Over opposite, the grand terminating buttress of the Palisades, Piermont, compresses the river channel, the rocks then receding, so that to the northward it broadens into the beautiful lake of the Tappan Zee. Here is the boundary dividing New Jersey from New York, and the long ridge, retiring from the river, stretches inland some miles, encircles the town of Nyack, and comes back to the river some distance above in an abrupt elevated cliff known as Point-no-Point. This lake is over four miles wide, and is the scene of the legend of "The Flying Dutchman of the Tappan Zee." Irving tells us that often in the still twilight of a summer evening, when the sea would be as glass, and the opposite hills threw their shadows half across it, a low sound would be heard, as of the steady vigorous pull of oars, though no boat could be seen. Some said it was a whale-boat of the ancient water-guard, sunk by the British ships during the war, but now permitted to haunt its old cruising-grounds. But the prevalent opinion connected it with the awful fate of "Rambout Van Dam of graceless memory." He was a roystering Dutchman of Spuyten Duyvel, who in a time long past navigated his boat alone one Saturday the whole length of the Tappan Zee to attend a quilting-party at Kakiat, on the western shore. Here he danced until midnight, when he started home. He was warned it was the verge of Sunday morning, but he went off, swearing he would not land until he reached Spuyten Duyvel, if it took him a month of Sundays. He was never seen afterwards, but may still be heard, plying his oars, being "the Flying Dutchman of the Tappan Zee, doomed to ply between Kakiat and Spuyten Duyvel until the day of judgment." There is also another legend of a stout, round, Dutch-built vessel of the olden time, with high bow and stern, sailing up New York harbor in the teeth of wind and tide. She never returned down the Hudson, but the Dutch skippers plying the river often saw her, sometimes along the Palisades, or off Croton Point, or in the Highlands, but never above them. Sometimes it was by the lightning flashes of a storm upon a pitchy night, and giving glimpses of her careering across the Tappan Zee or the wide waste of Haverstraw Bay. Sometimes on quiet moonlight nights she would lie under a high bluff in the Highlands, all in deep shadow, excepting her topsails glittering in the moonbeams. She appeared always just before or after or during unruly weather, and all the skippers knew her as the "Storm Ship." Some maintained this phantom was the "Flying Dutchman," come from the Cape of Good Hope into more tranquil waters. Others held it to be Hendrick Hudson and the shadowy crew of the "Half Moon" sailing to their revels in the Catskills. We are told by Irving that "she still haunts the Highlands and cruises about Point-no-Point. People living along the river insist they sometimes see her in summer moonlight, and that in a deep still midnight they have heard the chant