THE HUDSON,

FROM THE WILDERNESS TO THE SEA.

CHAPTER I.

T is proposed to present, in a series of sketches with pen and pencil, pictures of the Hudson River, from its birth among the mountains to its marriage with the ocean. It is by far the most interesting river in America, considering the beauty and magnificence of its scenery, its natural, political, and social history, the agricultural and mineral treasures of its vicinage, the commercial wealth hourly floating upon its bosom, and the relations of its geography and topography to some of the most important events in the history of the Western hemisphere.

High upon the walls of the governor's room in the New York City Hall is a dingy painting of a broad-headed, short-haired, sparsely-bearded man, with an enormous ruffle about his neck, and bearing the impress of an intellectual, courtly gentleman of the days of King James the First of England. By whom it was painted nobody knows, but conjecture shrewdly guesses that it was delineated by the hand of Paul Van Someren, the skilful Flemish artist who painted the portraits of many persons of distinction in Amsterdam and London, in the reign of James, and died in the British capital four years before that monarch. We are

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