ENTERED according to Att o toms in the gel 1854, by WASHINGTON IRVING, in the Clerk's Office. of the District Court for the Southern District of New York TIDBYBA JOHN F. TROW, PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER, 49 ANN STREET. WOLFERT'S ROOST. CHRONICLE I. ABOUT five-and-twenty miles from the ancient and renowned city of Manhattan, formerly called New-Amsterdam, and vulgarly called New-York, on the eastern bank of that expansion of the Hudson, known among Dutch mariners of yore, as the Tappan Zee, being in fact the great Mediterranean Sea of the NewNetherlands, stands a little old-fashioned stone mansion, all made up of gable-ends, and as full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat. It is said, in fact, to have been modelled after the cocked hat of Peter the Headstrong, as the Escurial was modelled after the gridiron of the blessed St. Lawrence. Though but of small dimensions, yet, like many small people, it is of mighty spirit, and values itself greatly on its antiquity, being one of the oldest edifices, for its size, in the whole country. It claims to be an ancient seat of empire, I may rather say an empire in itself, and like all empires, great and small, has had its grand historical epochs. In speaking of this doughty and valorous little pile, I shall call it by its usual appellation of "The Roost; " though that is a name given to it in modern days, since it became the abode of the white man. |