92 



THE MUSEUM. 



tion to attack the Lower Fort, though 

 its garrison did not amount to a hun- 

 dred men. They approached near 

 enough however to fire a few shots in- 

 to the tower of the stone church, but 

 a discharge of grape from the fort 

 drove them back, when they contin- 

 ued down the valley and through the 

 woods to Fort Hunter on the Mohawk. 

 The beautiful valley of the Scho- 

 harie presented a scene of devastation 

 that evening not easily described. 

 Homes, barns and numerous stacks of 

 hay and grain were consumed by fire; 

 domestic animals lay dead everywhere 

 over the fields. The buildings belong- 

 ing to the Royalists alone had been 

 spared, but the militia turned out and 

 set fire to them in' revenge. After the 

 burning of Schoharie, this settlement 

 ceased to be so much an object of tory 

 vengence; during the years 1781 and 

 1782 though, there were frequent 

 alarms, but little damage was done by 

 the enemy. 



Nearly 125 years have elapsed since 

 the tragedies were enacted; the actors 

 themselves are no more, yet the very 

 mention of the events sendsa chill cur- 

 rent to every youthful heart in the 

 valley. 



It can be truthfully said of those 

 honest and God-fearing Germans who 

 rooted themselves in the Schoharie 

 valley, that they proved one of the 

 best stocks which have made the 

 American people. They were never 

 popular with the men or women who 

 wanted to make America a new Lon- 

 don or a new England, with courts 

 and castles, aristocracy and nobles. 



What ever in their wanderings they 

 lost or were robbed of, they managed 

 to. hold to their hymn-books and 

 Bibles, and in the case of the Iveform- 

 ed Churchmen, their Heidelburg cate- 

 chism. 



Though other nationalities after- 

 wards helped to make the Schoharie 

 valley cosmopolitan, it was by this 

 branch of the Teutonic race that the 

 region was settled and defended. 

 Their characteristics were the intense 



love of liberty, -j^deepseated hatred 

 against feudalism and the encroach- 

 ments of monarchy in every form. 

 Especially did they find destestation 

 in the established or government 

 church. Theirs was the democratic 

 idea in church and state, and they ex- 

 pressed it strongly 



RoBKRT M. Hartley, 



Amsterdam, N. Y. 



Cuba as a Naturalists Paradise. 



The Island of Cuba is just now 

 hardly a desirable place for the aver- 

 age non-combatant to find himself in 

 and if we are to believe the reports 

 sent into an eager press concerning the 

 epidemic of Yellow Jack and Small 

 Pox which are once more beginning to 

 rage now that the wet season has set 

 in we can readily imagine that the war- 

 ring men upon the Island find them- 

 selves in not exactly a desirable residen- 

 tial portion of the western hemisphere. 

 And yet not withstanding James Creel- 

 man's woeful tales of the stamping 

 flat of towns and the ravaging of pro- 

 vinces with the embellishments of dy- 

 ing thousands wasted with starvation 

 and fever — notwithstanding the har- 

 rowing nature of the pictures which 

 this great war correspondent and his 

 equally talented purveyors of horrors 

 conjure up before the minds eye, even 

 now at this seemingly inauspicious 

 time, do I a normally constructed and 

 rational human being, yearn that I may 

 wander again upon the white sands- 

 and amid the glorious verdure of the 

 Pearl of the Antilles — despite the pop- 

 ping of the Mausers and tfie waving of 

 the yellow flag — for be it known to you 

 readers — that I am of the collectors a 

 collector and all that is strange and 

 beautiful in Nature's offspring is of vast 

 interest unto me — be the object bird, 

 beast, insect, reptile or shell, in me it 

 will find a willing worshiper at its 

 shrine and upon the hills and in the 

 valleys of the Isle De Cuba I have 

 roamed and collected of old and know 

 from personal experience that rare 

 treasure dear to he who fills his cabi- 



