T is proposed to present, in a series of sketclies witli pen and pencil, pictures of the Hudsoa lliver, from its birth among th(^ mountains to its marriage with the ocean. '^ff 'IM It is by far the most interesting river in *'' ' America, considering the beauty and magnificence of its scenery, its natural, political, and social history, the agricultural and mineral treasures of its vicinage, the commercial wealth hourly floating upon its bosom, and the relations of its geography __ and topography to some of the most importiint events in the history of the Western hemisphere.

High upon the walls of the governor's room in the Xew York City Hall is a dingy painting of a broad-headed, short-haired, sparsely-bearded man, with an enormous ruffle about his neck, and bearing the impress of an intellectual, courtly gentleman of the days of King James the First of England. By whom it was painted nobody knows, but conjecture shrewdly guesses that it was delineated by the hand of Paul Van Soraeren, the skilful Flemish artist who painted the portraits of many persons of distinction in Amsterdam and London, in the reign of James, and died in the British capital four years before that monarch. We are

THE HUDSON.

■u'ell assured that it is the portrait of an eminent navigator, who, in that remarkable year in the history of England and America, one thousand six hundred and seven, met "certains worshippeful merchants of London," in the parlour of a son of Sir Thomas Gresham, in Bishopsgatc Street, and bargained concerning a proposed voyage in search of a north-east passage to India, between the icy and rock-bound coasts of Nova Zembla and Spitzbergcn.