said to have been made in 1740 was many years after the erection of the fort or main structure. The timbers in the cellar of the old building are hewn and very large, being by measurement sixteen by eighteen inches, while those of the addition are comparatively small. In entering the hall, at the north door, on the right hand of the hall, the wall is of brick or stone, twenty inches broad, and on the left of the same hall there is a partition of only four inches. Ascending to the rooms above, and to the garret, the same difference is observable. Going still higher, the roof of the old building, covered with long, quaintly formed shingles, in a good state of preservation, forms an inclined partition which plainly defines the new addition of 1740. Around the fireplace, in one of the upper chambers of the new addition, are a number of tiles, of a dull purple color, and in a good state of preservation, all of them containing Scripture illustrations. Drawings of a few of these are given. One of them is intended to delineate the three unclean spirits like frogs, as seen in the Apocalyptic vision, coming out of the mouth of the dragon. Another represents the flight of Joseph into Egypt. Another still, from the tenth chapter of the Revelation, is a crude attempt to picture a vision beyond the power of art to portray. The most quaint and original treatment of all the subjects, however, is that of Dives and Lazarus, in which the latter, as will be seen, reposes in the clouds in the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man, thrust down to Tartarus, suffers for the commission of evil or the omission of good deeds. His spiritual adversaries, having him now more fully in their power, are actively engaged inflicting retribution. One from below encircles his waist, dragging him down to deeper woe. Another from above pours upon his devoted head the concentrated fury of a well-charged vessel of wrath. On the right still another inflicts upon his person with a lash of scorpions a part of the punishment due for his shortcomings, and on the left, with the same instrument of vengeance, an old Dutch lady -or rather her upper part, for she appears without body, save only a wing, arms, and a head, the last of which is encased in a nightcap which she has neglected or forgotten to remove-lashes the exposed shoulders of the poor man. Another of the tiles represents the baptism of Christ in the river Jordan. There are altogether between forty and fifty of these tiles, all of which have Scripture subjects upon them. A sufficient number is presented to the reader to give a pretty correct impression of the whole. When we consider the relationship that existed between Wouter Van Twiller and his ward Johannes, who was also his cousin and brother-in-law, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they may have spent many a happy hour together in the library of the old house, and that Wouter, as Dederick Knickerbocker in his history of New York describes him-"a model of majesty and lordly grandeur, exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet six inches in circumference"-reposing in his chair, may have seen, in the curling smoke that ascended from his "long pipe," visions of the incoming power of Keift, or of Keift's successor, Peter Stuyvesant. The only tablet in the village church is that placed to the memory of Dr. Jeremiah Van Rensselaer, through whose agency the church was founded, and who, from the time it was built to the day of his death, held the office of Senior Warden. A gentleman of the old school, distinguished for his large-hearted charity and courteous bearing towards all, the fragrance of his gentle Christian character will long remain to justify the appropriate inscription upon his tomb-"the memory of the just is blessed." With the exception of the tablet referred to, very little of special interest attaches to the church, unless it be to "The Taking Down from the Cross"-a large oil-painting which hangs within the chancel on the right side of the altar. Some degree of romance is connected with the history of this picture. A highly intelligent and beautiful young lady, while traveling with her family in Europe, was taken seriously ill, and died. Before she died, she requested her father, who was possessed of ling with the common dust originally fenced off and designed for their own use. The few gravestones that appear are plain and simple, in keeping with the characteristic prudence of the early settlers and their descendants. In the library of the old mansion was found an amusing little book, entitled A Tour in Holland, in 1784, by an American; with a preface by the author of McFingal. This book was printed at Worcester, Mass., by Isaiah Thomas, in 1790, and is interesting from having been written probably by the great-grandfather of the present TILES IN THE NEW WING OF THE OLD MANSION. large wealth, to purchase this picture, which she had seen and admired in her travels, and present it to the Church of the Messiah, at Greenbush. The request was at once complied with by the indulgent and loving father, though at a cost, we are informed, which exceeded that of the church itself. A short distance below the house, which is built of brick brought from Holland, is the old burying-ground of the Van Rensselaer family. The remains of many members of the family have been interred elsewhere. Those who have been buried here lie side by side with their humbler neighbors, comming owner of the house, and from the reference it makes to the custom of the Dutch in disposing of their dead. "In the Church of St. Lawrence, at Rotterdam," writes this author, we saw a grave where bones and some old Dutch skulls were sticking out at the sides, apparently eager once more to catch the light. The old sexton was busily employed in collecting the bones, and packing them up in separate boxes, of about three feet square, to be reinterred in this compact way, which I find is a custom." There is one stone in this little family inclosure of the dead which possesses peculiar Albany. When the survey was made for this road, it took in five acres of the Van Rensselaer land, which yielded the owner little or no profit. Efforts were made by the directors of the road, but without success, to effect a purchase of the land. Persistent refusal to sell on the part of the owner compelled them to call upon disinterested parties living in the neighborhood to appraise the land. The sum fixed upon as a fair valuation was three hundred dollars per acre, which was offered to the owner, but peremptorily declined, under protest, with the assurance added, that if the company took his land he would never touch a dollar of their money. The land was taken, the road completed, and nearly a quarter of a century passed away; and though on many occasions greatly pressed for ready money, he was faithful to his promise even unto death. To the sur interest. It is over the remains of a member of the family who died lately, at the age of 76 years. Minding his own business when upon this earth, he has left a bright example for the busybodies and gossips of country villages. Some said he was niggardly and penurious; the poor declared he was kind and generous, and forbearing and indulgent to a fault. That he was averse to improvements or changes of any kind, the dilapidated condition of the house in which he lived, and the decayed and tottering fences around, most clearly proved. With pure, rich, and phlegmatic Dutch blood flowing in his veins, he was true to the constitutional characteristics of the nation of his forefathers. No railroad was ever constructed, no manufactory ever built upon a foot of his land, save under protest. Owing to a disappointment in early life, due to the opposition of his relatives to his marriage with a young girl in the humbler walks of life, to whom he was warmly at-prise of his executors, a short time after his tached, he lived and died a bachelor. His former neighbors will recall his dim and shadowy figure, almost unearthly even when in life, and that of his little dog, always by his side, as they stood together at his gate, in the darkening twilight of the summer evening, looking anxiously in wrapt silence towards the glimmering lights which twinkled in the city on the opposite side of the river-that city the ground of which was unlawfully wrested from his forefathers by the willfulness of Peter the Headstrong; that city the streets of which his unwilling feet but rarely trodmusing upon what had been, and congratulating himself, perhaps, that no encroachments had thus far reached his favorite abode to dislodge him from his homestead, from which, for generation after generation, so many hordes of hungry invaders had been kept at bay. The General Government had essayed many years ago to tempt him by a munificent offer to sell a portion of his lands for the establishment of an arsenal. The prospect of increased wealth, the assurance that the sale of his lands, and the erection thereon of buildings by the United States Government, would greatly enhance the value of his large estate surrounding, had no effect. His refusal to sell was positive, and the purchase of land was made, and the arsenal erected, at Watervliet, opposite the city of Troy. But a darker hour came. A passenger who crossed from Albany on the Greenbush ferry-boat brought the startling report that it was in contemplation to construct a railroad along the east bank of the Hudson river from the city of New York through Greenbush to VOL. VI-42 decease, they were notified by an officer of Lands which he permitted the poor to There are gossiping tales associated with the manes of this man, as well as with the old mansion in which so many of his ancestors lived and died. Mysterious whisperings of an old horse-shoe nailed somewhere over one of the doors in a by-place, to keep off witches, with legends of strange noises and stranger sights, are used, it is reported, by the visionary matrons of the neighboring village, in a vain effort to keep their unruly urchins within doors at night. The full, round, wondering eyes of one of these good-natured country dames met the author of this article shortly after he had removed with his family to the old house, and looking him earnestly in the face, exclaimed: "So you are living with your family in the old mansion. Have you heard anything?" "Yes!" we answered, in a solemn monosyllable. "Is it possible! Have you seen anything ?" With the same important and measured we replied, "Yes, many, many manner things." Then sinking her voice to a whisper, she said, "Dreadful! dreadful! is it not? Tell me, Domine, is it true, as reported, that human bones have been found in a box in the cellar?" and airy visitants. and airy visitants. An old apple-tree, that stands solitary and alone in the open field, between the family grave-yard and the railroad, has its mystical story of a figure having been seen in its shadow, on more than one occasion, gazing with a sad countenance at the midnight train, as it dashed over the road in its mad career. One bright moonlight night this figure, it is reported, was seen by the engineer and some of the passengers on the road. His right arm was raised and stretched out, as if in condemnation of past injustice or warning of future retribution. Two farmer-boys, out upon the hills hunting, or detained by the fond persuasion of youthful friends up to the witching hour when graves do yawn, in taking a short cut across fields to strike the river-road on their way home, saw, as they aver, the same figure and the same startling warning. We have seen many happy hours in the old mansion-have heard many strange sounds, such as may be heard in every old house when the winds of heaven hold high 66 It is, madam; I have seen and handled carnival around. Even now, at this writing, them myself." "And human skulls in the garret ?" said she, while her eyes stood out in bas-relief. "And human skulls in the garret," was my reply. Shocking! How can you remain in such a place with your wife and children? It would be death to me." I assured the good old lady that the place was very pleasant to me and my family-just such a place as we all enjoyed-and left her to learn from some other quarter, that the skulls and dry bones of which she had heard, and which she so much dreaded, had been the property of a worthy physician, once owner of the house, but now deceased. Nor are the surroundings of the old mansion without their legends of midnight visions we look out of the south window of our study, on a beautiful afternoon, as spring merges into summer, upon a landscape of garden, broken beyond into hills, and meadows and the glittering river, and the eye rests upon that veritable apple-tree, beneath which the shadowy figure with its outstretched arm of admonition is said to have appeared. We have seen the tree before, barren and leafless in midwinter; we see it now, proud in its attire of rich foliage, promising a harvest of fruit; yet have we never seen it when the midnight moon throws its weird and ghostly light athwart the earth, and cannot therefore offer a word of testimony as to whether a disembodied spirit mars or helps to make the shadows which it casts. FREE MARRIAGE. To undo all their old doings, and make an absolutely fresh start, is a desire known to many mortals, perhaps to most, at some period of their existence. To turn over that blessed new leaf, and fasten down with some everlasting glue all the abominably blotted old leaves, if we could but do this, ah! what a lovely volume would we then make of all the rest of our book of life! One needs not to have been particularly wicked, or preposterously weak, to have had reason to wish this even in young years; for, besides our own inexperienced blunders and follies and sins, most of us are born into such a plentiful inheritance in the results of these behaviors in others, that a passionate longing to take the wings of a dove and fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, from those very worst parts of it where we began to be, and never hear the fatal regions mentioned again, -an impulse like this has, verily, large justification. But that being has lived very lightly, who has not also learned that a yet deeper law somehow strangely compels us back; that this abolishing of the past is a thing mysteriously forbidden to us; that even when the burden beneath which we sink may not be of our own piling, but may be laid on us in what seems the last blind cruelty of fate,-even this load of doom very seldom is it permitted us to take up like a mill-stone, and go drop it in the sea; yea, ordinarily, not in the escaping from, but in the recasting.even of the accidental mould of our dark fortunes, does the true soul at last find its true work to lie. For the fact is, that in the mysterious and quite awful sequence of things which forever links penalty to fault, this throwing off of burdens is generally not abolishing them, but merely shifting their weight to other shoulders. Thus has it come to be held as one of the prime requisites of character, that a man shall stand by his deeds; hence, too, is the eternally recognized virtue of confession, that thereby the transgressor assumes his Past, acknowledges as the indispensable first step towards an honest future-Thus have I done. We say then, in general terms, that all social theories which tend to make secondary the question of obligation, of responsibility, and to give the first place to the selfish, reckless impulse to escape, we affirm that such theories contradict the whole ideal of right human conduct, at least as that ideal has been hitherto built up in the moral growth of the race. It would seem needless to state, that of all human relations the marriage relation is that where the liberty of the individual is most deeply involved with the question of the rights and interests of others; nevertheless, from the very nature of this relation, a certain class of social philosophers are arguing more and more loudly every day, that in this especial affair of marriage the true law of moral action everywhere else is reversed, and that here the personal inclination becomes paramount to all claims, duties, obligations whatsoever. It is this doctrine which we propose to examine as the limits of these columns may permit. We suppose that no uncorrupted mind disputes that reciprocal sentiment between the parties is the only true foundation of marriage, or believes it possible for the yet unmarried to have too ideal a standard in these things; but the question is,-A mistaken, a false marriage having been made, shall it then be unmade; and on what conditions ? The favorite metaphor whereby our philosophers describe an unloving husband and wife, viz., that of "two corpses chained together," is striking, no doubt, but happens to be untrue; the unfortunate thing is, that these subjects are alive, yea, both of them; since if only one would consent to be dead, why there were no case at all, the road being 'rolled smooth by the funeral-train for the survivor to "anew life's journey pursue" with his or her perfect mate in peace. This inconvenience of having two living parties to consider greatly complicates the case, which is still farther complicated by the likelihood of their being yet other living parties, equally related to this pair, perfectly guiltless of their quarrel, too young to decide anything for themselves, or to take care of themselves,-to express all this intricacy of things, we find the pet simile of the corpses rather inadequate. Corresponding, however, with this selection of metaphors, in the same marvelous strain of assuming that to break the mistaken bond is the be-all and end-all of the difficulty, is the following, as an argument for free divorce, by a conspicuous and long-known journalist: Marriage without love is a sin against God, which, like other sins, is to be repented of, ceased from, and put away?" Do we, then, put away other sins in any such sense as that of cutting loose from the liabilities to which they have brought us? A mere spendthrift who has squandered his substance, and all the substance of other people that he could borrow, in riotous living, if he make a reform that has one particle of genuineness, must not his first step be to pay his debts? No matter in what folly, yea, wickedness, they were contracted, the fact remains that he owes the money. To put away the spirit of transgression is most carefully not to put away the burden of its consequences. To take that up, to search and see what power may yet be left us to stay the mischief which ramifies from all wrong-doing, whether willful or merely ignorant, this is honor; and in proportion to the seriousness of the matter involved is its neglect dishonor. We remark, parenthetically, ere applying this truth to our present subject, that we leave outside of this discussion that flagrant class' of offenses for which divorce is now granted in the New England States. It may be that such limited divorce provisions are, on the whole, in the interests of morality, having a |