the distance one sees a massive group of low, marble buildings, the melancholy residence of convicts, — it is the State prison at Sing Sing. It is natural, but unfortunate, that the fair fame of one of the most attractive of Hudson River towns should for years have been damaged by such an ogre squatting at its very gates. Nor is it surprising that there has been a resolute and recently successful effort to change the name of the village from Sing Sing to Ossining. Ossining is a corruption of Ossin-sing, an Indian name, which, according to Schoolcraft, signified " sing- ing stones." The brook which ran through the place was "Sint Sink," and the village, according to the old maps, "Sink Sink." 289 Digitized by Microsoft® 290 The Hudson River The land here rises almost abruptly from the river, reaching with the first half mile an altitude of three hundred feet above tide level. The plateau above is the residence portion of the place and very attractive. Long ago, when New York was still a British posses- sion and Sing Sing a part of the mammoth estate that owned the sway of the Philipse family, silver and cop- per were sought in the neighbourhood. A mine was worked where the prison now stands, the shaft having been within a few yards of the north wall. Not far away, at the mouth of the kill that finds its way to the Hudson, through a deep gore, from the plateau above, the smelting furnace was erected. There the /Ore was reduced, the precious metal being shipped to England. The Revolution put a stop to the opera- tions of the mine, which seems never to have been reopened. At the time of its abandonment, the length of the works is said to have reached one hundred and twenty feet. According to Bolton, the historian of Westchester County, Colonel James, who was superintending the mine, had command of a regiment stationed at Sing Sing in 1774. At the commencement of hostilities it was ordered to Boston. According to certificates signed and sworn to by several reputable citizens, the mine was a very rich one and was worked with energy to the last ; but modern attempts to revive the silver dream have not been successful. /- Immediately after the Revolution, according to an- Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Around Haverstraw Bay 293 other authority, there were only three dwelling-houses in Sing Sing. Moses Ward had a stone house that was also a fort, about where the intersection of Main Street and the Croton aqueduct occurs. There were even in his day numerous Indians in the neighbour- hood, but they seem to have been generally peaceful fishermen. Many of them, it is said, found their lodg- ing in what used to be known as the Great Kill cave, near the brook already referred to. Years ago. Sing Sing was the terminal station for ^ the stages that ran on the Bedford Pike. Hachaliah Bailey of Somers, who had a stage route between New York and Danbury, Conn., made the Bedford Pike ^ line a connecting link between the latter place and his steamboat, the John Jay, that touched at the Sing Sing wharf. This satisfied the popular conception of rapid transit, before the days of the railroads. Ossining has long been noted for its excellent schools. One or two military academies and a girls' seminary have had for many years a more than local reputation. The northern boundary of the village is the Croton River, important as a tributary to the lower Hudson, but still more so as the sole source of the water supply of New York City for more than a generation. The Indians called the stream Kitchawan, and so it is named in the old land grants. The mouth of the stream is crossed by a drawbridge belonging to the railroad. Not far above is the reservoir from which the "old" Croton aqueduct carries the water to the Digitized by Microsoft® 294 The Hudson River city. Its capacity is 100,000,000 gallons a day, but this supply was found to be inadequate for the rapidly growing city, and a new aqueduct, commenced in 1884 and finished in 1890, was constructed to the east of the earlier one. This has a capacity three times as great as the first, and taps the numerous lakes of a water- shed embracing between three and four hundred square miles. Above the bay into which the Croton enters is the old house of the Van Cortlandts, for we have now passed from the domain of Philipse to that of his neighbour and brother-in-law. From a paper pub- lished by Benson J. Lossing in Harper's Monthly, about ten years after his Hudson appeared in