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

OLD CILIMON I

the mouth of Roeleffe Jansen's Kill, or Ancrain Creek, of which hardly a vestige now remains.-'"

The lord of the manor gave, by his will, the lower portion of his domain to his son Eobert, who built a finer mansion than the old manorhouse, and named his seat Clermont. This was sometimes called the

* In the year 1710 Governor Hunter, by order of Queen Anne, bought of Mr. Livingston 6,000 acres of his manor, tor the sum of a little more than £200, for the use of Protestant Germans then in England, who had been driven from their homes in the Lower Palatinate of the Khine, then the dominions of a cousin of the British Queen. About 1,800 of them settled upon the manor lands, and at a place on the opposite shore of the river, the respective localities being known as East and West Camp. These Germans were called Palatines, and are represented as the most enlightened people of their native land. Among them was the widow Hannah Zenger, whose son, John Peter, apprenticed to William Bradford, the printer, became, in after life, the impersonation of the struggling democratic idea.