Hudson River." Judge Atkins has written interesting legends of
the manor-house, involving the secret passage and other features.

NOTE 9. (Page 259.)

"That lonely highway now called Broadway." A block of houses and
another street now lie between that highway and the east front of the
manor-house. The building is closely hemmed in by the sordid signs of
progress. Ugly houses, in crowded blocks, cover all the great
surrounding space that once was thick forest, fair orchards, gardens,
fields, and pastoral rivulet. The Neperan or Saw Mill River flows,
sluggish and scummy, under streets and houses. A visit to the
manor-house, now, would spoil rather than improve one's impression of
what the place looked like in the old days. Yet the house itself
remains well preserved, for which all honor to the town of Yonkers.
There is in our spacious America so much room for the present and the
future, that a little ought to be kept for the past. It is well to be
reminded, by a landmark here and there, of our brave youth as a
people. A posterity, sure to value these landmarks more than this
money-grabbing age does, will reproach us with the destruction we have
already wrought. Worse still than the crime of obliterating all
human-made relics of the past, is the vandalism of nature herself
where nature is exceptionally beautiful. To rob millions of
beauty-lovers, yet to live, of the Palisades of the Hudson, would
bring upon us the amazement and execration of future centuries. This
earth is an entailed estate, that each generation is in honor bound to
hand down, undefaced, undiminished, to its successor. In order that a
close-clutched wallet or two may wax a little fatter, shall we bring
upon ourselves a cry of shame that would ring with increasing
bitterness through the ages,--shall we invite the execration merited
by such greed as could so outrage our fair earth, such stolid apathy
as could stand by and see it done? Shall an alien or two, as hard of
soul as the stone in which he traffics, mar the Hudson that Washington
patrolled, rob countless eyes, yet unopened, of a joy; countless
minds, yet to waken, of an inspiration; countless hearts, yet to beat,
of a thrill of pride in the soil of their inheriting? Shall some
future reader wonder why Irving, deeming it "an invaluable advantage
to be born and brought up in the neighborhood of some grand and noble
object in nature," should have thanked God he was born on the banks of
the Hudson?