A country school was having recess as I went by, the master sitting in the shade outside reading, while the boys were playing the national game and the one little girl stood by admiring their prowess. Wappinger Falls preserves the name of the Indian tribe that once held sway over these uplands. The falls around which the village has grown up are lined with factories and factory ruins, which latter lend an added charm to the natural beauty of the scene, for even in a dry time water enough tumbles down these rocks to make the place a delight. The village contains an interesting relic of the past in the old homestead of Peter Mesier, a New York merchant, who settled here about the close of the Revolution. Between here and Poughkeepsie the trolley plies. Its tracks run through the grass by the roadside, the poles blend with the trees, and this usually unsightly modern convenience hardly mars the beauty of the landscape. Not a mile-stone was to be seen on this piece of road, but down by the river, at a corner of the Livingstone Mansion, evidently taken from its original station on the old road nearby, and marked "80 M. from N. York," reposes one of the lost guardians of the highway. The stones appear to have all been set along the west side of the road, so that they were compass on a cloudy day as well as distance markers, and a man had but to know his right hand from his left to be sure of his direction. [Sidenote: _LIVINGSTONE HOUSE._] The Livingstone house, built about 1714, stood on a point on the river bank on what is now the southern edge of Poughkeepsie. Facing the south it overlooks the river for miles, while in front was a sheltered little harbor for river craft, but this has been filled in by the manufacturing concern that now owns the property, and nothing is as it was, except the house. During the Revolution the place was the home of Henry Livingstone, whose well-known patriotism led the British, when ascending the river in October, 1777, to bombard the building, as they did so many others. One of its shingles, pierced by a shot at that time, has been left in place as a reminder of the incident. It also draws attention to the difference between the hand-split shingles of those days and the machine-sawed ones of the present. [Sidenote: _POUGHKEEPSIE._] Poughkeepsie is the Apo-keep-sinck of the Indians, the "pleasant and safe harbor" where canoes were safe from wind and wave. The name is said to be spelled some forty-two different ways in the old town records. The "safe harbor" was made so by rocky bluffs projecting into the river; that on the south being known to the Dutch as Call Rock, though it did not sound like that in the vernacular. From this rock old Baltus Van Kleeck and his neighbors were wont to hail passing sloops for news or passage.