himself, was
wrought to such a jealous fury at the discovery of Wolsey's good fortune
that he sprang at him with a knife, and would have despatched him on the
spot had not the white man's faithful hound leaped at his throat and
borne him to the ground.

Wolsey disarmed the fellow and kicked and cuffed him to the edge of the
wood, while the whole company shouted with laughter at this ignominious
punishment, and approved it.  A year or more passed.  Wolsey and his
Indian wife were happy in their free and simple life; happy, too, in
their little babe.  Wolsey was seldom absent from his cabin for any
considerable length of time, and usually returned to it before the night
set in.  One evening he noticed that the grass and twigs were bent near
his house by some passing foot that, with the keen eye of the woodman,
he saw was not his wife's.

"Some hunter," he said, "saw the house when he passed here, and as,
belike, he never saw one before, he stopped to look in."  For the trail
led to his window, and diverged thence to the forest again.  A few days
later, as he was returning, he came on the footprints that were freshly
made, and a shadow crossed his face.  On nearing the door he stumbled on
the body of his dog, lying rigid on the ground.  "How did this happen,
Minamee?"  he cried, as he flung open the door.  The wife answered, in a
low voice, "O Hush! you'll wake the child."

Nick Wolsey entered the cabin and stood as one turned to marble.
Minamee, his wife, sat on the gold hearth, her face and hands cut and
blackened, her dress torn, her eyes glassy, a meaningless smile on her
lips.  In her arms she pressed the body of her infant, its dress soaked
with blood, and the head of the little creature lay on the floor beside
her.  She crooned softly over the cold clay as if hushing it to sleep,
and when Wolsey at length found words, she only whispered, "Hush! you
will wake him."  The night went heavily on; day dawned, and the crooning
became lower and lower; still, through all that day the bereft woman
rocked to and fro upon the floor, and the agonized husband hung about
her, trying in vain to give comfort, to bind her wounds, to get some
explanation of the mystery that confronted him.  The second night set
in, and it was evident that it would be the last for Minamee.  Her
strength failed until she allowed herself to be placed on a couch of
skins, while the body of her child was gently lifted from her arms.
Then, for a few brief minutes, her reason was restored, and she found
words to tell her husband how the Indian whose murderous attack he had
thwarted at the wedding had come to the cabin, shot the dog that had
rushed out to defend the place, beat the woman back from the door, tore
the baby from its bed, slashed its head off with a knife, and, flinging
the little body into her lap, departed with the words, "This is my
revenge.  I am satisfied."  Before the sun was in the east again Minamee
was with her baby.

Wolsey sat for hours in the ruin of his happiness, his breathing alone
proving that he was alive, and when at last he arose and went out of the
house, there were neither tears nor outcry; he saddled his horse and
rode off to the westward.  At nightfall he came to the Indian village
where he had won his wife, and relating to the assembled tribe what had
happened, he demanded that the murderer be given up to him.  His demand
was readily granted, whereupon the white man advanced on the cowering
wretch, who had confidently expected the protection of his people, and
with the quick fling and jerk of a raw-hide rope bound his arms to his
side.  Then casting a noose about his neck and tying the end of it to
his saddle-bow, he set off for the Hudson.  All that night he rode, the
Indian walking and running at the horse's heels, and next day he reached
his cabin.  Tying his prisoner to a tree, the trapper cut a quantity of
young willows, from which he fashioned a large cradle-like receptacle;
in this he placed the culprit, face upward, and tied so stoutly that he
could not move a finger; then going into his house, he emerged with the
body of Minamee, and laid it, face downward, on the wretch, who could
not repress a groan of horror as the awful burden sank on his breast.
Wolsey bound together the living and the dead, and with a swing of his
powerful arms he flung them on his horse's back, securing them there
with so many turns of rope that nothing could displace them.  Now he
began to lash his horse until the poor beast trembled with anger and
pain, when, flinging off the halter, he gave it a final lash, and the
animal plunged, foaming and snorting, into the wilderness.  When it had
vanished and the hoof-beats were no longer heard, Nick Wolsey took his
rifle on his arm and left his home forever.  And tradition says that the
horse never stopped in its mad career, but that on still nights it can
be heard sweeping through the woods along the Hudson and along the
Mohawk like a whirlwind, and that as the sound goes by a smothered voice
breaks out in cursing, in appeal, then in harsh and dreadful laughter.




THE VANDERDECKEN OF TAPPAN ZEE

It is Saturday night; the swell of the Hudson lazily heaves against the
shores of Tappan Zee, the cliff above Tarrytown where the white lady
cries on winter nights is pale in starlight, and crickets chirp in the
boskage.  It is so still that the lap of oars can be heard coming across
the water at least a mile away.  Some small boat, evidently, but of
heavy build, for it takes a vigorous hand to propel it, and now there is
a grinding of oars on thole-pins.  Strange that it is not yet seen, for
the sound is near.  Look!  Is that a shadow crossing that wrinkle of
starlight in the water?  The oars have stopped, and there is no wind to
make that sound of a sigh.

Ho, Rambout Van Dam!  Is it you?  Are you still expiating your oath to
pull from Kakiat to Spuyten Duyvil before the dawn of Sabbath, if it
takes you a month of Sundays?  Better for you had you passed the night
with your roistering friends at Kakiat, or started homeward earlier, for
Sabbath-breaking is no sin now, and you, poor ghost, will find little
sympathy for your plight.  Grant that your month of Sundays, or your
cycle of months of Sundays, be soon up, for it is sad to be reminded
that we may be punished for offences many years forgotten.  When the sun
is high to-morrow a score of barges will vex the sea of Tappan, each
crowded with men and maids from New Amsterdam, jigging to profane music
and refreshing themselves with such liquors as you, Rambout, never even
smelled--be thankful for that much.  If your shade sits blinking at them
from the wooded buttresses of the Palisades, you must repine, indeed, at
the hardness of your fate.




                          THE GALLOPING HESSIAN

In the flower-gemmed cemetery of Tarrytown, where gentle Irving sleeps,
a Hessian soldier was interred after sustaining misfortune in the loss
of his head in one of the Revolutionary battles.  For a long time after
he was buried it was the habit of this gentleman to crawl from his grave
at unseemly hours and gallop about the country, sending shivers through
the frames of many worthy people, who shrank under their blankets when
they heard the rush of hoofs along the unlighted roads.

In later times there lived in Tarrytown--so named because of the
tarrying habits of Dutch gossips on market days, though some hard-minded
people insist that Tarwe-town means Wheat-towna gaunt schoolmaster, one
Ichabod Crane, who cherished sweet sentiments for Katrina Van Tassell,
the buxom daughter of a farmer, also a famous maker of pies and
doughnuts.  Ichabod had been calling late one evening, and, his way home
being long, Katrina's father lent him a horse to make the journey; but
even with this advantage the youth set out with misgivings, for he had
to pass the graveyard.

As it was near the hour when the Hessian was to ride, he whistled feebly
to keep his courage up, but when he came to the dreaded spot the whistle
died in a gasp, for he heard the tread of a horse.  On looking around,
his hair bristled and his heart came up like a plug in his throat to
hinder his breathing, for he saw a headless horseman coming over the
ridge behind him, blackly defined against the starry sky.  Setting spurs
to his nag with a hope of being first to reach Sleepy Hollow bridge,
which the spectre never passed, the unhappy man made the best possible
time in that direction, for his follower was surely overtaking him.
Another minute and the bridge would be reached; but, to Ichabod's
horror, the Hessian dashed alongside and, rising in his stirrups, flung
his head full at the fugitive's back.  With a squeal of fright the
schoolmaster rolled into a mass of weeds by the wayside, and for some
minutes he remained there, knowing and remembering nothing.

Next morning farmer Van Tassell's horse was found grazing in a field
near Sleepy Hollow, and a man who lived some miles southward reported
that he had seen Mr. Crane striding as rapidly along the road to New
York as his lean legs could take him, and wearing a pale and serious
face as he kept his march.  There were yellow stains on the back of his
coat, and the man who restored the horse found a smashed pumpkin in the
broken bushes beside the road.  Ichabod never returned to Tarrytown, and
when Brom Bones, a stout young ploughman and taphaunter, married
Katrina, people made bold to say that he knew more about the galloping
Hessian than any one else, though they believed that he never had reason
to be jealous of Ichabod Crane.




                         STORM SHIP OF THE HUDSON

It was noised about New Amsterdam, two hundred years ago, that a round
and bulky ship flying Dutch colors from her lofty quarter was careering
up the harbor in the teeth of a north wind, through the swift waters of
an ebbing tide, and making for the Hudson.  A signal from the Battery to
heave to and account for herself being disregarded, a cannon was trained
upon her, and a ball went whistling through her cloudy and imponderable
mass, for timbers she had none.  Some of the sailor-folk talked of
mirages that rose into the air of northern coasts and seas, but the wise
ones put their fingers beside their noses and called to memory the
Flying Dutchman, that wanderer of the seas whose captain, having sworn
that he would round Cape Horn in spite of heaven and hell, has been
beating to and fro along the bleak Fuegian coast and elsewhere for
centuries, being allowed to land but once in seven years, when he can
break the curse if he finds a girl who will love him.  Perhaps Captain
Vanderdecken found this maiden of his hopes in some Dutch settlement on
the Hudson, or perhaps he expiated his rashness by prayer and penitence;
howbeit, he never came down again, unless he slipped away to sea in snow
or fog so dense that watchers and boatmen saw nothing of his passing.  A
few old settlers declared the vessel to be the Half Moon, and there were
some who testified to seeing that identical ship with Hudson and his
spectre crew on board making for the Catskills to hold carouse.

This fleeting vision has been confounded with the storm ship that lurks
about the foot of the Palisades and Point-no-Point, cruising through
Tappan Zee at night when a gale is coming up.  The Hudson is four miles
wide at Tappan, and squalls have space enough to gather force; hence,
when old skippers saw the misty form of a ship steal out from the
shadows of the western hills, then fly like a gull from shore to shore,
catching the moonlight on her topsails, but showing no lanterns, they
made to windward and dropped anchor, unless their craft were stanch and
their pilot's brains unvexed with liquor.  On summer nights, when falls
that curious silence which is ominous of tempest, the storm ship is not
only seen spinning across the mirror surface of the river, but the
voices of the crew are heard as they chant at the braces and halyards in
words devoid of meaning to the listeners.




                      WHY SPUYTEN DUYVIL IS SO NAMED

The tide-water creek that forms the upper boundary of Manhattan Island
is known to dwellers in tenements round about as "Spittin' Divvle."  The
proper name of it is Spuyten Duyvil, and this, in turn, is the
compression of a celebrated boast by Anthony Van Corlaer.  This
redoubtable gentleman, famous for fat, long wind, and long whiskers, was
trumpeter for the garrison at New Amsterdam, which his countrymen had
just bought for twenty-four dollars, and he sounded the brass so
sturdily that in the fight between the Dutch and Indians at the Dey
Street peach orchard his blasts struck more terror into the red men's
hearts than did the matchlocks of his comrades.  William the Testy vowed
that Anthony and his trumpet were garrison enough for all Manhattan
Island, for he argued that no regiment of Yankees would approach near
enough to be struck with lasting deafness, as must have happened if they
came when Anthony was awake.

Peter Stuyvesant-Peter the Headstrong--showed his appreciation of
Anthony's worth by making him his esquire, and when he got news of an
English expedition on its way to seize his unoffending colony, he at
once ordered Anthony to rouse the villages along the Hudson with a
trumpet call to war.  The esquire took a hurried leave of six or eight
ladies, each of whom delighted to believe that his affections were
lavished on her alone, and bravely started northward, his trumpet
hanging on one side, a stone bottle, much heavier, depending from the
other.  It was a stormy evening when he arrived at the upper end of the
island, and there was no ferryman in sight, so, after fuming up and down
the shore, he swallowed a mighty draught of Dutch courage,--for he was
as accomplished a performer on the horn as on the trumpet,--and swore
with ornate and voluminous oaths that he would swim the stream "in spite
of the devil" [En spuyt den Duyvil].

He plunged in, and had gone half-way across when the Evil One, not to be
spited, appeared as a huge moss-bunker, vomiting boiling water and
lashing a fiery tail.  This dreadful fish seized Anthony by the leg; but
the trumpeter was game, for, raising his instrument to his lips, he
exhaled his last breath through it in a defiant blast that rang through
the woods for miles and made the devil himself let go for a moment.
Then he was dragged below, his nose shining through the water more and
more faintly, until, at last, all sight of him was lost.  The failure of
his mission resulted in the downfall of the Dutch in America, for, soon
after, the English won a bloodless victory, and St. George's cross
flaunted from the ramparts where Anthony had so often saluted the
setting sun.  But it was years, even then, before he was hushed, for in
stormy weather it was claimed that the shrill of his trumpet could be
heard near the creek that he had named, sounding above the deeper roar
of the blast.




                          THE RAMAPO SALAMANDER

A curious tale of the Rosicrucians runs to the effect that more than two
centuries ago a band of German colonists entered the Ramapo valley and
put up houses of stone, like those they had left in the Hartz Mountains,
and when the Indians saw how they made knives and other wonderful things
out of metal, which they extracted from the rocks by fire, they believed
them to be manitous and went away, not wishing to resist their
possession of the land.  There was treasure here, for High Tor, or Torn
Mountain, had been the home of Amasis, youngest of the magi who had
followed the star of Bethlehem.  He had found his way, through Asia and
Alaska, to this country, had taken to wife a native woman, by whom he
had a child, and here on the summit he had built a temple.  Having
refused the sun worship, when the Indians demanded that he should take
their faith, he was set upon, and would have been killed had not an
earthquake torn the ground at his feet, opening a new channel for the
Hudson and precipitating into it every one but the magus and his
daughter.  To him had been revealed in magic vision the secrets of
wealth in the rocks.

The leader in the German colony, one Hugo, was a man of noble origin,
who had a wife and two children: a boy, named after himself; a girl,--
Mary.  Though it had been the custom in the other country to let out the
forge fires once in seven years, Hugo opposed that practice in the forge
he had built as needless.  But his men murmured and talked of the
salamander that once in seven years attains its growth in unquenched
flame and goes forth doing mischief.  On the day when that period was
ended the master entered his works and saw the men gazing into the
furnace at a pale form that seemed made from flame, that was nodding and
turning in the fire, occasionally darting its tongue at them or allowing
its tail to fall out and lie along the stone floor.  As he came to the
door he, too, was transfixed, and the fire seemed burning his vitals,
until he felt water sprinkled on his face, and saw that his wife, whom
he had left at home too ill to move, stood behind him and was casting
holy water into the furnace, speaking an incantation as she did so.  At
that moment a storm arose, and a rain fell that put out the fire; but as
the last glow faded the lady fell dead.

When her children were to be consecrated, seven years later, those who
stood outside of the church during the ceremony saw a vivid flash, and
the nurse turned from the boy in her fright.  She took her hands from
her eyes.  The child was gone.  Twice seven years had passed and the
daughter remained unspotted by the world, for, on the night when her
father had led her to the top of High Torn Mountain and shown her what
Amasis had seen,--the earth spirits in their caves heaping jewels and
offering to give them if Hugo would speak the word that binds the free
to the earth forces and bars his future for a thousand years,--it was
her prayer that brought him to his senses and made the scene below grow
dim, though the baleful light of the salamander clinging to the rocks at
the bottom of the cave sent a glow into the sky.

Many nights after that the glow was seen on the height and Hugo was
missing from his home, but for lack of a pure soul to stand as
interpreter he failed to read the words that burned in the triangle on
the salamander's back, and returned in rage and jealousy.  A knightly
man had of late appeared in the settlement, and between him and Mary a
tender feeling had arisen, that, however, was unexpressed until, after
saving her from the attack of a panther, he had allowed her to fall into
his arms.  She would willingly then have declared her love for him, but
he placed her gently and regretfully from him and said, "When you slept
I came to you and put a crown of gems on your head: that was because I
was in the power of the earth spirit.  Then I had power only over the
element of fire, that either consumes or hardens to stone; but now water
and life are mine.  Behold!  Wear these, for thou art worthy."  And
touching the tears that had fallen from her eyes, they turned into
lilies in his hands, and he put them on her brow.

"Shall we meet again?"  asked the girl.

"I do not know," said he.  "I tread the darkness of the universe alone,
and I peril my redemption by yielding to this love of earth.  Thou art
redeemed already, but I must make my way back to God through obedience
tested in trial.  Know that I am one of those that left heaven for love
of man.  We were of that subtle element which is flame, burning and
glowing with love,--and when thy mother came to me with the power of
purity to cast me out of the furnace, I lost my shape of fire and took
that of a human being,--a child.  I have been with thee often, and was
rushing to annihilation, because I could not withstand the ordeal of the
senses.  Had I yielded, or found thee other than thou art, I should have
become again an earth spirit.  I have been led away by wish for power,
such as I have in my grasp, and forgot the mission to the suffering.  I
became a wanderer over the earth until I reached this land, the land
that you call new.  Here was to be my last trial and here I am to pass
the gate of fire."

As he spoke voices arose from the settlement.

"They are coming," said he.  The stout form of Hugo was in advance.
With a fierce oath he sprang on the young man.  "He has ruined my
household," he cried.  "Fling him into the furnace!"  The young man
stood waiting, but his brow was serene.  He was seized, and in a few
moments had disappeared through the mouth of the burning pit.  But Mary,
looking up, saw a shape in robes of silvery light, and it drifted upward
until it vanished in the darkness.  The look of horror on her face died
away, and a peace came to it that endured until the end.





                               CHIEF CROTON

Between the island of Manhattoes and the Catskills the Hudson shores
were plagued with spooks, and even as late as the nineteenth century
Hans Anderson, a man who tilled a farm back of Peekskill, was worried
into his grave by the leaden-face likeness of a British spy whom he had
hanged on General Putnam's orders.  "Old Put" doubtless enjoyed immunity
from this vexatious creature, because he was born with few nerves.  A
region especially afflicted was the confluence of the Croton and the
Hudson, for the Kitchawan buryingground was here, and the red people
being disturbed by the tramping of white men over their graves, "the
walking sachems of Teller's Point" were nightly to be met on their
errands of protest.

These Indians had built a palisade on Croton Point, and here they made
their last stand against their enemies from the north.  Throughout the
fight old chief Croton stood on the wall with arrows showering around
him, and directed the resistance with the utmost calm.  Not until every
one of his men was dead and the fort was going up in flame about him did
he confess defeat.  Then standing amid the charring timbers, he used his
last breath in calling down the curse of the Great Spirit against the
foe.  As the victorious enemy rushed into the enclosure to secure the
scalps of the dead he fell lifeless into the fire, and their jubilant
yell was lost upon his ears.  Yet, he could not rest nor bear to leave
his ancient home, even after death, and often his form, in musing
attitude, was seen moving through the woods.  When a manor was built on
the ruins of his fort, he appeared to the master of it, to urge him into
the Continental army, and having seen this behest obeyed and laid a
solemn injointure to keep the freedom of the land forever, he vanished,
and never appeared again.




                         THE RETREAT FROM MAHOPAC

After the English had secured the city of New Amsterdam and had begun
to extend their settlements along the Hudson, the Indians congregated
in large numbers about Lake Mahopac, and rejected all overtures for the
purchase of that region.  In their resolution they were sustained by
their young chief Omoyao, who refused to abandonon on any terms the
country where his fathers had solong hunted, fished, and built their
lodges.  A half-breed, one Joliper, a member of this tribe, was secretly
in the pay of the English, but the allurements and insinuations that he
put forth on their behalf were as futile as the breathing of wind in the
leaves.  At last the white men grew angry.  Have the land they would, by
evil course if good ways were refused, and commissioning Joliper to act
for them in a decisive manner, they guaranteed to supply him with forces
if his negotiations fell through.  This man never thought it needful to
negotiate.  He knew the temper of his tribe and he was too jealous of
his chief to go to him for favors, because he loved Maya, the chosen one
of Omoyao.

At the door of Maya's tent he entreated her to go with him to the white
settlements, and on her refusal he broke into angry threats, declaring,
in the self-forgetfulness of passion, that he would kill her lover and
lead the English against the tribe.  Unknown to both Omoyao had
overheard this interview, and he immediately sent runners to tell all
warriors of his people to meet him at once on the island in the lake.
Though the runners were cautioned to keep their errand secret, it is
probable that Joliper suspected that the alarm had gone forth, and he
resolved to strike at once; so he summoned his renegades, stole into
camp next evening and made toward Maya's wigwam, intending to take her
to a place of safety.  Seeing the chief at the door, he shot an arrow at
him, but the shaft went wide and slew the girl's father.  Realizing,
upon this assault, that he was outwitted and that his people were
outnumbered, the chief called to Maya to meet him at the island, and
plunged into the brush, after seeing that she had taken flight in an
opposite direction.  The vengeful Joliper was close behind him with his
renegades, and the chief was captured; then, that he might not
communicate with his people or delay the operations against them, it was
resolved to put him to death.

He was tied to a tree, the surrounding wood was set on fire, and he was
abandoned to his fate, his enemies leaving him to destruction in their
haste to reach the place of the council and slay or capture all who were
there.  Hardly were they out of hearing ere the plash of a paddle
sounded through the roar of flame and Maya sprang upon the bank, cut her
lover's bonds, and with him made toward the island, which they reached
by a protected way before the assailants had arrived.  They told the
story of Joliper's cruelty and treason, and when his boats were seen
coming in to shore they had eyes and hands only for Joliper.  He was the
first to land.  Hardly had he touched the strand before he was
surrounded by a frenzied crowd and had fallen bleeding from a hundred
gashes.

The Indians were overpowered after a brief and bloody resistance.  They
took safety in flight.  Omoyao and Maya, climbing upon the rock above
their "council chamber," found that while most of their people had
escaped their own retreat was cut off, and that it would be impossible
to reach any of the canoes.  They preferred death to torture and
captivity, so, hand in hand, they leaped together down the cliff, and
the English claimed the land next day.




                                 NIAGARA

The cataract of Niagara (properly pronounced Nee-ah-gah-rah), or
Oniahgarah, is as fatal as it is fascinating, beautiful, sublime, and
the casualties occurring there justify the tradition that "the
Thundering Water asks two victims every year."  It was reputed, before
white men looked for the first time on these falls--and what thumping
yarns they told about them!--that two lives were lost here annually, and
this average has been kept up by men and women who fall into the flood
through accident, recklessness or despair, while bloody battles have
been fought on the shores, and vessels have been hurled over the brink,
to be dashed to splinters on the rocks.

The sound of the cataract was declared to be the voice of a mighty
spirit that dwelt in the waters, and in former centuries the Indians
offered to it a yearly sacrifice.  This sacrifice was a maiden of the
tribe, who was sent over in a white canoe, decorated with fruit and
flowers, and the girls contended for this honor, for the brides of
Manitou were objects of a special grace in the happy hunting-grounds.
The last recorded sacrifice was in 1679, when Lelawala, the daughter of
chief Eagle Eye, was chosen, in spite of the urgings and protests of the
chevalier La Salle, who had been trying to restrain the people from
their idolatries by an exposition of the Christian dogma.  To his
protests he received the unexpected answer, "Your words witness against
you.  Christ, you say, set us an example.  We will follow it.  Why
should one death be great, while our sacrifice is horrible?"  So the
tribe gathered at the bank to watch the sailing of the white canoe.  The
chief watched the embarkation with the stoicism usual to the Indian when
he is observed by others, but when the little bark swung out into the
current his affection mastered him, and he leaped into his own canoe and
tried to overtake his daughter.  In a moment both were beyond the power
of rescue.  After their death they were changed into spirits of pure
strength and goodness, and live in a crystal heaven so far beneath the
fall that its roaring is a music to them: she, the maid of the mist; he,
the ruler of the cataract.  Another version of the legend makes a lover
and his mistress the chief actors.  Some years later a patriarch of the
tribe and all his sons went over the fall when the white men had seized
their lands, preferring death to flight or war.

In about the year 200 the Stone Giants waded across the river below the
falls on their northward march.  These beings were descended from an
ancient family, and being separated from their stock in the year 150 by
the breaking of a vine bridge across the Mississippi, they left that
region.  Indian Pass, in the Adirondacks, bore the names of Otneyarheh,
Stony Giants; Ganosgwah, Giants Clothed in Stone; and Dayohjegago, Place
Where the Storm Clouds Fight the Great Serpent.  Giants and serpents
were held to be harmful inventions of the Evil Spirit, and the Lightning
god, catching up clouds as he stood on the crags, broke them open, tore
their lightnings out and hurled them against the monsters.  These
cannibals had almost exterminated the Iroquois, for they were of immense
size and had made themselves almost invincible by rolling daily in the
sand until their flesh was like stone.  The Holder of the Heavens,
viewing their evil actions from on high, came down disguised as one of
their number--he used often to meditate on Manitou Rock, at the
Whirlpool--and leading them to a valley near Onondaga, on pretence of
guiding them to a fairer country, he stood on a hill above them and
hurled rocks upon their heads until all, save one, who fled into the
north, were dead.  Yet, in the fulness of time, new children of the
Stone Giants (mail-clad Europeans?) entered the region again and were
destroyed by the Great Spirit,--oddly enough where the famous fraud
known as the Cardiff giant was alleged to have been found.  The
Onondagas believed this statue to be one of their ancient foes.




                           THE DEFORMED OF ZOAR

The valley of Zoar, in western New York, is so surrounded by hills that
its discoverers--a religious people, who gave it a name from Scripture
said, "This is Zoar; it is impregnable.  From her we will never go."
And truly, for lack of roads, they found it so hard to get out, having
got in, that they did not leave it.  Among the early settlers here were
people of a family named Wright, whose house became a sort of inn for
the infrequent traveller, inasmuch as they were not troubled with piety,
and had no scruples against the selling of drink and the playing of
cards at late hours.  A peddler passed through the valley on his way to
Buffalo and stopped at the Wright house for a lodging, but before he
went to bed he incautiously showed a number of golden trinkets from his
pack and drew a considerable quantity of money out of his pocket when he
paid the fee for his lodging.  Hardly had he fallen asleep before his
greedy hosts were in the room, searching for his money.  Their lack of
caution caused him to awake, and as he found them rifling his pockets
and his pack he sprang up and showed fight.

A blow sent him to the bottom of the stairs, where his attempt to escape
was intercepted, and the family closed around him and bound his arms and
legs.  They showed him the money they had taken and asked where he had
concealed the rest.  He vowed that it was all he had.  They insisted
that he had more, and seizing a knife from the table the elder Wright
slashed off one of his toes "to make him confess."  No result came from
this, and six toes were cut off,--three from each foot; then, in
disgust, the unhappy peddler was knocked on the head and flung through a
trap-door into a shallow cellar.  Presently he arose and tried to draw
himself out, but with hatchet and knife they chopped away his fingers
and he fell back.  Even the women shared in this work, and leaned
forward to gaze into the cellar to see if he might yet be dead.  While
listening, they heard the man invoke the curse of heaven on them: he
asked that they should wear the mark of crime even to the fourth
generation, by coming into the world deformed and mutilated as he was
then.  And it was so.  The next child born in that house had round,
hoof-like feet, with only two toes, and hands that tapered from the
wrist into a single long finger.  And in time there were twenty people
so deformed in the valley: The "crab-clawed Zoarites" they were called.




                                HORSEHEADS

The feeling recently created by an attempt to fasten the stupid names of
Fairport or of North Elmira on the village in central New York that, off
and on for fifty years, had been called Horseheads, caused an inquiry as
to how that singular name chanced to be adopted for a settlement.  In
1779, when General Sullivan was retiring toward the base of his supplies
after a destructive campaign against the Indians in Genesee County, he
stopped near this place and rested his troops.  The country was then
rude, unbroken, and still beset with enemies, however, and when the
march was resumed it was thought best to gain time over a part of the
way by descending the Chemung River on rafts.

As there were no appliances for building large floats, and the depth of
the water was not known, the general ordered a destruction of all
impedimenta that could be got rid of, and commanded that the poor and
superfluous horses should be killed.  His order was obeyed.  As soon as
the troops had gone, the wolves, that were then abundant, came forth and
devoured the carcasses of the steeds, so that the clean-picked bones
were strewn widely over the camp-ground.  When the Indians ventured back
into this region, some of them piled the skulls of the horses into
heaps, and these curious monuments were found by white settlers who came
into the valley some years later, and who named their village
Horseheads, in commemoration of these relics.  The Indians were
especially loth to leave this region, for their tradition was that it
had been the land of the Senecas from immemorial time, the tribe being
descended from a couple that had a home on a hill near Horseheads.




                            KAYUTA AND WANETA

The Indians loved our lakes.  They had eyes for their beauty, and to
them they were abodes of gracious spirits.  They used to say of Oneida
Lake, that when the Great Spirit formed the world "his smile rested on
its waters and Frenchman's Island rose to greet it; he laughed and Lotus
Island came up to listen."  So they built lodges on their shores and
skimmed their waters in canoes.  Much of their history relates to them,
and this is a tale of the Senecas that was revived a few years ago by
the discovery of a deer-skin near Lakes Waneta and Keuka, New York, on
which some facts of the history were rudely drawn, for all Indians are
artists.

Waneta, daughter of a chief, had plighted her troth to Kayuta, a hunter
of a neighboring tribe with which her people were at war.  Their tryst
was held at twilight on the farther shore of the lake from her village,
and it was her gayety and happiness, after these meetings had taken
place, that roused the suspicion and jealousy of Weutha, who had marked
her for his bride against the time when he should have won her father's
consent by some act of bravery.  Shadowing the girl as she stole into
the forest one evening, he saw her enter her canoe and row to a densely
wooded spot; he heard a call like the note of a quail, then an answer;
then Kayuta emerged on the shore, lifted the maiden from her little
bark, and the twain sat down beside the water to listen to the lap of
its waves and watch the stars come out.

Hurrying back to camp, the spy reported that an enemy was near them, and
although Waneta had regained her wigwam by another route before the
company of warriors had reached the lake, Kayuta was seen, pursued, and
only escaped with difficulty.  Next evening, not knowing what had
happened after her homeward departure on the previous night--for the
braves deemed it best to keep the knowledge of their military operations
from the women--the girl crept away to the lake again and rowed to the
accustomed place, but while waiting for the quail call a twig dropped on
the water beside her.  With a quick instinct that civilization has
spoiled she realized this to be a warning, and remaining perfectly
still, she allowed her boat to drift toward shore, presently discovering
that her lover was standing waist-deep in the water.  In a whisper he
told her that they were watched, and bade her row to a dead pine that
towered at the foot of the lake, where he would soon meet her.  At that
instant an arrow grazed his side and flew quivering into the canoe.

Pushing the boat on its course and telling her to hasten, Kayuta sprang
ashore, sounded the warwhoop, and as Weutha rose into sight he clove his
skull with a tomahawk.  Two other braves now leaped forward, but, after
a struggle, Kayuta left them dead or senseless, too.  He would have
stayed to tear their scalps off had he not heard his name uttered in a
shriek of agony from the end of the lake, and, tired and bleeding though
he was, he bounded along its margin like a deer, for the voice that he
heard was Waneta's.  He reached the blasted pine, gave one look, and
sank to the earth.  Presently other Indians came, who had heard the
noise of fighting, and burst upon him with yells and brandished weapons,
but something in his look restrained them from a close advance.  His
eyes were fixed on a string of beads that lay on the bottom of the lake,
just off shore, and when the meaning of it came to them, the savages
thought no more of killing, but moaned their grief; for Waneta, in
stepping from her canoe to wade ashore, had been caught and swallowed by
a quagmire.  All night and all next day Kayuta sat there like a man of
stone.  Then, just as the hour fell when he was used to meet his love,
his heart broke, and he joined her in the spiritland.




                              THE DROP STAR

A little maid of three years was missing from her home on the Genesee.
She had gone to gather water-lilies and did not return.  Her mother,
almost crazed with grief, searched for days, weeks, months, before she
could resign herself to the thought that her little one--Kayutah, the
Drop Star, the Indians called her--had indeed been drowned.  Years went
by.  The woman's home was secure against pillage, for it was no longer
the one house of a white family in that region, and the Indians had
retired farther and farther into the wilderness.  One day a hunter came
to the woman and said, "I have seen old Skenandoh,--the last of his
tribe, thank God! who bade me say this to you: that the ice is broken,
and he knows of a hill of snow where a red berry grows that shall be
yours if you will claim it."  When the meaning of this message came upon
her the woman fainted, but on recovering speech she despatched her
nephew to the hut of the aged chief and passed that night in prayer.

The young man set off at sunset, and by hard riding, over dim trails,
with only stars for light, he came in the gray of dawn to an upright
timber, colored red and hung with scalps, that had been cut from white
men's heads at the massacre of Wyoming.  The place they still call
Painted Post.  Without drawing rein he sped along the hills that hem
Lake Seneca, then, striking deeper into the wilds, he reached a smaller
lake, and almost fell from his saddle before a rude tent near the shore.
A new grave had been dug close by, and he shuddered to think that
perhaps he had come too late, but a wrinkled Indian stepped forth at
that moment and waited his word.

"I come," cried the youth,--to see the berry that springs from snow."

"You come in time," answered Skenandoh.  "No, 'tis not in that grave.
It is my own child that is buried there.  She was as a sister to the one
you seek, and she bade me restore the Drop Star to her mother,--the
squaw that we know as the New Moon's Light."

Stepping into the wigwam, he emerged again, clasping the wrist of a girl
of eighteen, whose robe he tore asunder at the throat, showing the white
breast, and on it a red birth-mark; then, leading her to the young man,
he said,--"And now I must go to the setting sun."  He slung a pouch about
him, loaded, not with arms and food, but stones, stepped into his canoe,
and paddled out upon the water, singing as he went a melancholy chant--
his deathsong.  On gaining the middle of the lake he swung his tomahawk
and clove the bottom of the frail boat, so that it filled in a moment
and the chief sank from sight.  The young man took his cousin to her
overjoyed mother, helped to win her back to the ways of civilized life,
and eventually married her.  She took her Christian name again, but left
to the lake on whose banks she had lived so long her Indian name of Drop
Star--Kayutah.




                          THE PROPHET OF PALMYRA

It was at Palmyra, New York, that the principles of Mormonism were first
enunciated by Joseph Smith, who claimed to have found the golden plates
of the Book of Mormon in a hill-side in neighboring Manchester,--the
"Hill of Cumorah,"--to which he was led by angels.  The plates were
written in characters similar to the masonic cabala, and he translated
them by divine aid, giving to the world the result of his discovery.
The Hebrew prophet Mormon was the alleged author of the record, and his
son Moroni buried it.  The basis of Mormonism was, however, an
unpublished novel, called "The Manuscript Found," that was read to
Sidney Rigdon (afterwards a Mormon elder) by its author, a clergyman,
and that formulated a creed for a hypothetical church.  Smith had a
slight local celebrity, for he and his father were operators with the
divining-rod, and when he appropriated this creed a harmless and
beneficent one, for polygamy was a later "inspiration" of Brigham Young
--and began to preach it, in 1844, it gained many converts.  His
arrogation of the presidency of the "Church of Latter Day Saints" and
other rash performances won for him the enmity of the Gentiles, who
imprisoned and killed him at Carthage, Missouri, leaving Brigham Young
to lead the people across the deserts to Salt Lake, where they prospered
through thrift and industry.

It was claimed that in the van of this army, on the march to Utah, was
often seen a venerable man with silver beard, who never spoke, but who
would point the way whenever the pilgrims were faint or discouraged.
When they reached the spot where the temple was afterwards built, he
struck his staff into the earth and vanished.

At Hydesville, near Palmyra, spiritualism, as it is commonly called,
came into being on March 31, 1849, when certain of the departed
announced themselves by thumping on doors and tables in the house of the
Fox family, the survivors of which confessed the fraud nearly forty
years after.  It is of interest to note that the ground whence these new
religions sprang was peopled by the Onondagas, the sacerdotal class of
the Algonquin tribe, who have preserved the ancient religious rites of
that great family until this day.




                          A VILLAIN'S CREMATION

Bramley's Mountain, near the present village of Bloomfield, New York, on
the edge of the Catskill group, was the home of a young couple that had
married with rejoicing and had taken up the duties and pleasures of
housekeeping with enthusiasm.  To be sure, in those days housekeeping
was not a thing to be much afraid of, and the servant question had not
come up for discussion.  The housewives did the work themselves, and the
husband had no valets.  The domicile of this particular pair was merely
a tent of skins stretched around a frame of poles, and their furniture
consisted principally of furs strewn over the earth floor; but they
loved each other truly.  The girl was thankful to be taken from her home
to live, because, up to the time of her marriage, she had been
persecuted by a morose and ill-looking fellow of her tribe, who laid
siege to her affection with such vehemence that the more he pleaded the
greater was her dislike; and now she hoped that she had seen the last of
him.  But that was not to be.  He lurked about the wigwam of the pair,
torturing himself with the sight of their felicity, and awaiting his
chance to prove his hate.  This chance came when the husband had gone to
Lake Delaware to fish, for he rowed after and gave battle in the middle
of the pond.  Taken by surprise, and being insufficiently armed, the
husband was killed and his body flung into the water.  Then, casting an
affectionate leer at the wife who had watched this act of treachery and
malice with speechless horror from the mountain-side, he drove his canoe
ashore and set off in pursuit of her.  She retreated so slowly as to
allow him to keep her in sight, and when she entered a cave he pressed
forward eagerly, believing that now her escape was impossible; but she
had purposely trapped him there, for she had already explored a tortuous
passage that led to the upper air, and by this she had left the cavern
in safety while he was groping and calling in the dark.  Returning to
the entrance, she loosened, by a jar, a ledge that overhung it, so that
the door was almost blocked; then, gathering light wood from the dry
trees around her, she made a fire and hurled the burning sticks into the
prison where the wretch was howling, until he was dead in smoke and
flame.  When his yells and curses had been silenced she told a friend
what she had done, then going back to the lake, she sang her death-song
and cast herself into the water, hoping thus to rejoin her husband.




                          THE MONSTER MOSQUITOE

They have some pretty big mosquitoes in New Jersey and on Long Island,
but, if report of their ancestry is true, they have degenerated in size
and voracity; for the grandfather of all mosquitoes used to live in the
neighborhood of Fort Onondaga, New York, and sallying out whenever he
was hungry, would eat an Indian or two and pick his teeth with their
ribs.  The red men had no arms that could prevail against it, but at
last the Holder of the Heavens, hearing their cry for aid, came down and
attacked the insect.  Finding that it had met its match, the mosquito
flew away so rapidly that its assailant could hardly keep it in sight.
It flew around the great lake, then turned eastward again.  It sought
help vainly of the witches that brooded in the sink-holes, or Green
Lakes (near Janesville, New York), and had reached the salt lake of
Onondaga when its pursuer came up and killed it, the creature piling the
sand into hills in its dying struggles.

As its blood poured upon the earth it became small mosquitoes, that
gathered about the Holder of the Heavens and stung him so sorely that he
half repented the service that he had done to men.  The Tuscaroras say
that this was one of two monsters that stood on opposite banks of the
Seneca River and slew all men that passed.  Hiawatha killed the other
one.  On their reservation is a stone, marked by the form of the Sky
Holder, that shows where he rested during the chase, while his tracks
were until lately seen south of Syracuse, alternating with footprints of
the mosquito, which were shaped like those of a bird, and twenty inches
long. At Brighton, New York, where these marks appeared, they were
reverentially renewed by the Indians for many years.



                            THE GREEN PICTURE

In a cellar in Green Street, Schenectady, there appeared, some years
ago, the silhouette of a human form, painted on the floor in mould.  It
was swept and scrubbed away, but presently it was there again, and month
by month, after each removal, it returned: a mass of fluffy mould,
always in the shape of a recumbent man.  When it was found that the
house stood on the site of the old Dutch burial ground, the gossips
fitted this and that together and concluded that the mould was planted
by a spirit whose mortal part was put to rest a century and more ago,
on the spot covered by the house, and that the spirit took this way of
apprising people that they were trespassing on its grave.  Others held
that foul play had been done, and that a corpse, hastily and shallowly
buried, was yielding itself back to the damp cellar in vegetable form,
before its resolution into simpler elements.  But a darker meaning was
that it was the outline of a vampire that vainly strove to leave its
grave, and could not because a virtuous spell had been worked about the
place.

A vampire is a dead man who walks about seeking for those whose blood he
can suck, for only by supplying new life to its cold limbs can he keep
the privilege of moving about the earth.  He fights his way from his
coffin, and those who meet his gray and stiffened shape, with fishy eyes
and blackened mouth, lurking by open windows, biding his time to steal
in and drink up a human life, fly from him in terror and disgust.  In
northern Rhode Island those who die of consumption are believed to be
victims of vampires who work by charm, draining the blood by slow
draughts as they lie in their graves.  To lay this monster he must be
taken up and burned; at least, his heart must be; and he must be
disinterred in the daytime when he is asleep and unaware.  If he died
with blood in his heart he has this power of nightly resurrection.  As
late as 1892 the ceremony of heart-burning was performed at Exeter,
Rhode Island, to save the family of a dead woman that was threatened
with the same disease that removed her, namely, consumption.  But the
Schenectady vampire has yielded up all his substance, and the green
picture is no more.




                           THE NUNS OF CARTHAGE

At Carthage, New York, where the Black River bends gracefully about a
point, there was a stanch old house, built in the colonial fashion and
designed for the occupancy of some family of hospitality and wealth, but
the family died out or moved away, and for some years it remained
deserted.  During the war of 1812 the village gossips were excited by
the appearance of carpenters, painters and upholsterers, and it was
evident that the place was to be restored to its manorial dignities; but
their curiosity was deepened instead of satisfied when, after the house
had been put in order and high walls built around it, the occupants
presented themselves as four young women in the garb of nuns.  Were they
daughters of the family?  Were they English sympathizers in disguise,
seeking asylum in the days of trouble?  Had they registered a vow of
celibacy until their lovers should return from the war?  Were they on
a secret and diplomatic errand?  None ever knew, at least in Carthage.
The nuns lived in great privacy, but in a luxury before unequalled in
that part of the country.  They kept a gardener, they received from New
York wines and delicacies that others could not afford, and when they
took the air, still veiled, it was behind a splendid pair of bays.

One afternoon, just after the close of the war, a couple of young
American officers went to the convent, and, contrary to all precedent,
were admitted.  They remained within all that day, and no one saw them
leave, but a sound of wheels passed through the street that evening.
Next day there were no signs of life about the place, nor the day
following, nor the next.  The savage dog was quiet and the garden walks
had gone unswept.  Some neighbors climbed over the wall and reported
that the place had been deserted.  Why and by whom no one ever knew, but
a cloud remained upon its title until a recent day, for it was thought
that at some time the nuns might return.




                          THE SKULL IN THE WALL

A skull is built into the wall above the door of the court-house at
Goshen, New York.  It was taken from a coffin unearthed in 1842, when
the foundation of the building was laid.  People said there was no doubt
about it, only Claudius Smith could have worn that skull, and he
deserved to be publicly pilloried in that manner.  Before the
Revolutionary war Smith was a farmer in Monroe, New York, and being
prosperous enough to feel the king's taxes no burden, to say nothing of
his jealousy of the advantage that an independent government would be to
the hopes of his poorer neighbors, he declared for the king.  After the
declaration of independence had been published, his sympathies were
illustrated in an unpleasantly practical manner by gathering a troop of
other Tories about him, and, emboldened by the absence of most of the
men of his vicinage in the colonial army, he began to harass the country
as grievously in foray as the red-coats were doing in open field.

He pillaged houses and barns, then burned them; he insulted women, he
drove away cattle and horses, he killed several persons who had
undertaken to defend their property.  His "campaigns" were managed with
such secrecy that nobody knew when or whence to look for him.  His
murder of Major Nathaniel Strong, of Blooming Grove, roused indignation
to such a point that a united effort was made to catch him, a money
reward for success acting as a stimulus to the vigilance of the hunters,
and at last he was captured on Long Island.  He was sent back to Goshen,
tried, convicted, and on January 22, 1779, was hanged, with five of his
band.  The bodies of the culprits were buried in the jail-yard, on the
spot where the court-house stands, and old residents identified Smith's
skeleton, when it was accidentally exhumed, by its uncommon size.  A
farmer from an adjacent town made off with a thigh bone, and a mason
clapped mortar into the empty skull and cemented it into the wall, where
it long remained.




                             THE HAUNTED MILL

Among the settlers in the Adirondacks, forty or fifty years ago, was
Henry Clymer, from Brooklyn, who went up to Little Black Creek and tried
to make a farm out of the gnarly, stumpy land; but being a green hand at
that sort of thing, he soon gave it up and put up the place near
Northwood, that is locally referred to as the haunted mill.  When the
first slab was cut, a big party was on hand to cheer and eat pie in
honor of the Clymers, for Mr. Clymer, who was a dark, hearty, handsome
fellow, and his bright young wife had been liberal in their hospitality.
The couple had made some talk, they were so loving before folks--too
loving to last; and, besides, it was evident that Mrs. Clymer was used
to a better station in life than her husband.  It was while the crowd
was laughing and chattering at the picnic-table of new boards from the
mill that Mrs. Clymer stole away to her modest little house, and a
neighbor who had followed her was an accidental witness to a singular
episode.  Mrs. Clymer was kneeling beside her bed, crying over the
picture of a child, when Clymer entered unexpectedly and attempted to
take the picture from her.

She faced him defiantly.  "You kept that because it looked like him, I
reckon," he said.  "You might run back to him.  You know what he'd call
you and where you'd stand with your aristocracy."

The woman pointed to the door, and the man left without another word,
and so did the listener.  Next morning the body of Mrs. Clymer was found
hanging to a beam in the mill.  At the inquest the husband owned that he
had "had a few words" with her on the previous day, and thought that she
must have suddenly become insane.  The jury took this view.  News of the
suicide was printed in some of the city papers, and soon after that the
gossips had another sensation, for a fair-haired man, also from
Brooklyn, arrived at the place and asked where the woman was buried.
When he found the grave he sat beside it for some time, his head resting
on his hand; then he inquired for Clymer, but Clymer, deadly pale, had
gone into the woods as soon as he heard that a stranger had arrived.
The new-comer went to Trenton, where he ordered a gravestone bearing the
single word "Estella" to be placed where the woman's body had been
interred.  Clymer quickly sold out and disappeared.  The mill never
prospered, and has long been in a ruinous condition.  People of the
neighborhood think that the ghost of Mrs. Clymer--was that her name?--
still troubles it, and they pass the place with quickened steps.




                             OLD INDIAN FACE

On Lower Ausable Pond is a large, ruddy rock showing a huge profile,
with another, resembling a pappoose, below it.  When the Tahawi ruled
this region their sachem lived here at "the Dark Cup," as they called
this lake, a man renowned for virtue and remarkable, in his age, for
gentleness.  When his children had died and his manly grandson, who was
the old man's hope, had followed them to the land of the cloud
mountains, Adota's heart withered within him, and standing beneath this
rock, he addressed his people, recounting what he had done for them, how
he had swept their enemies from the Lakes of the Clustered Stars (the
Lower Saranac) and Silver Sky (Upper Saranac) to the Lake of Wandah,
gaining a land where they might hunt and fish in peace.  The little one,
the Star, had been ravished away to crown the brow of the thunder god,
who, even now, was advancing across the peaks, bending the woods and
lighting the valleys with his jagged torches.

Life was nothing to him longer; he resigned it.

As he spoke these words he fell back, and the breath passed out of him.
Then came the thunder god, and with an appalling burst of fire sent the
people cowering.  The roar that followed seemed to shake the earth, but
the medicine-man of the tribe stood still, listening to the speech of
the god in the clouds.  "Tribe of the Tahawi," he translated, "Adota
treads the star-path to the happy hunting-grounds, and the sun is
shining on his heart.  He will never walk among you again, but the god
loves both him and you, and he will set his face on the mountains.
Look!"  And, raising their eyes, they beheld the likeness of Adota and
of his beloved child, the Star, graven by lightning-stroke on the cliff.
There they buried the body of Adota and held their solemn festivals
until the white men drove them out of the country.




                       THE DIVISION OF THE SARANACS

In the middle of the last century a large body of Saranac Indians
occupied the forests of the Upper Saranac through which ran the Indian
carrying-place, called by them the Eagle Nest Trail.  Whenever they
raided the Tahawi on the slopes of Mount Tahawus (Sky-splitter), there
was a pleasing rivalry between two young athletes, called the Wolf and
the Eagle, as to which would carry off the more scalps, and the tribe
was divided in admiration of them.  There was one who did not share this
liking: an old sachem, one of the wizards who had escaped when the Great
Spirit locked these workers of evil in the hollow trees that stood
beside the trail.  In their struggles to escape the less fortunate ones
thrust their arms through the closing bark, and they are seen there, as
withered trunks and branches, to this day.  Oquarah had not been
softened by this exhibition of danger nor the qualification of mercy
that allowed him still to exist.  Rather he was more bitter when he saw,
as he fancied, that the tribe thought more of the daring and powerful
warriors than it did of the bent and malignant-minded counsellor.

It was in the moon of green leaves that the two young men set off to
hunt the moose, and on the next day the Wolf returned alone.  He
explained that in the hunt they had been separated; he had called for
hours for his friend, and had searched so long that he concluded he must
have returned ahead of him.  But he was not at the camp.  Up rose the
sachem with visage dark.  "I hear a forked tongue," he cried.  "The Wolf
was jealous of the Eagle and his teeth have cut into his heart."

"The Wolf cannot lie," answered the young man.

"Where is the Eagle?"  angrily shouted the sachem, clutching his
hatchet.

"The Wolf has said," replied the other.

The old sachem advanced upon him, but as he raised his axe to strike,
the wife of the Wolf threw herself before her husband, and the steel
sank into her brain.  The sachem fell an instant later with the Wolf's
knife in his heart, and instantly the camp was in turmoil.  Before the
day had passed it had been broken up, and the people were divided into
factions, for it was no longer possible to hold it together in peace.
The Wolf, with half of the people, went down the Sounding River to new
hunting-grounds, and the earth that separated the families was reddened
whenever one side met the other.

Years had passed when, one morning, the upper tribe saw a canoe
advancing across the Lake of the Silver Sky.  An old man stepped from
it: he was the Eagle.  After the Wolf had left him he had fallen into a
cleft in a rock, and had lain helpless until found by hunters who were
on their way to Canada.  He had joined the British against the French,
had married a northern squaw, but had returned to die among the people
of his early love.  Deep was his sorrow that his friend should have been
accused of doing him an injury, and that the once happy tribe should
have been divided by that allegation.  The warriors and sachems of both
branches were summoned to a council, and in his presence they swore a
peace, so that in the fulness of time he was able to die content.  That
peace was always kept.




                         AN EVENT IN INDIAN PARK

It was during the years when the Saranacs were divided that Howling
Wind, one of the young men of Indian Carry, saw and fell in love with a
girl of the family on Tupper Lake.  He quickly found a way to tell his
liking, and the couple met often in the woods and on the shore.  He made
bold to row her around the quieter bays, and one moonlight evening he
took her to Devil's Rock, or Devil's Pulpit, where he told her the story
of the place.  This was to the effect that the fiend had paddled, on
timbers, by means of his tail, to that rock, and had assembled fish and
game about him in large numbers by telling them that he was going to
preach to them, instead of which moral procedure he pounced upon and ate
all that were within his grasp.

As so often happened in Indian history, the return of these lovers was
seen by a disappointed rival, who had hurried back to camp and secured
the aid of half a dozen men to arrest the favored one as soon as he
should land.  The capture was made after a struggle, and Howling Wind
was dragged to the chief's tent for sentence.  That sentence was death,
and with a refinement of cruelty that was rare even among the Indians,
the girl was ordered to execute it.  She begged and wept to no avail.
An axe was put into her hands, and she was ordered to despatch the
prisoner.  She took the weapon; her face grew stern and the tears dried
on her cheeks; her lover, bound to a tree, gazed at her in amazement;
his rival watched, almost in glee.  Slowly the girl crossed the open
space to her lover.  She raised the tomahawk and at a blow severed the
thongs that held him, then, like a flash, she leaped upon his rival, who
had sprung forward to interfere, and clove his skull with a single
stroke.  The lovers fled as only those can fly who run for life.
Happily for them, they met a party from the Carry coming to rescue
Howling Wind from the danger to which his courtship had exposed him, and
it was even said that this party entered the village and by presenting
knives and arrows at the breast of the chief obtained his now
superfluous consent to the union of the fugitives.  The pair reached
the Carry in safety and lived a long and happy life together.




                             THE INDIAN PLUME

Brightest flower that grows beside the brooks is the scarlet blossom of
the Indian plume: the blood of Lenawee.  Hundreds of years ago she lived
happily among her brother and sister Saranacs beside Stony Creek, the
Stream of the Snake, and was soon to marry the comely youth who, for the
speed of his foot, was called the Arrow.  But one summer the Quick Death
came on the people, and as the viewless devil stalked through the
village young and old fell before him.  The Arrow was the first to die.
In vain the Prophet smoked the Great Calumet: its smoke ascending took
no shape that he could read.  In vain was the white dog killed to take
aloft the people's sins.  But at last the Great Spirit himself came down
to the mountain called the Storm Darer, splendid in lightning, awful in
his thunder voice and robe of cloud.  "My wrath is against you for your
sins," he cried, "and naught but human blood will appease it."

In the morning the Prophet told his message, and all sat silent for a
time.  Then Lenawee entered the circle.  "Lenawee is a blighted flower,"
she sobbed.  "Let her blood flow for her people."  And catching a knife
from the Prophet's belt, she ran with it to the stream on which she and
the Arrow had so often floated in their canoe.  In another moment her
blood had bedewed the earth.  "Lay me with the Arrow," she murmured,
and, smiling in their sad faces, breathed her last.  The demon of the
quick death shrank from the spot, and the Great Spirit smiled once more
on the tribe that could produce such heroism.  Lenawee's body was placed
beside her lover's, and next morning, where her blood had spilt, the
ground was pure, and on it grew in slender spires a new flower,--the
Indian plume: the transformed blood of sacrifice.  The people loved that
flower in all years after.  They decked their hair and dresses with it
and made a feast in its honor.  When parents taught their children the
beauty of unselfishness they used as its emblem a stalk of Indian plume.




                         BIRTH OF THE WATER-LILY

Back from his war against the Tahawi comes the Sun, chief of the Lower
Saranacs,--back to the Lake of the Clustered Stars, afterward called, by
dullards, Tupper's Lake.  Tall and invincible he comes among his people,
boasting of his victories, Indian fashion, and stirring the scalps that
hang at his breast.  "The Eagle screams," he cries.  "He greets the
chief, the Blazing Sun.  Wayotah has made the Tahawi tremble.  They fly
from him.  Hooh, hooh!  He is the chief."  Standing apart with wistful
glance stands Oseetah, the Bird.  She loves the strong young chief, but
she knows that another has his promise, and she dares not hope; yet the
chief loves her, and when the feasting is over he follows her footprints
to the shore, where he sees her canoe turning the point of an island.
He silently pursues and comes upon her as she sits waving and moaning.
He tries to embrace her, but she draws apart.  He asks her to sing to
him; she bids him begone.

He takes a more imperious tone and orders her to listen to her chief.
She moves away.  He darts toward her.  Turning on him a face of sorrow,
she runs to the edge of a steep rock and waves him back.  He hastens
after.  Then she springs and disappears in the deep water.  The Sun
plunges after her and swims with mad strength here and there.  He calls.
There is no answer.  Slowly he returns to the village and tells the
people what has happened.  The Bird's parents are stricken and the Sun
moans in his sleep.  At noon a hunter comes in with strange tidings:
flowers are growing on the water!  The people go to their canoes and row
to the Island of Elms.  There, in a cove, the still water is enamelled
with flowers, some as white as snow, filling the air with perfume,
others strong and yellow, like the lake at sunset.

"Explain to us," they cry, turning to the old Medicine of his tribe,
"for this was not so yesterday."  "It is our daughter," he answered.
"These flowers are the form she takes.  The white is her purity, the
yellow her love.  You shall see that her heart will close when the sun
sets, and will reopen at his coming."  And the young chief went apart
and bowed his head.




                              ROGERS'S SLIDE

The shores of Lakes George and Champlain were ravaged by war.  Up and
down those lovely waters swept the barges of French and English, and the
green hills rang to the shrill of bugles, the boom of cannon, and the
yell of savages.  Fiction and history have been weft across the woods
and the memory of deeds still echoes among the heights.  It was at
Glen's Falls, in the cave on the rock in the middle of the river, that
the brave Uncas held the watch with Hawkeye.  Bloody Defile and Bloody
Pond, between there and Lake George, take their names from the "Bloody
morning scout" sent out by Sir William Johnson on a September day in
1755 to check Dieskau until Fort William Henry could be completed.  In
the action that ensued, Colonel Williams, founder of Williams College,
and Captain Grant, of the Connecticut line, great-grandfather of the
President who bore that name, were killed.  The victims, dead and
wounded alike, having been flung into Bloody Pond, it was thick and red
for days, and tradition said that in after years it resumed its hue of
crimson at sunset and held it until dawn.  The captured, who were
delivered to the Indians, had little to hope, for their white allies
could not stay their savagery.  Blind Rock was so called because the
Indians brought a white man there, and tearing his eyes out, flung them
into embers at the foot of the stone.  Captives were habitually
tortured, blazing splinters of pine being thrust into their flesh, their
nails torn out, and their bodies slashed with knives before they went to
the stake.  An English prisoner was allowed to run the gauntlet here.
They had already begun to strike at him as he sped between the lines,
when he seized a pappoose, flung it on a fire, and, in the instant of
confusion that followed, snatched an axe, cut the bonds of a comrade who
had been doomed to die, and both escaped.

But the best-known history of this region is that of Rogers's Rock, or
Rogers's Slide, a lofty precipice at the lower end of Lake George.
Major Rogers did not toboggan down this rock in leather trousers, but
his escape was no less remarkable than if he had.  On March 13, 1758,
while reconnoitring near Ticonderoga with two hundred rangers, he was
surprised by a force of French and Indians.  But seventeen of his men
escaped death or capture, and he was pursued nearly to the brink of this
cliff.  During a brief delay among the red men, arising from the loss of
his trail, he had time to throw his pack down the slide, reverse his
snow-shoes, and go back over his own track to the head of a ravine
before they emerged from the woods, and, seeing that his shoe-marks led
to the rock, while none pointed back, they concluded that he had flung
himself off and committed suicide to avoid capture.  Great was their
disappointment when they saw the major on the frozen surface of the lake
beneath going at a lively rate toward Fort William Henry.  He had gained
the ice by way of the cleft in the rocks, but the savages, believing
that he had leaped over the precipice, attributed his preservation to
the Great Spirit and forbore to fire on him.  Unconsciously, he had
chosen the best possible place to disappear from, for the Indians held
it in superstitious regard, believing that spirits haunted the wood and
hurled bad souls down the cliff, drowning them in the lake, instead of
allowing them to go to the happy hunting grounds.  The major reached his
quarters in safety, and lived to take up arms against the land of his
birth when the colonies revolted, seventeen years later.




                           THE FALLS AT COHOES

When Occuna, a young Seneca, fell in love with a girl whose cabin was
near the present town of Cohoes, he behaved very much as Americans of a
later date have done.  He picked wild flowers for her; he played on the
bone pipe and sang sentimental songs in the twilight; he roamed the
hills with her, gathering the loose quartz crystals that the Indians
believed to be the tears of stricken deer, save on Diamond Rock, in
Lansingburgh, where they are the tears of Moneta, a bereaved mother and
wife; and in fine weather they went boating on the Mohawk above the
rapids.  They liked to drift idly on the current, because it gave them
time to gaze into each other's eyes, and to build air castles that they
would live in in the future.  They were suddenly called to a realization
of danger one evening, for the stream had been subtly drawing them on
and on until it had them in its power.  The stroke of the paddle failed
and the air castles fell in dismal ruin.  Sitting erect they began their
death-song in this wise:

Occuna: "Daughter of a mighty warrior, the Manitou calls me hence.  I
hear the roaring of his voice; I see the lightning of his glance along
the river; he walks in clouds and spray upon the waters."

The Maiden: "Thou art thyself a warrior, O Occuna.  Hath not thine axe
been often bathed in blood?  Hath the deer ever escaped thine arrow or
the beaver avoided thy chase?  Thou wilt not fear to go into the
presence of Manitou."

Occuna: "Manitou, indeed, respects the strong.  When I chose thee from
the women of our tribe I promised that we should live and die together.
The Thunderer calls us now.  Welcome, O ghost of Oriska, chief of the
invincible Senecas!  A warrior and the daughter of a warrior come to
join you in the feast of the blessed!"

The boat leaped over the falls, and Occuna, striking on the rocks below,
was killed at once; but, as by a miracle, the girl fell clear of them
and was whirled on the seething current to shoal water, where she made
her escape.  For his strength and his virtues the dead man was
canonized.  His tribe raised him above the regions of the moon, whence
he looked down on the scenes of his youth with pleasure, and in times of
war gave pleasant dreams and promises to his friends, while he confused
the enemy with evil omens.  Whenever his tribe passed the falls they
halted and with brief ceremonials commemorated the death of Occuna.




                     FRANCIS WOOLCOTT'S NIGHT-RIDERS

In Copake, New York, among the Berkshire Hills, less than a century ago,
lived Francis Woolcott, a dark, tall man, with protruding teeth, whose
sinister laugh used to give his neighbors a creep along their spines.
He had no obvious trade or calling, but the farmers feared him so that
he had no trouble in making levies: pork, flour, meal, cider, he could
have what he chose for the asking, for had he not halted horses at the
plow so that neither blows nor commands could move them for two hours?
Had he not set farmer Raught's pigs to walking on their hind legs and
trying to talk?  When he shouted "Hup! hup! hup!"  to farmer Williams's
children, had they not leaped to the moulding of the parlor wainscot,
--a yard above the floor and only an inch wide,--and walked around it,
afterward skipping like birds from chair-back to chair-back, while the
furniture stood as if nailed to the floor?  And was he not the chief of
thirteen night-riders, whose faces no man had seen, nor wanted to see,
and whom he sent about the country on errands of mischief every night
when the moon was growing old?  As to moons, had he not found a mystic
message from our satellite on Mount Riga, graven on a meteor?

Horses' tails were tied, hogs foamed at the mouth and walked like men,
cows gave blood for milk.  These night-riders met Woolcott in a grove of
ash and chestnut trees, each furnished with a stolen bundle of oat
straw, and these bundles Woolcott changed to black horses when the night
had grown dark enough not to let the way of the change be seen.  These
horses could not cross streams of water, and on the stroke of midnight
they fell to pieces and were oaten sheaves once more, but during their
time of action they rushed through woods, bearing their riders safely,
and tore like hurricanes across the fields, leaping bushes, fences, even
trees, without effort.  Never could traces be found of them the next
day.  At last the devil came to claim his own.  Woolcott, who was ninety
years old, lay sick and helpless in his cabin.  Clergymen refused to see
him, but two or three of his neighbors stifled their fears and went to
the wizard's house to soothe his dying moments.  With the night came
storm, and with its outbreak the old man's face took on such a strange
and horrible look that the watchers fell back in alarm.  There was a
burst of purple flame at the window, a frightful peal, a smell of
sulphur, and Woolcott was dead.  When the watchers went out the roads
were dry, and none in the village had heard wind, rain, or thunder.  It
was the coming of the fiend.




                              POLLY'S LOVER

In about the middle of this century a withered woman of ninety was
buried from a now deserted house in White Plains, New York, Polly Carter
the name of her, but "Crazy Polly" was what the neighbors called her,
for she was eccentric and not fond of company.  Among the belongings of
her house was a tall clock, such as relic hunters prize, that ticked
solemnly in a landing on the stairs.

For a time, during the Revolution, the house stood within the British
lines, and as her father was a colonel in Washington's army she was left
almost alone in it.  The British officers respected her sex, but they
had an unpleasant way of running in unannounced and demanding
entertainment, in the king's name, which she felt forced to grant.  One
rainy afternoon the door was flung open, then locked on the inside, and
she found herself in the arms of a stalwart, handsome lieutenant, who
wore the blue.  It was her cousin and fiance.  Their glad talk had not
been going long when there came a rousing summons at the door.  Three
English officers were awaiting admittance.

Perhaps they had seen Lawrence Carter go into the house, and if caught
he would be killed as a spy.  He must be hidden, but in some place where
they would not think of looking.  The clock!  That was the place.  With
a laugh and a kiss the young man submitted to be shut in this narrow
quarter, and throwing his coat and hat behind some furniture the girl
admitted the officers, who were wet and surly and demanded dinner.  They
tramped about the best room in their muddy boots, talking loudly, and in
order to break the effect of the chill weather they passed the brandy
bottle freely.  Polly served them with a dinner as quickly as possible,
for she wanted to get them out of the house, but they were in no mood to
go, and the bottle passed so often that before the dinner was over they
were noisy and tipsy and were using language that drove Polly from the
room.

At last, to her relief, she heard them preparing to leave the house, but
as they were about to go the senior officer, looking up at the landing,
now dim in the paling light, said to one of the others, "See what time
it is."  The officer addressed, who happened to be the drunkest of the
party, staggered up the stair and exclaimed, "The d---d thing's
stopped."  Then, as if he thought it a good joke, he added, "It'll never
go again."  Drawing his sabre he gave the clock a careless cut and ran
the blade through the panel of the door; after this the three passed
out.  When their voices had died in distant brawling, Polly ran to
release her lover.  Something thick and dark was creeping from beneath
the clock-case.  With trembling fingers she pulled open the door, and
Lawrence, her lover, fell heavily forward into her arms, dead.  The
officer was right: the clock never went again.




                         CROSBY, THE PATRIOT SPY

It was at the Jay house, in Westchester, New York, that Enoch Crosby met
Washington and offered his services to the patriot army.  Crosby was a
cobbler, and not a very thriving one, but after the outbreak of
hostilities he took a peddler's outfit on his back and, as a non-
combatant, of Tory sympathies, he obtained admission through the British
lines.  After his first visit to head quarters it is certain that he
always carried Sir Henry Clinton's passport in the middle of his pack,
and so sure were his neighbors that he was in the service of the British
that they captured him and took him to General Washington, but while his
case was up for debate he managed to slip his handcuffs, which were not
secure, and made off.  Clinton, on the other hand, was puzzled by the
unaccountable foresight of the Americans, for every blow that he
prepared to strike was met, and he lost time and chance and temper.  As
if the suspicion of both armies and the hatred of his neighbors were not
enough to contend against, Crosby now became an object of interest to
the Skinners and Cowboys, who were convinced that he was making money,
somehow, and resolved to have it.

The Skinners were camp-followers of the American troops and the Cowboys
a band of Tories and renegade British.  Both factions were employed,
ostensibly, in foraging for their respective armies, but, in reality,
for themselves, and the farmers and citizens occupying the neutral belt
north of Manhattan Island had reason to curse them both impartially.
While these fellows were daring thieves, they occasionally got the worst
of it, even in the encounters with the farmers, as on the Neperan, near
Tarrytown, where the Cowboys chased a woman to death, but were afterward
cut to pieces by the enraged neighbors.  Hers is but one of the many
ghosts that haunt the neutral ground, and the croaking of the birds of
ill luck that nest at Raven rock is blended with the cries of her dim
figure.  Still, graceless as these fellows were, they affected a loyalty
to their respective sides, and were usually willing to fight each other
when they met, especially for the plunder that was to be got by
fighting.

In October, 1780, Claudius Smith, "king of the Cowboys," and three
scalawag sons came to the conclusion that it was time for Crosby's money
to revert to the crown, and they set off toward his little house one
evening, sure of finding him in, for his father was seriously ill.  The
Smiths arrived there to find that the Skinners had preceded them on the
same errand, and they recognized through the windows, in the leader of
the band, a noted brigand on whose head a price was laid.  He was
searching every crack and cranny of the room, while Crosby, stripped to
shirt and trousers, stood before the empty fireplace and begged for that
night to be left alone with his dying father.

"To hell with the old man!" roared the Skinner.  "Give up your gold, or
we'll put you to the torture," and he significantly whirled the end of a
rope that he carried about his waist.  At that moment the faint voice of
the old man was heard calling from another room.

"Take all that I have and let me go!"  cried Crosby, and turning up a
brick in the fire-place he disclosed a handful of gold, his life
savings.  The leader still tried to oppose his exit, but Crosby flung
him to the floor and rushed away to his father, while the brigand,
deeming it well to delay rising, dug his fingers into the hollow and
began to extract the sovereigns.  At that instant four muskets were
discharged from without: there was a crash of glass, a yell of pain, and
four of the Skinners rolled bleeding on the floor; two others ran into
the darkness and escaped; their leader, trying to follow, was met at the
threshold by the Smiths, who clutched the gold out of his hand and
pinioned his elbows in a twinkling.

"I thought ye'd like to know who's got ye," said old Smith, peering into
the face of the astonished and crestfallen robber, "for I've told ye
many a time to keep out of my way, and now ye've got to swing for
getting into it."

Within five minutes of the time that he had got his clutch on Crosby's
money the bandit was choking to death at the end of his own rope, hung
from the limb of an apple-tree, and, having secured the gold, the
Cowboys went their way into the darkness.  Crosby soon made his
appearance in the ranks of the Continentals, and, though they looked
askant at him for a time, they soon discovered the truth and hailed him
as a hero, for the information he had carried to Washington from
Clinton's camp had often saved them from disaster.  He had survived
attack in his own house through the falling out of rogues, and he
survived the work and hazard of war through luck and a sturdy frame.
Congress afterwards gave him a sum of money larger than had been taken
from him, for his chief had commended him in these lines: "Circumstances
of political importance, which involved the lives and fortunes of many,
have hitherto kept secret what this paper now reveals.  Enoch Crosby has
for years been a faithful and unrequited servant of his country.  Though
man does not, God may reward him for his conduct.
                                               GEORGE WASHINGTON."

Associated with Crosby in his work of getting information from the enemy
was a man named Gainos, who kept an inn on the neutral ground, that was
often raided.  Being assailed by Cowboys once, Gainos, with his tenant
and stable-boys, fired at the bandits together, just as the latter had
forced his front door, then stepping quickly forward he slashed off the
head of the leader with a cutlass.  The retreating crew dumped the body
into a well on the premises, and there it sits on the crumbling curb o'
nights looking disconsolately for its head.

It may also be mentioned that the Skinners had a chance to revenge
themselves on the Cowboys for their defeat at the Crosby house.  They
fell upon the latter at the tent-shaped cave in Yonkers,--it is called
Washington's Cave, because the general napped there on bivouac,--and not
only routed them, but secured so much of their treasure that they were
able to be honest for several years after.




                         THE LOST GRAVE OF PAINE

Failure to mark the resting-places of great men and to indicate the
scenes of their deeds has led to misunderstanding and confusion among
those who discover a regard for history and tradition in this practical
age.  Robert Fulton, who made steam navigation possible, lies in an
unmarked tomb in the yard of Trinity Church--the richest church in
America.  The stone erected to show where Andre was hanged was destroyed
by a cheap patriot, who thought it represented a compliment to the spy.
The spot where Alexander Hamilton was shot in the duel by Aaron Burr is
known to few and will soon be forgotten.  It was not until a century of
obloquy had been heaped on the memory of Thomas Paine that his once
enemies were brought to know him as a statesman of integrity, a
philanthropist, and philosopher.  His deistic religion, proclaimed in
"The Age of Reason," is unfortunately no whit more independent than is
preached in dozens of pulpits to-day.  He died ripe in honors, despite
his want of creed, and his mortal part was buried in New Rochelle, New
York, under a large walnut-tree in a hay-field.  Some years later his
friends removed the body to a new grave in higher ground, and placed
over it a monument that the opponents of his principles quickly hacked
to pieces.  Around the original grave there still remains a part of the
old inclosure, and it was proposed to erect a suitable memorial--
the Hudson and its Hills the spot, but the owner of the tract would
neither give nor sell an inch of his land for the purpose of doing honor
to the man.  Some doubt has already been expressed as to whether the
grave is beneath the monument or in the inclosure; and it is also
asserted that Paine's ghost appears at intervals, hovering in the air
between the two burial-places, or flitting back and forth from one to
the other, lamenting the forgetfulness of men and wailing, "Where is my
grave?  I have lost my grave!"




                     THE RISING OF GOUVERNEUR MORRIS

Gouverneur Morris, American minister to the court of Louis XVI, was
considerably enriched, at the close of the reign of terror, by plate,
jewels, furniture, paintings, coaches, and so on, left in his charge by
members of the French nobility, that they might not be confiscated in
the sack of the city by the /sans culottes/; for so many of the
aristocracy were killed and so many went into exile or disguised their
names, that it was impossible to find heirs or owners for these effects.
Some of the people who found France a good country to be out of came to
America, where adventurers had found prosperity and refugees found peace
so many times before.  Marshal Ney and Bernadotte are alleged to have
served in the American army during the Revolution, and at Hogansburg,
New York, the Reverend Eleazer Williams, an Episcopal missionary, who
lies buried in the church-yard there, was declared to be the missing son
of Louis XVI.  The question, "Have we a Bourbon among us?"  was
frequently canvassed; but he avoided publicity and went quietly on with
his pastoral work.

All property left in Mr. Morris's hands that had not been claimed was
removed to his mansion at Port Morris, when he returned from his
ministry, and he gained in the esteem and envy of his neighbors when the
extent of these riches was seen.  Once, at the wine, he touched glasses
with his wife, and said that if she bore a male child that son should be
heir to his wealth.  Two relatives who sat at the table exchanged looks
at this and cast a glance of no gentle regard on his lady.  A year went
by.  The son was born, but Gouverneur Morris was dead.

It is the first night of the year 1817, the servants are asleep, and the
widow sits late before the fire, her baby in her arms, listening betimes
to the wind in the chimney, the beat of hail on the shutters, the
brawling of the Bronx and the clash of moving ice upon it; yet thinking
of her husband and the sinister look his promise had brought to the
faces of his cousins, when a tramp of horses is heard without, and anon
a summons at the door.  The panels are beaten by loaded riding-whips,
and a man's voice cries, "Anne Morris, fetch us our cousin's will, or
we'll break into the house and take it."  The woman clutches the infant
to her breast, but makes no answer.  Again the clatter of the whips; but
now a mist is gathering in the room, and a strange enchantment comes
over her, for are not the lions breathing on the coat of arms above the
door, and are not the portraits stirring in their frames?

They are, indeed.  There is a rustle of robes and clink of steel and one
old warrior leaps down, his armor sounding as he alights, and striking
thrice his sword and shield together he calls on Gouverneur Morris to
come forth.  Somebody moves in the room where Morris died; there is a
measured footfall in the corridor, with the clank of a scabbard keeping
time; the door is opened, and on the blast that enters the widow hears a
cry, then a double gallop, passing swiftly into distance.  As she gazes,
her husband appears, apparelled as in life, and with a smile he takes a
candelabrum from the mantel and, beckoning her to follow, moves from
room to room.  Then, for the first time, the widow knows to what wealth
her baby has been born, for the ghost discloses secret drawers in
escritoires where money, title deeds, and gems are hidden, turns
pictures and wainscots on unsuspected hinges, revealing shelves heaped
with fabrics, plate, and lace; then, returning to the fireside, he
stoops as if to kiss his wife and boy, but a bell strikes the first hour
of morning and he vanishes into his portrait on the wall.





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