Excerpt from The Hudson River: And Routes From New York to the White and Green Mountains, Montreal, Lake George, Saratoga, Newport and Niagara Falls Kortlandt dreamed a dream, and the good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees and descended upon the island of Manhattan and sat himself down and smoked, and the smoke ascended into the sky, and formed a cloud over head, and Olofi'e bethought him and he hastened and climbed up to the t0p of one of the tallest trees and saw that the smoke spread over a great extent of country; and as he considered it more attentively he fancied that the great volume assumed a variety of mar velous forms, where, in dim obscurity, he saw shadowed out palaces and domes and lofty spires, all of: which lasted but a moment, and then passed away. So our city, like Alba Longa and Rome, and other cities of antiquity, was under the immediate care of its tutelar saint. Its destiny was foreshadowed, for now the palaces and domes and lofty spires are real and genuine, and something more than dreams are made of. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.