house is
like a beautiful living body with his memory for its soul"]

Frightfully geologic things seem to have happened and subsided under the
Hudson, making it navigable all the way; otherwise New York City
wouldn't be the greatest on the American continent. Jack was talking to
me about this all along Riverside Drive, not that it would have mattered
much, because New Yorkers could have said it was the greatest to
Chicago people just the same. I didn't dare make this remark to Jack,
however, because he was being thrilled with thoughts of the Revolution
and I wanted to encourage him in those. I hoped he wouldn't know about
Fort Washington being the place of the fight that caused General
Washington to give up Manhattan Island to his--Jack's--horrid ancestors;
but he did know, and about the sloops and brigs and other things which
we foxy little Americans had sunk there to keep the British ships from
getting farther up the river. You can get tremendously excited about
this Revolution business when you're on the spot, you see, though you
and I have lived so much in England where most people treat it as a
"brush" less important than the Boer War. And when you are here,
surrounded with all the noisy progress and skyscraping greatness of our
country, it is wonderful to think how a few brave men, determined to
have their rights, in spite of desperate odds, made this vast difference
in the world.

I was secretly longing to know what Jack would think of the dear
Palisades, which seem so wonderful to us, and give us more of a feeling,
somehow, than the highest mountains of Europe, Africa, or Asia. But he
was most satisfactory about them. He didn't say much. He just gazed,
which was better; and they were looking their grandest that day, like
the walls of castles turned into mountains. And there were strange
lights and shadows in the water which gave a magical, enchanted effect.
There were thunderous violet clouds in the sky, with shafts of sunshine
pouring through; and Jack and I discovered, deep down in the river,
marvellous treasures of the enchanted castles: white marble seats and
statues, and golden vases, and drowned peacocks, with spread purple
tails floating under the crystal roof which _we_ call the surface of the
river.

It does annoy me when Europeans patronize us about being a new country,
doesn't it you? The Palisades, it seems, boiled up and took shape as a
wall of cliff thirty million years ago, or maybe more, in th