The aggregate sale of Irving’s works when he received his portfolio to Spain was already more than half a million copies, with an equal popularity achieved in Britain.  No writer was ever more truly loved on both sides of the Atlantic, and his name is cherished to-day in England as fondly as it is in our own country.  It has been the good fortune of the writer to spend many a delightful day in the very centre of Merrie England, in the quiet town of Stratford-on-Avon, and feel the gentle companionship of Irving.  Of all writers who have brought to Stratford their heart homage Irving stands the acknowledged chief.  The sitting-room in the “Red Horse Hotel,” where he was disturbed in his midnight reverie, is still called Irving’s room, and the walls are hung with portraits taken at different periods of his life.  Mine host said that visitors from every land were as much interested in this room as in Shakespeare’s birth-place.  The remark may have been intensified to flatter an American visitor, but there are few names dearer to the Anglo-Saxon race than that on the plain headstone in the burial-yard of Sleepy Hollow.  Sunnyside is scarcely visible to the Day Line tourist.  A little gleam of color here and there amid the trees, close to the river bank, near a small boat-house, merely indicates its location; and the traveler by train has only a hurried glimpse, as it is within one hundred feet of the New York Central Railroad.  Tappan Zee, at this point, is a little more than two miles wide and over the beautiful expanse Irving has thrown a wondrous charm.  There is, in fact, “magic in the web” of all his works.  A few modern critics, lacking appreciation alike for humor and genius, may regard his essays as a thing of the past, but as long as the Mahicanituk, the ever-flowing Hudson, pours its waters to the sea, as long as Rip Van Winkle sleeps in the blue Catskills, or the “Headless Horseman” rides at midnight along the Old Post Road en route for Teller’s Point, so long will the writings of Washington Irving be remembered and cherished.  We somehow feel the reality of every legend he has given us.  The spring bubbling up near his cottage was brought over, as he gravely tells us, in a churn from Holland by one of the old time settlers, and we are half inclined to believe it; and no one ever thinks of doubting that the “Flying Dutchman,” Mynheer Van Dam, has been rowing for two hundred years and never made a port.  It is in fact still said by the old inhabitants, that often in the soft twilight of summer evenings, when the sea is like glass and the opposite hills throw their shadows across it, that the low vigorous pull of oars is heard but no boat is seen.

[Illustration:  NORTHERN POINT OF PALISADES]

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Here was no castle in the air, but a realized day-dream.  Irving was there, as genial, humorous and imaginative as if he had never wandered from the primal haunts of his childhood and his fame.

    Henry T. Tuckerman.