Her very air is sweet with the perfume of patriot memories. Throughout our State, here and there, _ in sacred churchyard and wayside cemetery, moulder the mortal part of its Revolutionary heroes. Nowhere in all its territory are the graves of those, men to be found more frequent relatively, or better preserved and known, or locally held in more tender regard, than right here in ancient Sleepy Hollow, where to-day we have unveiled in their honor the memorial shaft.

Sleepy Hollow ! There is no more fitting filial resting place for heroic dead. The genius of Irving, whose remains, at his own request, rest within her soil, that sweet and gentle Father of American Literature, has made her name known and loved, as far and as widely as the English tongue is spoken. Rising in terraced heights from the gentler slopes and glades along the river's edge ; with the beauteous Pocantico bearing the crystal tribute of distant hills to lave her feet ; with the broad belt of the water's flashing tide stretching for miles upon miles across her southern and western horizon ; and with her own surface pleasingly diversified in open space and wooded crest or slope, now clothed with autumn's fairest charms, she presents a scene of sylvan beauty unsurpassed in all our country.

MONUMENT DEDICATION.

In her immediate neighborhood, in Revolutionary days, brave deeds and deeds of great moment were performed. On that September morning in 1780, when the fate of the new born nation rode along yonder highway in the keeping of the British spy, the straining ear of the listener, standing upon her southern slope, might perhaps have caught the faint echo ot Paulding's bold challenge, which checked the spy, broke the plot of treason and saved the patriot cause in its direst crisis.