many small people, it is of mighty spirit, and values itself greatly on
its antiquity, being one of the oldest edifices, for its size, in the
whole country. It claims to be an ancient seat of empire, I may rather
say an empire in itself, and like all empires, great and small, has had
its grand historical epochs. In speaking of this doughty and valorous
little pile, I shall call it by its usual appellation of "The Roost;"
though that is a name given to it in modern days, since it became the
abode of the white man.

Its origin, in truth, dates far back in that remote region commonly
called the fabulous age, in which vulgar fact becomes mystified, and
tinted up with delectable fiction. The eastern shore of the Tappan Sea
was inhabited in those days by an unsophisticated race, existing in all
the simplicity of nature; that is to say, they lived by hunting and
fishing, and recreated themselves occasionally with a little tomahawking
and scalping. Each stream that flows down from the hills into the
Hudson, had its petty sachem, who ruled over a hand's-breadth of forest
on either side, and had his seat of government at its mouth. The
chieftain who ruled at the Roost, was not merely a great warrior, but a
medicine-man, or prophet, or conjurer, for they all mean the same thing,
in Indian parlance. Of his fighting propensities, evidences still
remain, in various arrowheads of flint, and stone battle-axes,
occasionally digged up about the Roost: of his wizard powers, we have a
token in a spring which wells up at the foot of the bank, on the
very margin of the river, which, it is said, was gifted by him with
rejuvenating powers, something like the renowned Fountain of Youth in
the Floridas, so anxiously but vainly sought after by the veteran Ponce
de Leon. This story, however, is stoutly contradicted by an old Dutch
matter-of-fact tradition, which declares that the spring in question was
smuggled over from Holland in a churn, by Femmetie Van Slocum, wife of