p there and get back before the moon
sets."

And the father would answer that it didn't matter, and would send his
best respects, through Mrs. Des Anges at King's Bridge, to Madam Des
Anges at New Rochelle; and at night he would sit down alone to his
dinner in the breakfast-room, served by old Chloe, who did her humble
best to tempt his appetite, which was likely to be feeble when Master
Jacob was away.

Master Jacob had taken to riding to King's Bridge of late. Sometimes he
would start out early in the morning, just about the time when young
Van Riper was plodding by on his way to the shop. Young Van Riper liked
to be at the shop an hour earlier than his father. Old Mr. Dolph was
always up, on these occasions, to see his son start off. He loved to
look at the boy, in his English riding-boots and breeches, astride of
black Diana, who pranced and curvetted up the unpaved road. Young Jacob
had her well in hand, but he gave her her head and let her play until
they reached Broadway, where he made her strike a rattling regular pace
until they got well up the road; and then she might walk up Bloomingdale
way or across to Hickory Lane.

If he went up by the east he was likely to dismount at a place which you
can see now, a little west and south of McComb's Dam Bridge, where there
is a bit of a rocky hollow, and a sort of horizontal cleft in the rocks
that has been called a cave, and a water-washed stone above, whose oddly
shaped depression is called an Indian's footprint. He would stop there,
because right in that hollow, as I can tell you myself, grew, in his
time as in mine, the first of the spring flowers. It was full of violets
once, carpeted fairly with the pale, delicate petals.

And up toward the west, on a bridle-path between the hills and the
river, as you came toward Fort Washington, going to Tubby Hook--we are
refined nowadays, and Tubby Hook is "Inwood"--Heaven help it!--there
were wonderful flowers in the woods. The wind-flowers came there early,
nestling under the gray rocks that sparkled with garnets; and there
bloomed great bunches of Dutchman's-breeches--not the thin sprays that
come in the late New England spring, but huge clumps that two men could
not enclose with linked hands; great masses of scarlet and purple,
and--mostly--of a waxy white, with something deathlike in their
translucent beauty. There, also, he would wade into the swamps around a
certain little creek, lured by a hope of the jack-in-the-p