Plains scarce trodden by human kind save by the red man are clothed in all the beauty of their pristine verdure, while the rock-capped hills and the resonant forest echo back and forth the sounds of wild and savage life. Plumed songsters fill the woods and enliven our journey with their music. Perchance the shrill cry of the eagle, or the plaintive note of the cuckoo, or the busy hammer of the woodpecker in turn arrests our attention."

Pleasant it is to reflect that by no very extended journey we may still discover in parts of the metropolitan area some woodland places, in which the same natural features exist, wherein we may find flourish-

INDIAN NOTES

INTRODUCTION

S3

ing the successors of the trees and vines under which the native walked, the same bushes and flowers that the aborigine admired; may still witness the same mystic revival of nature's life in spring as that the shivering red man welcomed, may still be greeted by those birds' descendants, singing the selfsame songs the Indian tried to imitate, and may still look upward through the leafy canopy to the same sky and stars he saw above him, the same eternal distance into which he gazed, and over them all the same Great Spirit he so simply tried to worship.

On the native path, even then an ancient thoroughfare, the rising sun of our early history sees the wondering Manhattan crowding down from the upland regions to the Kapsee rocks, to gaze at the sails of the ship of Verrazano through the vista of the Narrows, and a generation later sees their successors filing down the trail to the place of the fateful bargain when the Manhattan path became a white man's highway. The shadows of history lengthen over Sachkerah, the old Shore pathway,