.

that-a-way, striving to get out of the hollow, till it finally comes to the plain. The rock sweeps like mason-work in a half-round on both sides of the fall, and shelves over the bottom for fifty feet; so that when I've been sitting at the foot of the first pitch, and my hounds have run

into the caverns behind the sheet of water, they've looked no bigger than so many rabbits. To my judgment, lad, it's the best piece of work I've met with in the woods; and none know how often the hand of God is seen in the wilderness, but them that rove it for a man's life."

"Does the water run into the Delaware ?" asked Edwards.

"No, no, it's a drop for the old Hudson: and a merry time it has until it gets down off the mountain."

And if the visitor would enjoy one of the wildest and most romantic rambles in the world, let him follow that little stream on its way "off the mountains," down the deep, dark, mysterious gorge, until it joins the Katers-Kill proper, that rushes through the "Clove" from the neighbourhood of Hunter, among the hills above, and thence onward to the plain.

It was just after a storm when we last visited these falls. The traces of "delicate-footed May" were upon every shrub and tree. Tiny leaves were just unfolding all over the mountains, and the snowy dogwood blossoms were bursting into beauty on every hand. Yet mementoes of winter were at the falls. In the cavern at the back of them, heaps of ice lay piled, and a chilling mist came sweeping up the gorge, at quick intervals, filling the whole amphitheatre with shadowy splendour when sunlight fell upon it from between the dissolving clouds. While sketching the cascades, memory recurred to other visits we had made there in midsummer, when the wealth of foliage lay upon tree and shrub; and also to a description given us by a lady, of her visit to the falls in winter, with Cole, the artist, when the frost had crystallised the spray into gorgeous fret-work all over the rocks, and made a spendid cylinder of milk-white ice from the base to the crown of the upper cascade. Of these phases Bryant has sung:

"Midst greens and shades the Katers-Kill leaps,

From cliffs where the wood-flower clings;

All summer he moistens his verdant steeps,

With the sweet light spray of the mountain springs;
And he shakes the woods on the mountain side,
When they drip with the rains of autumn tide.

"But when, in the forests bare and old,

The blast of December calls,

He builds, in the star-light clear and cold,
A palace of ice, where his torrent falls,
With turret, and arch, and fret-work fair,
And pillars blue as the summer air."

The tourist, if he fails to traverse the rugged gorge, should not omit a ride from the Mountain House, down through the "Clove" to Palensville

and the plain, a distance of about eight miles. Unpleasant as was the day when we last visited the mountains, we returned to Katz-Kill by that circuitous route. After leaving the falls, we rode about three miles before reaching the "Clove." Huge masses of vapour came rolling up from its lower depths, sometimes obscuring everything around us, and then,

drifting away, laving the lofty summits of the mountains that stretch far southward, gleaming in the fitful sunlight, and presenting unsurpassed exhibitions of aërial perspective. Down, down, sometimes with only a narrow space between the base of a high mountain on one side, and steep

precipices upon the other, whose feet are washed by the rushing KatersKill, our crooked road pursued its way, now passing a log-house, now a pleasant cottage, and at length the ruins of a leather manufacturing village, deserted because the bark upon the hills around, used for tanning, is exhausted. Near this picturesque scene, the Katers-Kill leaps into a

seething gulf between cleft rocks, and flows gently on to make still greater plunges into darker depths a short distance below. This cleft in the rocks is called the Fawn's Leap, a young deer having there escaped a hunter and his dog, that pursued to the verge of the chasm. The fawn leaped it,

but the dog, attempting to follow, fell into the gulf below and was drowned. The foiled hunter went home, without dog or game. By some, less poetical than others, the place is called the Dog Hole.

A few rods below the Fawn's Leap, the road crosses a rustic bridge, at the foot of a sheer precipice, and for half a mile traverses a shelf cut from the mountain side, two hundred feet above the stream that has found its way into depths so dark as to be hardly visible. Upon the opposite side of the creek a perpendicular wall rises many hundred feet, and then in slight inclination the mountain towers up at least a thousand feet higher, and forms a portion of the range known as the South Mountain. At the mouth of this cavernous gorge lies the pretty little village of Palensville, where we again cross the stream, and in a few moments find ourselves upon a beautiful and highly cultivated plain. From this point, along the base of the mountains to the road by which we enter them, or more directly to Katz-Kill, the drive is a delightful one.

From the lower borders of Columbia County, opposite Katz-Kill village, to Hyde Park, in Duchess County, a distance of thirty miles, the east bank of the Hudson is distinguished for old and elegant country seats, most of them owned and occupied by the descendants of wealthy proprietors who flourished in the last century, and were connected by blood and marriage with Robert Livingston, a Scotch gentleman, of the family of the Earls of Linlithgow, who came to America in 1672, and married a member of the Schuyler family, the widow of a Van Rensselaer. He lived at Albany, and was secretary to the Commissioners of Indian Affairs for a long time. From 1684 to 1715 he had, from time to time, purchased of the Indians, and secured by patents from the English crown, large tracts of land in the present Columbia County. This land was then mostly wild and unprofitable, but became the basis of great family wealth.

In the year 1710 Livingston's grants were consolidated, and Hunter, the royal governor, gave him a patent for a tract of a little more than one hundred and sixty-two thousand acres, for which he was to pay into the king's treasury "an annual rent of twenty-eight shillings, lawful money of New York," a trifle over fourteen shillings sterling! This magnificent estate was constituted a manor, with political privileges.