Many of them, it is said, found their lodging in what used to be known as the Great Kill cave, near the brook already referred to. Years ago. Sing Sing was the terminal station for the stages that ran on the Bedford Pike. Hachaliah Bailey of Somers, who had a stage route between New York and Danbury, Conn,, made the Bedford Pike line a connecting link between the latter place and his steamboat, the John Jay, that touched at the Sing Sing wharf. This satisfied the popular conception of rapid transit, before the days of the railroads. Ossining has long been noted for its excellent schools. One or two military academies and a girls' seminary have had for many years a more than local reputation. The northern boundary of the village is the Croton River, important as a tributary to the lower Hudson, but still more so as the sole source of the water supply of New York City for more than a generation. The Indians called the stream Kitchawan, and so it is named in the old land grants. The mouth of the stream is crossed by a drawbridge belonging to the railroad. Not far above is the reser\^oir from which the "old" Croton aqueduct carries the water to the

294 The Hudson River

citv. Its capacity is 100,000,000 gallons a day, but this supply was found to be inadec[uate for the rapidly growing city, and a new aqueduct, commenced in 1884 and finished in 1890, was constructed to the east of the earlier one. This has a capacity three times as great as the first, and taps the numerous lakes of a watershed embracing between three and four hundred square miles. Above the ba}^ into which the Croton enters is the old house of the Van Cortlandts, for we have now passed from the domain of Philipse to that of his neighbour and brother-in-law.