s if it hadn't
been for--but no matter!

We (quite a large party in four cars: the Grayles-Grice, the Wilmot,
ours, and the Hippopotamus) started early on a warm morning, not from
Long Island but from a New York hotel. We'd been invited by Mrs. Shuster
to a roof-garden dinner in (or on) it the night before, where we'd been
dazzled by an incredible assemblage of gunpowder pearls and dynamite
diamonds on the bosoms of the Ammunition Aristocracy--a wondrous new
class of Americans sprung up since the war. Not _one_ of us wore a
jewel, I must tell you, except Mrs. Shuster, who flaunted an ancestral
ring she'd cozened out of poor Larry. (Pat had "forgotten" her
searchlight which Caspian made a special expedition to New York to buy
her as a badge of slavery.)

Jack was quite excited about beginning the Hudson River trip in this
way, because he's been so busy discovering Long Island, and it's been so
warm, that he kept New York up his sleeve (sleeves are worn large) until
later. He hadn't even seen Riverside Drive I'd boasted of so much; but
he wouldn't be Jack Winston if he didn't know rather more about it than
the average American, including me.

If it were any other Englishman, I couldn't stand his airs of historic
erudition about my native land, but Jack is _so_ human and boyish in his
joy of "fagging up things," and so broad-mindedly pleased that we beat
his wrong-headed ancestors in our Revolution, that I don't grudge him
the crumbs he's gathered. Of course, I pretend to have crumbs in my
cupboard, too, even when it's really bare as bone. I say, "Oh, yes, now
I _remember_!" and intelligent-sounding things like that.

Did you, for instance, ever know that the source of the Hudson--the most
important source--is a little lake in Essex County, with an Indian name
which translates into "Tear of the Clouds?" I didn't, and I'm not
certain people ought to probe rivers' pasts any more than they ought
women's. It's their own fault if they find out insignificant beginnings.
Fancy saying, "Who _was_ she?" about a beautiful body of water like the
Hudson! Jack is naturally glad that Henry Hudson was English, not Dutch,
as so many people think from his being spelt Hendrik as a rule. I
suppose the Dutch hoped that would be thought, from their tacking on the
"k," for they were so jealous of each other, the Hollanders and the
Puritans, in the days of the early un-settlers.

[Illustration: SUNNYSIDE "Washington Irving's dear old Dutch