The vents along the way for the escape of water from deep cuttings and leakages were closed once for all. And on the twenty-second of June the Croton River began its march upon New York. At five o’clock in the morning the head of the stream was admitted and on the primal tide, some eighteen inches deep, a boat was launched. The _Croton Maid_ weighed anchor to descend upon New York with the “navigable river” from the north. Harry Chalender made one of the four passengers on that “singular voyage” through the great pipe at the rate of a little better than a mile an hour. The “Maid” came up for air at the Harlem River the next day, a Thursday, soon after the first ripple of the water laved the borders of Manhattan Island. The Commissioners formally notified the Mayor and Common Council that the Croton River had arrived and would proceed after a brief rest to Yorkville Reservoir. On Monday afternoon the Governor of the State, the Lieutenant Governor, the Mayor, and other distinguished guests drew up in solemn array and greeted the “extinguishing visitor,” while the artillery fired a salute of thirty-eight guns. When the _Croton Maid_ sailed into the reservoir she was made grandly welcome and then presented to the Fire Department, with appropriate remarks on the “important results pecuniary and moral which may be expected to flow from the abundance of the water with which our citizens are hereafter to be supplied.” On the Fourth of July Queen Crotona resumed her royal progress and proceeded the necessary parasangs to Murray’s Hill, pausing to fire the salute of a beautiful jet of water fifty feet in air at Forty-seventh Street. It was noted by one of the observers that when the waters of the Croton gushed up into the reservoir they “wandered about its bottom as if to examine the magnificent structure or to find a resting place in the temple toward which they had made a pilgrimage.” That river was as much of a god to the New Yorkers as old Tiber ever was to Rome, or Nilus to Egypt. But thereafter the stream, like another conquered Andromache, became the servant of New York, pouring into its thirsty throat twelve million imperial gallons of pure water every day.