[J. Thomas Scharf (1886)] Dear Sir: In response to your inquiry, " Why it is assumed that the first Interments in what is now the Old Dutch Church-Yard at Sleepy Hollow were made as early as 1645 to 1655," I can only say that its probabilities seem to me to rest upon a variety of collated cirvnm-stances, some of them well-known facts, and others resting in tradition! more or less colored as they have been handled by the genim tod, constituting a lore, the study of which is somewhat archaological. Id a number of interviews with the late Washington Irving, at the cem-etery in question and at Sunny Side, beginning as early as 1852, I learned that he believed the first interment to have been made about the middle of the seventeenth century; and that a few habitation* had been planted along the ahore of the lower Hudson but a short time subsequent to the settlement of New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island, in 1617. And that a rendezvous for divine worship was early prvvided near to the mouth of the Tocantico Brook, even some little time before the manor of Thillipse had continued practical existence, or manorial habitation. Basing this belief in part upon letters and other writing* then ex-tant, of which he might then have been custodian— but as to that, I do not remember that he spoke— it was natural that he should have diligently searched all sources of information iu his time available, for the purpose of a [Kirtion of the work he had in baud; hi*