At the head of Newburg Bay, on the western shore, is a rocky platform down by the waterside, known as the "Devil's Dance Chamber." When the "Half Moon" came up the river and anchored for the night, this broad flat rock, now almost hidden by cedars, was the scene of a wild midnight revel of the Indians, with all the accessories of song and dance, fire and war-paint, at which the Dutch sailors marvelled exceedingly, calling it the "Duyvel's Dans-Kamer." Here the warlike Minsis of the Quassaic, before going on hunting expeditions or the warpath, would paint themselves grotesquely and dance around a fire with horrible contortions, singing and yelling under direction of the soothsayers or "medicine men." They believed, if this was kept up long enough, the evil spirit would appear, either as a wild beast or a harmless animal; if the former, it foreboded ill-fortune and the expedition was abandoned, while the latter was a good omen. These hideous performances afterwards scared old Governor Peter Stuyvesant, according to the veracious Knickerbocker, when he sailed up the river, for the historian says, "Even now I have it on the point of my pen to relate how his crew was most horribly frightened, on going on shore above the Highlands, by a gang of merry, roystering devils, frisking and curvetting on a huge flat rock projecting into the river, and which is called the Duyvel's Dans-Kamer to this very day." POUGHKEEPSIE AND VASSAR. The Hudson River's "Long Reach" stretches many miles almost due northward, and on it is Poughkeepsie, with thirty thousand population, midway between New York and Albany. Near here lived stout Theophilus Anthony the blacksmith, who forged the great chains stretched across the Hudson in the Highlands, for which the British burnt his house and carried him a captive down to the New York prison-ships. Here, at Locust Grove, a foliage-covered rocky point protruding into the river, was long the home of Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph. Poughkeepsie spreads broadly upon its group of gentle hills, with the great railway-bridge crossing high overhead, elevated two hundred feet above the water, and nearly a mile and a half long. The Poughkeepsie streets, lined with fine elms, maples and acacias, rise upon the sloping banks to a height above the bridge level, the town being environed by rocky buttresses. The Indians named the place Apo-keep-sinck, or the "pleasant and safe harbor," and in it they housed their canoes. From this was gradually evolved the present name, through a variety of spellings, of which no less than forty-two different styles are found in the old records of the town. The "safe harbor" of the Indians was between two protruding rocky bluffs, and is now filled with wharves. The rapid Winnakee Brook leaps into it, a stream which the Dutch called the Fall Kill. The northern bordering bluff was their Slange Klippe, or the "Adder Cliff," infested with