"Come and see me." he wrote, years afterward, from Sunnyside, " and I will give you a book and a tree." A whimsical picture he drew of his first reading of Scott's Lady of the Lake, while he was at the Hoffmans' home on the Hudson in 18 10: " Seated leaning against a rock, with a wild-cherry tree over my head, reading Scott's Lady of the Lake ; the busy ant hurrying over the page -- crickets skipping into my bosom -- ^wind rustling among the top branches of the trees. Broad masses of shade darken the Hudson and cast the opposite shore in black." With the eminent lawyer, Josiah Ogden Hoffman, he read law after Brockholst Livingston, in whose office he began his studies, had been called to the bench of the Supreme Court. At Mr. Hoffman's house he soon became an intimate and most welcome visitor and at times an inmate, for he had a rare faculty for winning hearts. It was during this early period that he lost his own heart to Matilda Hoffman, the daughter of his friend. Of more than ordinary beauty, fineness of character, and sweetness of disposition, that winsome girl of long ago will be remembered wherever Irving 's life is read,

Literary Associations of the Hudson 249

her name linked with his in one of the world's i)athetic love stories. Under all the humour and the gaiety that marked his work and intercourse with friends during his long life, he hid the troubling memory of her loss. Miss Hoffman's death occurred in 1809, when she was but eighteen years old and he twentysix. From that time till, in 1859, his own dust was laid to rest in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, he w^as never knowm to mention her name, even to his most intimate friends; but, after his death, his literary executor found a paper relating the story of his passion and lifelong attachment to her memory, together with her miniature and a braid of her hair.