NATIVE BROOKS. 139 



It is the same with the Jersey street brook that once ran to the 

 shore by the old " Still House Landing," and the one that winds its 

 way through Stapleton, an humble prisoner except in freshet time 

 when it occasionally assists the Prohibition party, floating chairs and 

 tables conveniently out of the saloon doors and basement windows. 

 Such was the effect of the storm of July 23rd 1887. 



That the alders with their dangling catkins grew along the banks 

 of these little streams is a certainty and that some Dutch settler 

 with expansive pantaloons, a " tough breeches," as Washington Ir- 

 ving would call him, lived near by is a great probability. But that 

 definite description of the times and of the relationship of man to 

 the surrounding natural features, that always lends a charm to a 

 locality, cannot be made in these later days. 



The little spring in the slightly rising ground near the swamp to 

 the northeast of Silver Lake, or Fresh Pond, as it used to be called 

 is much more interesting for bearing the name of Logan, the Indian 

 who is said to have lived near it. He no doubt, would share our 

 sorrow in seeing how often it is dry in recent years and would help 

 if he could, in clearing away the paper boxes and eggshells that are 

 left by the average pic-nic party. Logan's spring brook is a rocky 

 one for Staten Island. In one place it is lost to view for several 

 yards under rocks and tree roots, except when it is full of water, 

 when it also makes use of an upper channel. There are monstrous 

 cray-fish hidden away under the rocks and no end of "water measur- 

 ers," or " water spiders," as they are called, that wait patiently for 

 some luckless creature, often a young cricket, floating down the 

 stream. In the grounds of the Sailors' Snug Harbor it runs through 

 a thick growth of little trees, where the blue jays are numerous, and 

 finally over a steep incline of serpentine rock and under the wall. 

 It finds its way through many a shaded lawn in its course to the 

 Rill van Kull, but art rarely improves upon nature, and a little 

 brook can not be made more beautiful by being confined between 

 two straight stone walls. 



Clove Valley, formed by a fork of the otherwise nearly straight 

 range of serpentine hills, forcibly reminds the rambler of more 

 northern views, of the hills and mild farming country along portions 

 of the Hudson River, only there the rock is different. So well is 

 the Valley itself walled in, that if a dam were built at the Clove and 



