Then, with necessary stealthiness and caution, he succeeded in freeing his companion, and falling iipon the sleeping Indians thev killed all except two squaws, who escaped. Providing themselves with the arms and provisions of their late captors, they undertook the return journey of four or five hundred miles through the woods. Their lives were barely sa\-ed by the game they managed to shoot on the way, for weakened by hunger as well as by fatigue, at the end of seventeen days they staggered into their homes, weak but rejoicing at their almost miraculous escape. This occurred in 1776. The inauguration of George CHnton, the first Governor of the vState of New York, was i^roclaimed at Kingston, then the capital of the State, the election having taken place on the 30th of July, 1777. Onlv a little more than two months previous to that event, the convention which had drafted the constitution of the new State, adjourned, leaving power in the hands of a Committee of Safety. The Fourth Provincial Con-

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gress, which met at White Plains, Westchester County, on the 9th of July, 1776, then accepting the Declaration of Independence, adjourned to Fishkill and sul)- sec[uently to Kingston. The centennial celebration of Clinton's inauguration, held on July 30, 1877, at Kingston, was necessarily a celebration also of the venerable house in which the deliberations oi John Jay and his associates had l)een held. The previous year, 1876, had been the l^i-centennial anniversary of the building of what has been known niodernly as the Old vSenate House. This building, that has so deep an historic interest, is long and low, constructed of stone and supplemented at a late period of its history by a "linto," or lean-to. It was erected in 1676 by Wessel Ten Broeck, a West])halian, who, emigrating to America at an early age, was elected ScJioppcr at Esopus and was a commissioner chosen to sujjerintend the settlement of the Nieuw Dorp, including the villages of Hurley and Marbletown.