Of grottoes in the far dim woods, Of pools moss-rimmed and deep, From whose embrace the little rills In daring venture creep. _E.A. Lente._ * * * The principal streams which flow into the Hudson between Albany and New York are the Norman's Kill, on west bank, two miles south of Albany; the Mourdener's Kill, at Castleton, eight miles below Albany, on the east bank; Coxsackie Creek, on west bank, seventeen miles below Albany; Kinderhook Creek, six miles north of Hudson; Catskill Creek, six miles south of Hudson; Roeliffe Jansen's Creek, on east bank, seven miles south of Hudson; the Esopus Creek, which empties at Saugerties; the Rondout Creek, at Rondout; the Wappingers, at New Hamburgh; the Fishkill, at Matteawan, opposite Newburgh; the Peekskill Creek, and Croton River. The course of the river is nearly north and south, and drains a comparatively narrow valley. It is emphatically the "River of the Mountains," as it rises in the Adirondacks, flows seaward east of the Helderbergs, the Catskills, the Shawangunks, through twenty miles of the Highlands and along the base of the Palisades. More than any other river it preserves the character of its origin, and the following apostrophe from the writer's poem, "The Hudson," condenses its continuous "mountain-and-lake-like" quality: O Hudson, mountain-born and free, Thy youth a deep impression takes, For, mountain-guarded to the sea, Thy course is but a chain of lakes. =The First Settlement of the Hudson.=--In 1610 a Dutch ship visited Manhattan to trade with the Indians and was soon followed by others on like enterprise. In 1613 Adrian Block came with a few comrades and remained the winter. In 1614 the merchants of North Holland organized a company and obtained from the States General a charter to trade in the New Netherlands, and soon after a colony built a few houses and a fort near the Battery. The entire island was purchased from the Indians in 1624 for the sum of sixty guilders or about twenty-four dollars. A fort was built at Albany in 1623 and known as Fort Aurania or Fort Orange. From Wassenaer's "Historie van Europa," 1621-1632, as translated in the 3d volume of the Documentary History of New York, a castle--Fort Nassau--was built in 1624, on an island on the north side of the River Montagne, now called Mauritius. "But as the natives there were somewhat discontented, and not easily managed, the projectors abandoned it, intending now to plant a colony among the Maikans (Mahicans), a nation lying twenty-five miles (American measure seventy-five miles) on both sides of the river, upwards." In another document we learn that "The West India Company being chartered, a vessel of 130 lasts, called the 'New Netherland' (whereof Cornelius Jacobs, of Hoorn, was skipper), with thirty families, mostly Walloons, was equipped in the spring of 1623." * * *