'ERIKSTAN, TARRYTOWN RESIDENCE OF JOHN J. HERRICK, ESQ.

general sentiment, even in the ranks of his foes, was, as it has ever since been with their descendants, one of earnest commiseration and kind apology. But the exigencies of the hour forbade, alas! the indulgences of these most natural dispositions. The averted crime was deep in dye; the traitor himself had escaped; disaffection was known to exist within the camp of the patriots, to such extent, that mercy at the moment might have been the direst evil; the captive had wittingly placed his life upon the chance, and by all the laws of war and of equity his doom was inevitable.

He was tried and condemned by a court-martial of fourteen general officers, in the old Dutch church which gave place in 1836 to the larger edifice that now covers the spot. The place of his confinement and from which he was led to the scaffold, still stands near the church. It is a little, low building, known to-day as the 'Stone House of '76.' Its appearance has somewhat changed, however, in process of years; a portico or piazza has grown up along the entire front, and the interior has been adapted to the purposes of a country way-side inn. The apartment once occupied by André has been converted into a ball-room; and Lossing tells us that at the time of his visit to the spot he heard the vandal owner boasting that he had received a whole dollar for the old lock that fastened up "Major Andrew."

Not far west of this old jail a stone, rudely sculptured, marks the spot where the young soldier bravely met his sad fate, and where his bones rested through forty long years afterward. At that time (1821) the relics were piously removed to a more hallowed grave, within the stately aisles of Westminster Abbey. Here they now moulder beneath a sumptuous monument, whereon they are mourned, not as those of an unhappy spy and a wretched felon, but of one 'who fell a sacrifice to his zeal for his king and country, universally beloved and esteemed by the army in which he served, and lamented even by his foes.'

Bidding good-by to Tappan and its interesting memories, we retrace our way to Piermont, and thence follow the river road and shore, all undisturbed by prosy railway tracks, as on the opposite side, to Nyack a delightful ride or ramble to a pleasant destination.

Nyack is a pretty and prosperous town, with good hope for the future, especially when it shall be reached, as it will be ere long, by the line of the Northern Railway, which already extends from Jersey City, back of the River Palisades to Piermont, just below. Among the most salient features of the landscape at Nyack, is the spacious edifice of the Rockland Female Institute, seen very picturesquely from all points, on the river or the shore above and below.

Directly across from Nyack lies the far-spreading domain of Tarrytown, readily reached by steam ferry. It is an enviable spot for sojourn, and there for the present we leave our traveller.

I Am a young woman in no wise distinguished by intellect, person, or accomplishment, from the mob of those who polk indifferently, laugh a good deal, and now and then experience a chance lover. Being so very ordinary, it will always remain a mystery why I was made the heroine of certain occurrences which it frightens me to think of.

We are residents of a large country town that crams itself with knowledge through a lyceum all winter, and dissipates the effect of so heavy a repast by a grand musical entertainment at the end of the season, generally some series of eight, with the Mendelssohn quintettes. There are a dozen steeples for indices of the religious fervency or pugnacity of the population; a reading-room where old gentlemen discuss the reputations of young ladies; every body takes a daily paper from the metropolis, and Court sits two or three times a year in this pleasant, dull old crevice of the State.

We lived, at the time about which I am going to tell you, in a house bequeathed my father by his Uncle Oliver - both uncle and nephew long dead; it was surrounded by a large garden, melancholy in the rankness of its summer ruin, from which my mother anticipated selling house-lots at some mythical period of an increase of habitation in the town. Our means were not large, and very little had been done to this house, and no furniture added since the day we moved into it shortly after my grand-uncle's sudden death, and before my birth. I said Uncle Oliver's sudden death, because I didn't like to say at first that he was murdered.

There is always an undue proportion of spinsters in country places, and, as in the present instance, frequently aged ones. I am a great favorite of old ladies, and I like to go and chat with them while they unfold their yellow samplers with a story for the setting of every stitch, and again slip rust-eaten ornaments on the shrunken hand and arm that once filled them so fair and roundly. Privacy or retirement does not exist in these settlements; that you find in cities, and so our own affairs were not better known to all such people than their little histories to us, and it was always pleasant to collate their own account with the higher-colored one of hearsay. Among these maiden-ladies there were two with whom we had some bond, and them I oftener visited than the others. They lived so snugly and happily that I never saw them without determining on the blessings of a single life. Miss Lucinda was the Martha of the establishment. I did not so much affect her: Miss Helen was my centre of attraction, and that not less for her

own sake than that she once promised and expected to marry my father's uncle.

There was scarcely any thing I had ever seen so charming as this old woman; the circle of years with their sorrows and compensations had sown peace on her quiet face, and bathed it in a certain saintly shine; her soft gray hair, her clear lawn cap, her exquisite neatness, all added to a beauty that was far purer and more touching than that of youth. Miss Helen's voice was yet much younger than her person, and her hazel eyes were bright at seventy as perhaps at twenty. She was very fond of me, partly because she fancied I looked like my uncle. I am sure I hope I don't. I must tell you how it was between her and Uncle Noll.

In the first place, he yielded as the enemy was marching by, without having been either besieged or summoned to surrender; he yielded with the more infatuation because he was twenty-two years the elder. 'People at forty-two are far more jealous than at twenty-two,' said Miss Helen to me, 'because maturity is less presumptuous than youth, my dear,' by which I infer that my uncle pestered the life out of Miss Helen with an absurd jealousy. However, they were engaged, and the wedding paraphernalia was ready, and the wedding-day was fixed for just such a day as this, an early, cheerful October day, all Nature festally trimmed in sympathy with lovers. Now Miss Helen had another lover, one of her own age, though not of her own rank, a young carpenter who had beset her with silent attentions, yet without ever speaking of the hopeless passion that she knew he cherished. Of course my uncle would have thought it tempting Providence to neglect such fine opportunities for the display of his great forte, as this silent suitor afforded him. He was intolerably distrustful, and, beleagured as he was by doubts and fears, would never have employed the young carpenter to make some slight but necessary repairs in the breakfastparlor if there had been in the town another capable of the job.

It so happened that one morning just as the carpenter had completed his task, Miss Helen opened the front-door, and then that of the breakfast-parlor.

'May I come in?' she said; and before my uncle with his old-style gallantry could hand her into another room, she had tiptoed across the dust to him. Perhaps she was a bit of a coquette and enjoyed the little disturbance that she knew would be created in the heart of either lover by her appearance. She held in her hand a letter just written and inviting a friend of his to the holiday, and having waited for him to come and read it till the post was about starting, had thought best to run down and find him.

Meanwhile, Ralph Crampton, the young carpenter, stooped to readjust a trifle in his finished work that needed no reädjustment; and while my uncle read the letter, standing before the tall mahogany secretary with Miss Helen at the other end, she watched the flush that came and went like a pulse in the young man's stooping face. Soon her attention was compulsorily drawn back to Uncle Oliver; he was not reading the letter, but regarding her with such a heated brow and angry eye that she knew at once what demon possessed him. She asked if he had finished. 'Not quite,' he returned shortly. Then she took up a little silhouette framed in some half-dozen and odd inches - it still hangs high on a panel of our breakfast-room - and played with the slender back-board whose confining tacks had got loosened. Wearying of that, for my uncle read the letter slowly, having to keep one eye on her, she commenced turning the ring on her fore-finger, slipping it on and off, and rubbing it here and there with the pen-wiper. This was a very costly diamond ring, a gift from my uncle, and was worth nearly a thousand dollars. 'It was worth the universe to me, my dear, Miss Helen once said. Continuing to play with the ring, it accidentally fell from her fingers. Just then my uncle looked up from the perusal of the note. 'Is it right?' she asked, bending to pick up the trinket.

'Entirely.'

'Then will you take it down now, dear? while her hand wandered over the floor in her search.

'And leave you here?' asked my uncle responsively, in a low tone, with a significant flash of his eye.

'Oh! I will go too, when I find my ring. I have dropped it; help me look, please. I thought it rolled on the floor.'

'You are certain that you dropped it?' said my uncle, with a peculiar emphasis.

'It fell, but I'm sure I don't know whether into some crack of the secretary or the floor,' was the innocent reply.

'I don't see it there,' said my uncle, stooping with her till her curls brushed his forehead and put him into good humor again, 'it must be in the secretary. Crampton!" Here he rose and faced the young carpenter who was still busy, 'Crampton, will you come and unhinge this lid? My uncle brushed the papers back into the pigeon-holes, folded the letter and put it in his wallet; while Crampton hung up the little silhouette after looking at it an instant, and then unhinging the lid as directed, took the secretary nearly to pieces, all without finding the ring. Here Uncle Oliver's suspicious nature was again excited; he showered hurried glances on the carpenter who, in his green jacket, with his rule thrust half-way into the pocket, went methodically about his work, and, except for the flush in his cheek, as indifferently as if laying another plank in the floor. But as Miss Helen caught one of these glances, she saw what mischief the loss might