deal-praise God!-and talk abundantly, both to each other and to other people, and live amply by the way, and worry very little. After all, we haven't got to accomplish all the infernal details of advancement and prosperity that come into my head. We have only got to live one day at a lick, and these present days are certainly not hard living. I like now and then to get my shoulders up against something substantial, like the Sermon on the Mount, and rest.

The real necessaries of life are cheap and abundant, but the gumption to recognize and live on them is not abundant at all. It is not necessary to be rich, but it is necessary to live on what you have got, for that means freedom. It is not necessary to be able beyond what abilities we have, but it is necessary to love truth and seek it. It is not necessary to be select, but it is necessary to be kind, for without love there is no sweetness in life. It is not necessary to be powerful, but it is necessary to have faith in something more than the intelligence of the selfish, and the wisdom of majorities, and such direction of the affairs of mankind as the people we see, and are, seem likely to give them. Cordelia and I are fairly pious people. We are even SO oldfashioned that we like to go to church. It is not a universally popular pastime among the Protestants of our acquaintance, but, for my part, I have to go, if it's only to be reminded that there is another force always working to make life possible and palatable besides the wisdom of majorities (aforesaid), and the abilities of legislatures to legislate, and the powers of courts to keep them from over

out.

doing it. Those things-the majorities and the legislatures and the courts—are eddies in the great current. I feel when I am in church more as though I was in the great current itself. I like to go, it is such a beautiful chance to think. Somehow it invites the soul, queer as it is. I like to hear the Bible read. I like to differ with the honorable apostle when I cannot, as yet, reach his conclusion about something, and to wonder how it happened to him to say some things so marvelously well. I like to differ with the prayer-book a good deal, and not to mind at all so long as they don't put me Prayer-books are not time-tables, and ought not to be expected to be up-todate right to the minute. People who insist that they are are a little trying, but in the present state of religion there is great liberty for peaceable folk to differ, and question, and doubt, and mature their views in the long school of rumination and human experience. And my dear Cordelia sits up and listens to the minister, handsome and gentle, an embellishment to the Lord's house, imparting repose to my spirit. And yet there are people who play bridge in country-houses on Sunday mornings and think they are ahead on it, and many others who scour the contiguous counties in devil-wagons, and claim that they are communing with nature! I am willing myself to devilwagon the suburbs once or twice in the spring, about dogwood or apple-blossom time, but habitual Sunday morning autoexercise seems an enormous waste of time. Poor Horace, who died before the autos came! He would have liked them, for they are marvels. But he would have said some very penetrating things about them.

P

ARADOXICAL as it may sound, I think that the peculiar thrill of antiquity, the sense of the past as a still living presence, can be more fully experienced, on occasion, here in America than in Europe, where its monuments are so much more numerous, and consequently more familiar and taken for granted. In Europe, too, such monuments are often so grandiose that the sense of their antiquity is somewhat merged in admiration of their other characteristics; or they are, so to speak, so professionally "historical" as to have become show-places and museums for the multitude. Curiously enough, when this happens, the past seems to die a second death and lose all power to stir the imagination. Similarly, caged wild animals fail entirely to suggest wildness, and a chipmunk darting along a fence gives one more keenly the true thrill of wild nature than the most formidable man-eater in the Zoo. Compared, say, with the Tower of London, Kingston on the Hudson, as an antiqua

VOL CXXIII. -No. 738.-114

rian exhibit, is as that chipmunk to the man-eater. Its modest antiquity seems, indeed, a picayune affair in competition with the spot where the young murdered princes were buried, the block on which Anne Boleyn was beheaded, and such entirely unconvincing antiquarian sensationalism.

Yet I, for one, must testify that, whereas the Tower of London has left me as unmoved as Madame Tussaud's, a brief visit I recently made to Kingston left me with as actual a sense of having been living for a few hours in the past as though the railway had been Mr. H. G. Wells's "time-machine," and had veritably set me down at a time-station, some two hundred and fifty years ago. Indeed, for a New-Yorker, the "road to yesterday" is always near at hand in the Hudson, and, if he prefers to travel most appropriately, the river-boats, with their Rip Van Winkle captains, may well seem to be plying for his convenience between the present and the past.

unbroken. A few generations of tillage may soften her savage contours, but they scarcely ripple the surface of her ancient peace, and the loneliness of the Highlands and the Catskills is as lonely to-day, perhaps even lonelier, than when the Esopus Indians inhabited its solitudes, and the first Dutch settlers anchored at the mouth of the Rondout, and, looking on the fertile flats bordering the river, found it "an exceedingly beautiful land."

This was in 1653; for, though as far back as 1615 there had been a Dutch fort at Rondout, there had been no settlement, till, difficulty having risen among the colonists at Rensselaerwyck on a question of boundaries, certain of the more peaceloving had decided to change their quarters, and so came to find a new home near Rondout. Boundaries were a fruitful cause of discussion and even bloodshed in those days, and a story is told in Kingston of the quaint method employed on occasion to fix them securely in the

memories of the younger generation. A century and a half later, when the long vexed question as to where Albany County ended and Ulster County began came up for final settlement before the Supreme Court. an aged woman was called as witness and gave testimony as follows:

"Margaret Snyder, the wife of Zachariah Snyder, being duly sworn, deposeth and saith that she is the daughter of Valentine Fiero, and near sixtyseven years of age; that she was born and brought up at her father's, and, after being married, removed to near the 'Steene Haert,' and lived there till about twenty years ago. When she was ten, twelve, or thirteen years of age, her father turned the cattle (as she believes, about the 25 April) in the woods near the Steene Haert Fonteyne [spring], where

one of the cows was entangled in the morass. She went to see, and found a cow, which she called her own, just drawn out. . . . Iler father, having cut a switch, took her to the north side of the Steene Haert rock, and, taking her by the hair, told her that he would give her something to remember; that that side was Albany, showing her letters, and gave her a smart whipping. After which he took her to the south side of said rock, and told her that that side was Esopus, and pointed at letters on that side of the rock, and, giving her a second whipping, told her to remember that he had been flag-bearer, and Peter York and Nicholas Branden were chain-bearers on the survey, and that was the line between Albany and Esopus, and after his death, if any dispute should arise, she might remember it."

This custom of "whipping the boundaries" was, of course, a European importation of great antiquity. Many and ingenious, indeed, were the uses found for the rod by our forefathers. One recalls Benvenuto Cellini's anecdote of the mnemonic whipping given to him by his father, that he might never forget the apparition of a salamander in the fire;

and it was by the same drastic aid to memory that some of us, even in these days of advanced methods, learned our Latin verbs.

My concern here with history in Kingston is not as one reads it written in books, however delightful, but as in Kingston one realizes it - an actual living presence in the air, as pervasive as the breath of spring which, the day of my pilgrimage, had filled the valley of the Hudson with apple-blossom, and infolded the little town in a huge embrace of green. It is with history as it gazes at us dreamily from the old stone houses fronting the sunny maple-lined streets, or sighs in oldfashioned Dutch from the quaint, runiclooking grave stones in the churchyard of the old Reformed Protestant Dutch church, or as it can be found written with Indian tomahawks on the stout door of a certain outlying farm-house a few miles away; or, again, as you can hear it from the lips of every second townsman you meet. One speaks of history in Kingston as naturally as of steel rails in Pittsburg. Busily prosperous as it is with its cement and other industries, its past is no less a living part of its present,