Washington and Lafayette still keep guard over his grave, mounted on white horses, and can be seen on summer nights by any of the truly faithful who may pass that way. The village of Kinderhook is in the Claverack Valley, and out in front on the Hudson is its port, Stuyvesant Landing, where the testy old Governor, Peter Stuyvesant the "Headstrong," made his landing when he came up the river to attack the great Patroon, Killian Van Rensselaer. Hendrick Hudson is said to have first named Kinderhook, or "Children's Point," because he saw here a crowd of Indian children watching his vessel. On the Lindenwold estate at Kinderhook, embowered in linden trees, lived for many years President Martin Van Buren, a descendant of the early Dutch settlers, and the shrewdest New York politician of his time. Over on the western bank is the Chaney Tinker Lighthouse, mounted on a crag a hundred feet high, and the distant horizon is bounded by the Helderbergs, a long range of peaks, lower, however, than the Catskills. Above, at Schodack Landing on the eastern shore, was the seat of the council-fire of the Mohicans, called by the French the _Loups_ or Wolves. The word "Is-cho-da" in their language means the "fireplace," and from this has come the name. When Hudson ascended the river, he found the Mohicans occupying its shores for a hundred miles above Rondout Creek, but the race dwindled, until it became the handful to whom the noted Jonathan Edwards ministered in the eighteenth century, at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Hudson passed a day with them at Schodack, was treated hospitably, and wrote that their land was "the finest for cultivation he ever set foot on." Two centuries later, Cooper lamented the _Last of the Mohicans_. THE LAND OF THE PATROONS.