* * *

    We have a charming position for our French encampment
    along the Hudson among rocks and under magnificent tulip trees.

    Count Dumas.

* * *

Turning to the eastern shore, we see “Nuits,” the Cottinet residence, Italian in style, built of Caen stone, “Nevis,” home of the late Col.  James Hamilton, son of Alexander Hamilton, the George L. Schuyler mansion, the late Cyrus W. Field’s, and many pleasant places about Abbotsford, and come to

=Irvington=, on the east bank, 24 miles from New York, once known as Dearman’s, but changed in compliment to the great writer and lover of the Hudson, who after a long sojourn in foreign lands, returned to live by the tranquil waters of Tappan Zee.  In a letter to his brother he refers to Sleepy Hollow as the favorite resort of his boyhood, and says:  “The Hudson is in a manner my first and last love, and after all my wanderings and seeming infidelities, I return to it with a heartfelt preference over all the rivers of the world.”  As at Stratford-on-Avon every flower is redolent of Shakespeare, and at Melrose every stone speaks of Walter Scott, so here on every breeze floats the spirit of Washington Irving.  A short walk of half a mile north from the station brings us to his much-loved

="Sunnyside."= Irving aptly describes it in one of his stories as “made up of gable-ends, and full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat.  It is said, in fact, to have been modeled after the hat of Peter the Headstrong, as the Escurial of Spain was fashioned after the gridiron of the blessed St. Lawrence.”  Wolfert’s Roost, as it was once styled (Roost signifying Rest), took its name from Wolfert Acker, a former owner.  It consisted originally of ten acres when purchased by Irving in 1835, but eight acres were afterwards added.  With great humor Irving put above the porch entrance “George Harvey, Boum’r,” Boumeister being an old Dutch word for architect.  A storm-worn weather-cock, “which once battled with the wind on the top of the Stadt House of New Amsterdam in the time of Peter Stuyvesant, erects his crest on the gable, and a gilded horse in full gallop, once the weather-cock of the great Van der Heyden palace of Albany, glitters in the sunshine, veering with every breeze, on the peaked turret over the portal.”

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Irving chose his residence in the valley, not amid the mountains; by the fields and meadows of the broad Tappan Zee, rather than the Highlands; in a congenial region suited to his temperament.

    Dr. Bethune.

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About fifty years ago a cutting of Walter Scott’s favorite ivy at Melrose Abbey was transported across the Atlantic, and trained over the porch of “Sunnyside,” by the hand of Mrs. Renwick, daughter of Rev. Andrew Jeffrey of Lochmaben, known in girlhood as the “Bonnie Jessie” of Annandale, or the “Blue-eyed Lassie” of Robert Burns:—­a graceful tribute, from the shrine of Waverley to the nest of Knickerbocker: