“First time I’ve got something for nothing since I struck New York,” was the comment of that gentleman.

Four or five miles across the Tappan Zee the blue of the mountain was splattered with the white of straggling houses.  To the left was a checker-board of farms, an area hundreds of square miles in extent basking in the rays of a cloudless sun.  Yet beyond, the Orange mountains lifted their rounded slopes.  To the south was the grim line of the Palisades, blue-black save where trees clung to their steep sides.  On the north Hook Mountain dipped its feet into the Hudson, and to our ears came the dull boom of explosions where vandals are blasting away its sides and ruining its beauty.

“Right over there,” said Carter, pointing toward Piermont, “is where Andre landed when he crossed the river on the mission to Benedict Arnold which ended in his capture and death.  Beyond the mountain is the monument which marks the spot where he met with what our school books term ‘an untimely fate.’”

“A short distance to the south,” I added, “is the old house where Washington made his headquarters during the most discouraging years of the Revolution, and in which he and Rochambeau planned the campaign which ended with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.  And not far away is ‘Sleepy Hollow,’ where Washington Irving lived, wrote, and died.”

“Yes, yes,” contributed Chilvers, “and on this sacred soil there now is bunched a cluster of millionaires, any one of whom could pay the entire expense of the War of the Revolution as easily as I can settle for a gas bill.”

We had not noticed Harding, who suddenly appeared in front of the machine with his driver and a handful of golf balls.

“The future historian will record,” he declared, “that from this spot Robert L. Harding drove a golf ball into that pond below!”

“Suppose you can, Robert,” observed his wife, “what earthly good will it do you, and what will it prove?”

“It will prove that I can drive one of these blamed things into that pond,” he grinned.  “I’ve got to break into history some way.”

On the fifth trial he had the satisfaction of driving a ball into that pond.  It was not much of a drive, but it pleased him immensely.

“I got my money’s worth out of those five balls,” he declared as he climbed back into the car.

“See how the sun strikes the sail of that schooner!” exclaimed Miss Harding.  “And how it glances from the brass work of those yachts at anchor!  There goes an auto boat darting through a swarm of sail boats like a bird through fluttering butterflies.  It is a glorious view from here!”

“It makes the Rhine look like counterfeit money,” asserted Chilvers, whose similes usually are grotesque.  “Any time you hear an American raving over the wonderful scenery of Europe you can place a bet that he has never seen that of his own country.”

“That’s right, Chilvers,” said Harding.  “We have all kinds of scenery out West that has never been used.  It’s a drug in the market, laying around out-of-doors for the first one that comes along.”