The Wickiup 
THE HOME OF AN ARTIST 
By E. N. Vallandigham 
TETIGH upon a spur of the Dunderberg 
overlooking Stony Point and the noble 
expanse of the Tappan Zee, a painter and 
his wife have made, from very unpromising 
material, an ideal but inexpensive home. 
One of the couple had sentimental reasons 
for seeking this high perch, for a few hundred 
feet below and almost on the edge of a beetling 
cliff that overhangs the tracks of the West 
Shore Road, stands a great old ancestral 
home, deserted now, 
but still well kept amid 
its mountain lawn and 
noble trees. When 
casting about for a spot 
upon which to set foot 
to earth the pair natu¬ 
rally thought of the old 
familiar region. The 
great old house was 
impossible, but a local 
relative suggested a 
cottage on the Buckel- 
barrack. Seen from 
the snake-like road half 
way down the slope, 
the cottage looked like 
a mere bird-house, 
and it seemed small enough even at close 
quarters. But unimpeachable local tradi¬ 
tion taught that the original builder of more 
than a century ago had lived in the house 
with a wife and fourteen children when it 
was scarcely more than half its present size'. 
That fact, taken in connection with the view 
and the spring of delicious water gushing 
from the hillside, was sufficient to determine 
the doubters. Double the house room that 
sufficed for sixteen in 
the youth of the nine¬ 
teenth century ought to 
yield comfortable shel¬ 
ter for two in the boy¬ 
hood of the twentieth. 
So the couple took 
the cottage and its barn 
hard by, and there they 
wintered. Then with 
the coming of spring 
they bought “two 
acres, more or less,” 
of the rough slopes 
lying about the house. 
The demesne seemed 
amazingly large for 
the area named in the 
PLAN OF THE WICKIUP 
*35 
