=The Dover Stone Church=, just west of Dover Plains Village, is also well worth a visit.  Here a small stream has worn out a remarkable cavern in the rocks forming a gothic arch for entrance.  It lies in a wooded gorge within easy walk from the village.  Many years ago the writer of this handbook paid it an afternoon visit, and the picture has remained impressed with wonderful vividness.  The archway opens into a solid rock, and a stream of water issues from the threshold.  On entering the visitor is confronted by a great boulder, resembling an old-fashioned New England pulpit, reaching half way to the ceiling.  The walls are almost perfectly arched, and garnished here and there with green moss and white lichen.  A rift in the rocks extends the whole length of the chapel, over which trees hang their green foliage, which, ever rustling and trembling, form a trellis-work with the blue sky, while the spray rising from behind the rock-worn altar seems like the sprinkling of holy incense.  After all these years I still hear the voice of those dashing waters and dream again, as I did that day, of the brook of Cherith where ravens fed the prophet of old.  It is said by Lossing, in his booklet on the Dover Stone Church, that Sacassas, the mighty sachem of the Pequoids and emperor over many tribes between the Thames and the Hudson River, was compelled after a disastrous battle which annihilated his warriors, to fly for safety, and, driven from point to point, he at last found refuge in this cave, where undiscovered he subsisted for a few days on berries, until at last he made his way through the territory of his enemies, the Mahicans, to the land of the Mohawks.

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  Tell me, where’er thy silver bark be steering,
    Bright Dian floating by fair Persian lands,
  Tell if thou visited, thou heavenly rover,
   A lovelier stream than this the wide world over.

  Charles Fenno Hoffman.

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=Poughkeepsie to Kingston.=

Leaving the Poughkeepsie dock the steamer approaches the Poughkeepsie Bridge which, from Blue Point and miles below, has seemed to the traveler like a delicate bit of lace-work athwart the landscape, or like an old-fashioned “valance” which used to hang from Dutch bedsteads in the Hudson River farm houses.  This great cantilever structure was begun in 1873, but abandoned for several years.  The work was resumed in 1886 just in time to save the charter, and was finished by the Union Bridge Company in less than three years.  The bridge is 12,608 feet in length (or about two miles and a half), the track being 212 feet above the water with 165 feet clear above the tide in the centre span.  The breadth of the river at this point is 3,094 feet.  The bridge originally cost over three million dollars and much more has been annually spent in necessary improvements.  It not only affords a delightful passenger route between Philadelphia and Boston, but also brings the coal centres of Pennsylvania to the very threshold of New England.  Two railroads from the east centre here, and what was once considered an idle dream, although bringing personal loss to many stockholders, has been of material advantage to the city.