74 Native Brooks. 



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 egg- 

 shells that are left by the average picnic 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 

 crayfish hidden away under the rocks, and no end of 

 " water-measurers" — or " water-spiders," as they are called 

 — that wait patiently for some luckless creature, often a 

 cricket, floating down the stream. In the grounds of the 

 Sailors' Snug Harbor it runs through a thick growth of 

 little trees, where the bluejays 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 Kill von Kull, but art rarely improves upon nature, 

 and a little brook cannot 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 another where 

 Britton's mill once stood, a considerable lake would be 



