Her workroom is in the tow^er that commands a \-iew that an eagle might envy, -- a view of river and hill, farmland and town, -- that melts at last in a horizon that is sixty miles distant. Next door to Cherry Croft is Julian Hawthorne's summer home, and nearer the foot of the hill lives Dr. Lyman Abbott, at whose house, it need hardly be suggested, Hamilton Wright Mabie is a familiar visitor. Mr. Mabie is himself a Hudson River man, in his youth a resident of

286 The Hudson River

Tarrytown, where his earliest Hterary aspirations were fostered by congenial associates. Of the little coterie whose comradeship has not been without an influence u]:)on his subsec[uent career, no name is more prominently suggested than that of Marshal H. Bright, the able editor of CJiristiau Work. John Burroughs has what Bradford Torrey would call a ramljler's lease, that covers half the country al:)ove the Highlands. He can vie w4th old "Sherd" Minnerly, w^ho "knew all the fish in the river by their Christian names," in that he is intimate with all the feathered creatiu'es that nest on the shores. His own stated residence is a properly constituted country home, where he raises the best Niagara grapes that come into the market; but, to satisfy the cravings of a born woodsman, he has built for retiring a less pretentious nest, which he calls Slabsides, a little "city where nobody lives," and the number of those who find it are few. Stephen Henry Thayer, long a resident of Tarrytown, has given us, in many a sweet transcript, the voices of the woods and waters of Sleepy Hollow. His hues upon the Nyack behs, heard at evening on the opposite shore of the Tappan Zee, are peculiarly tender in sentiment :