The negress disappears, is called twenty ways in twenty seconds, and an hour afterwards the patient husband sees the faithless messenger pass with a glass of lemonade, having utterly forgotten him and the lady in the black bonnet and gray eyes, who may be, for ought he knows to the contrary, wringing her hands at this moment on the wharf at New York. By this time the young ladies are tired of looking at the Palisades, and have taken out their novels, the old gentlemen are poring over their damp newspapers, and the captain has received his fourteen hundred or two thousand dollars, locked up his office, and gone to smoke with the black funnel and the engineer. The broad waters of the Tappan Zee open before the flying cutwater; those who have never been up the river before think of poor Andre as they pass Tappan and Tarry town, and those who love gentle worth and true genius begin to look out for Sleepy Hollow and the house of Washington Irving. It is a ciuiet little spot, buried in trees and marked with an old Dutch vane. May his latter days, when they shall come, find there the reverence and repose which are his due!

Still the old order changes. As the white wings made way before the steamboat of Fulton's time and that in turn retired to give precedence to the swashbuckling river-craft of half a centurv ago, so these, too, have

138 The Hudson River

disappeared, and now the traveller finds great floating hotels, run to maintain, in comfort and fidelity to schedule time, a successful rivalry with the modern railroad service. Their appointments are no longer barbaric, their accommodations no longer uncomfortable, their voyages no longer invitations to disaster and sudden death. By day, they sweep by the base of the echoing hihs or into the open river reaches with a dignity of presence and a majesty of motion that fit well with their surroundings; and, by night, the inquisitive eye of the almost omniscient search-light explores the secrets of the sleeping shores.