this day that Andre was
hanged, and they love the monument to his captors who wouldn't be bribed
by horse, or watch, or money. I suppose if Andre hadn't offered those
bribes, or said he belonged to the "Southern party," they might never
have thought of his stockings, he would have got safely to the waiting
ship, and on to New York; and Benedict Arnold would have surrendered
West Point to the British!

Heaps of other exciting things helped to make Tarrytown historic: an
Indian massacre, a big battle in the Revolution, Major Hunt's "bag of
British soldiers at Van Tassel's Tavern when he won fame by his shout,
'Gentlemen, clubs are trumps!'" and so on. But we took even more
interest in the old legends of Spook Rock, and Andre's ghost and Cuffy's
Prophecy and the Flying Dutchman, who of course tacks back and forth
across the Tappan Zee. Such things are so much more real than facts!
Besides, we had to "get on--get on!" that war cry of motoring men.

We did get on, along the smooth brick road to Ossining, which is really
Sing Sing, you know (or ought to, if you don't), only Ossining is the
old Indian name, so they took it back to escape the blight. It's such a
pretty town that it would have been a shame to associate it only with
the state prison, whose high gray walls are the only grim thing in the
landscape. It was for the sake of staring at them, though, and shivering
down our spines that we took the detour to Ossining. When we had
shivered enough we turned back to Tarrytown and drove our motors like
docile cattle on board a steam ferryboat which took us across the river
to Nyack, the dearest, quaintest of little Dutch towns. It looks as lazy
as, and more obstinately old-fashioned than, Tarrytown, though Tarrytown
is far more important and impressive.

There's a colony of frame houses in Nyack which makes you feel you've
suddenly tripped and stumbled out of the twentieth century back into the
early nineteenth; and we lunched in a charming little hotel that gave us
things to eat equal to any restaurant in New York.

We had a divine run from Nyack, through a fairy forest, with Hook
Mountain in sight and the Ramapo Hills on the horizon. Hook Mountain
glowed a bright rose colour wherever its green cloak was torn; and when
we came into sudden sight of the river there was a magical effect: a
veil of silver mist, with boats big and little moving behind it, like
white swans. We had woods all the way to Rockland Lake, where the g