Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/69

 upper story, leaving behind in their haste the youngest member of the family, Margaret Schuyler, afterward the wife of the patroon. An elder sister going to rescue the infant, was pursued by an Indian, who threw his tomahawk at her as she fled up the stairs. The weapon entered the hand-rail near the newel, and the mark is still shown, which would be conclusive evidence if the same story were not told of the Glen house in Schenectady, the only house unburnt in the massacre of 1690."

With all its historic associations, Albany is not conspicuous for the scenery it has furnished for the enchantments of poetry and romance; still it is not altogether destitute of literary honors. Its colonial life figures in the Satanstoe of the great Fenimore Cooper and in Harold Frederick's In the Valley. The Normanskill, which tumbles into the Hudson at the south end of the city, flows through the Vale of Tawasentha, the scene of Longfellow's Hiawatha. The hills and forests about the city suggested many a delicate detail in the woodland rhythms of Alfred Street, who made his home and burial-place in Albany. Its old Dutch life with its sedate charm has been pictured by a living Albanian, Leonard Kip; and probably the house still stands on Pearl Street or Broadway, in which Henry James found the charming girl who stood for his Portrait of a Lady.