while it held its sessions in Fishkill, that had much to do with forming our first State Constitution.  Baron Steuben was for a while in the old Scofield House at Glenham.  In Fishkill are those renowned old churches where legislative sittings were held, which were also used as hospitals for the sick, and one of which is otherwise known as being the place where Enoch Crosby, the spy, was imprisoned, and from which he escaped.  Near at hand the Wharton House (Van Wyck House), forever associated with him, and made famous by Cooper’s ‘Spy.’  In the Brinckerhoff House above, Lafayette was dangerously ill with a fever, and there, at Swartwoutville, Washington was often a visitor.  Whenever Washington was at Fishkill he made Colonel Brinckerhoff’s his headquarters.  He occupied the bedroom back of the parlor, which remains the same ’excepting a door that opens into the hall, which has been cut through.’  It is an old-fashioned house built of stone, with the date 1738 on one of its gables.”  With the story of Fishkill we close the largest page relating to our revolutionary heroes, and leave behind us the Old Beacon Mountains which forever sentinel and proclaim their glory.

* * *

No prouder sentinel of glory than the old Beacon Mountain whose watch-fire guarded the valley and spoke its rallying message to the Catskills and Berkshires and the very foothills of the Green Mountains.

    Wallace Bruce.

* * *

The sun touched mountains in some places were of a bright orange and the shadows between them deep neutral tint or blue.  And the river apparently had stopped running to reflect.

    Susan Warner.

* * *

=Low Point=, or Carthage, is a small village on the east bank, about four miles north of Fishkill.  It was called by the early inhabitants Low Point, as New Hamburgh, two miles north, was called High Point.  Opposite Carthage is Roseton, once known as Middlehope, and above this we see the residence of Bancroft Davis and the Armstrong Mansion.  We now behold on the west bank a large flat rock, covered with cedars, recently marked by a lighthouse, the—­

=Duyvel’s Dans Kammer.=—­Here Hendrick Hudson, in his voyage up the river, witnessed an Indian pow-wow—­the first recorded fireworks in a country which has since delighted in rockets and pyrotechnic displays.  Here, too, in later years, tradition relates the sad fate of a wedding party.  It seems that a Mr. Hans Hansen and a Miss Kathrina Van Voorman, with a few friends, were returning from Albany, and disregarding the old Indian prophecy, were all slain:—­

  “For none that visit the Indian’s den
  Return again to the haunts of men. 
  The knife is their doom!  O sad is their lot! 
  Beware, beware of the blood-stained spot!”

Some years ago this spot was also searched for the buried treasures of Captain Kidd, and we know of one river pilot who still dreams semi-yearly of there finding countless chests of gold.