The formation continues for nearly twenty miles, at an elevation of from 200 to 300 feet, and the summit is fringed with trees. Needless to say, with such a city as New York below, and with densely populated banks above, the broad sweeps of the beautiful Hudson displayed an infinity of navigating craft--steamers, ships, trim coasters, fishing-boats, net-poles and buoys near the banks marked the haunts of the much-prized and inexhaustible shad. There is much of the interest of American history connected with the Hudson, and there is the wider interest of all English-speaking races attached to it by the associations with the scenery of Washington Irving and his charming creations. An Englishman can forgive the death of André for the sake of Sunnyside and Tarrytown. We pass the Convent of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, who would have been roused out pretty quickly by the Pilgrim Fathers and their children--the wide expanse of the Tappan Zee, where Henry Hudson's galliots found great comfort and much astonished the Red-man--"Sing Sing"; the vast state prison, connected in my mind with a joke, too good to be lost, of the time of the (United States) civil war. It was made _à propos_ of a certain Prince of Salm-Salm, who came to offer his sword to the Federal Government at Washington. His title puzzled Mr. Seward. "Psalm-Psalm!" he exclaimed. "Where on earth does _he_ come from, I wonder." "Very probably from 'Sing Sing,'" replied the person whom he addressed. But the gallant German Prince, it needs not to be said, was a soldier of unblemished name and honour. The Croton Aqueduct, at the other side, which supplies New York, forty miles away, with water, commences at the lake some miles higher up than the station, and we were obliged to hear that the quality of its water was not strained, and that it needed boiling; but that may be a calumny, and I do not think any of us made even one trial to disprove the fact. The scenery beyond Peekskill, at the stretch of river called the Highlands, made me make a mental vow, which will, I fear, never be kept, that I would return and vegetate in one of the hotels of which we caught glimpses in the trees on the slopes of the mountains, which in grand and varied outlines tower over the stream.