From the lower borders of Columbia County, opposite Katz-Kill village, to Hyde Park, in Duchess County, a distance of thirty miles, the east bank of the Hudson is distinguished for old and elegant country scats, most of them owned and occupied by the descendants of wealthy proprietors who flourished in the last century, and were connected by blood and marriage with Robert Livingston, a Scotch gentleman, of the family of the Earls of Linlithgow, who came to America in 1672, and married a member of the Schuyler family, the widow of a Van Eensselaer. . He lived at Albany, and was secretary to the Commissioners of Indian Affairs for a long time. From 1684 to 1715 he had, from time to time, purchased of the Indians, and secured by patents from the English crown, large tracts of land in the present Columbia County. This land was then mostly wild and unprofitable, but became the basis of great family wealth.

In the year 1710 Livingston's grants were consolidated, and Hunter, the royal governor, gave him a patent for a tract of a little more than one hundred and sixty-two thousand acres, for which he was to pay into the king's treasury "an annual rent of twenty-eight shillings, lawful money of New York," a trifle over fourteen shillings sterling! This magnificent estate was constituted a manor, with political privileges.

THE HUDSON.

The freeholders upon it were allowed a representative in the colonial legislature, chosen by themselves, and in 1716 the lord of the manor, by virtue of that privilege, took his seat as a legislator. He had already built a manor-house, on a grassy point upon the banks of the Hudson, at