The changing hues of colour, the evanescent shadows playing across the distant hills, the long lanes of winddrift vanishing in perspective, present not one picture, but a never-ending succession of them. Near the southern end of Riverside Drive used to be a place of resort known as Elm Park. Mr. Benson J. Lossing describes it as a camp-ground for recruits during the Civil War, " once the seat of the Apthorpe family." The Apthorpe mansion stood at the corner of 9 1 st Street and Columbus Avenue. Washington had his headquarters here for a very brief time. The de Lancey house, the property of General Oliver de Lancey, stood at about 86th Street. In the winter of 1777, while the owner was absent, a party of young men came down from Tarrytown, bent on retaliation for the burning of the Van Tassel house, not far from there. They were led by Martlings and others, and succeeded in passing the British lines and setting fire to the de Lancey mansion. The ladies escaped in their night dresses, as those of the Van Tassel farmhouse had done a short time before. Ri\-erside looks down at one point into the hollow that was known in the old times as Marritje David's Vly, now 127th Street. It keeps its watch above the turmoil of the waters and the travel upon their bosom,

Riverside to Inwood 143

and wears proudh' its own record of Revolutionary happenings. The trees that crown this ridge and sentinel its slopes gi\'e an impression of venerable antic[uity, and it is difficult to receive without a grain of allowance the record that tells how, during the severe winter of 1779- 80, when the island was under martial law, General Robertson stripped the land of its trees for fuel. At the north end of Riverside is the restaurant where