llowed to peep inside the gates of the old place, but of course the
house is only for friends or acquaintances, or it would be overrun and
the family would have to take to the cellar. Pat had somehow forced
Larry to write and ask permission, for he never puts pen to paper if he
can help it!

Sometimes it's a blow to see where your favourite authors lived, but
Washington Irving's dear old Dutch house is _just right_. It is like a
beautiful living body with his memory for its soul: yes, a charming body
with all his quaintnesses and unexpectednesses and dainty mysteries.
It looks at least as old as the seventeenth century, but only a nucleus
of the rambling, many-windowed, creeper-clad mansion is really old.
There's a romance about that part, by the way, but perhaps you know it
better than I do.

[Illustration: "The old Dutch Church at Tarrytown"]

Once upon a time, when Washington Irving was very young, he visited the
Pauldings in a house swept away now. He used to take a boat and row all
alone, to think thoughts and dream dreams under the willow trees that
even then roofed the brook in Sunnyside glen. He could see a tiny house
called "Wolfert's Roost," and said to himself, "If I could live here and
have that for mine I should be perfectly happy."

It didn't seem then as if his wish could possibly come true, but he
always kept it in his heart, and years later, after he had lived in
London and been American Minister in Madrid, he came back to his first
love, with money he had been saving up, to make it his own. He added and
added again to the house, but contrived to give it the lovely look of
having just grown up anyhow, as trees and flowers grow. That's partly
because of its cloaks and muffs and boas of trumpet-creeper and ivy. It
has the look, too, even now, of being miles from anywhere--except the
river and the creek, which sing the same song they sang long ago, under
the trees. The trees of Sunnyside are somehow curiously individual, Jack
and I thought, as if they knew the historic reputation they had to live
up to, and were gently proud of it. There are trees graceful as ladies
dancing a minuet, spreading out their green brocade skirts for a deep
curtsey; trees as spicily perfumed as the pouncet boxes of those same
ladies; thoughtful trees whose one mission in life is to give deep shade
under showering branches, and gay trees like sieves for sunshine. Jack
and I wandered among them and then gazed out upon them, as