udson
burst upon us. At our feet lay the broad bosom of the Tappan Zee, its
waters glistening in the sunlight, the spires of a village in the
foreground, and the distance blue-girt with cliffs, hills, and
mountains.

I have seen it a thousand times, but it is ever new.

"Stop; Jacques Henri!" commanded Miss Harding, and I stopped.

"What's the matter?" asked Harding. "Something busted?"

"We're going to sit right here a minute or more and admire this,"
declared Miss Harding.

"Great; isn't it?" admitted Harding. "Who owns it, Smith? Does it cost
anything to look at it?"

"Not a penny," I said.

"First time I've got something for nothing since I struck New York," was
the comment of that gentleman.

Four or five miles across the Tappan Zee the blue of the mountain was
splattered with the white of straggling houses. To the left was a
checker-board of farms, an area hundreds of square miles in extent
basking in the rays of a cloudless sun. Yet beyond, the Orange mountains
lifted their rounded slopes. To the south was the grim line of the
Palisades, blue-black save where trees clung to their steep sides. On
the north Hook Mountain dipped its feet into the Hudson, and to our ears
came the dull boom of explosions where vandals are blasting away its
sides and ruining its beauty.

"Right over there," said Carter, pointing toward Piermont, "is where
Andre landed when he crossed the river on the mission to Benedict Arnold
which ended in his capture and death. Beyond the mountain is the
monument which marks the spot where he met with what our school books
term 'an untimely fate.'"

"A short distance to the south," I added, "is the old house where
Washington made his headquarters during the most discouraging years of
the Revolution, and in which he and Rochambeau planned the campaign
which ended with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. And not far
away is 'Sleepy Hollow,' where Washington Irving lived, wrote, and
died."

"Yes, yes," contributed Chilvers, "and on this sacred soil there now is
bunched a cluster of millionaires, any one of whom could pay the entire
expense of the War of the Revolution as easily as I can settle for a gas
bill."

We had not noticed Harding, who suddenly appeared in front of the
machine with his driver and a handful of golf balls.

"The future historian will record," he declared, "that from this spot
Robert L. Harding drove a golf ball into that pond below!"

"Suppose you can, Rob