Kills),
and changes gradually to higher undulating bluffs, where the morainal
hills plunge into the sea at Princess Bay. Intermediate between the
morainal wall and this flat land is a diversified country, rising
southward and holding, near the sea, bowls of fresh water, with fields
where fish-hawks haunt old apple trees, or tatterdemalion acres of weed
and grass and shrub alternate with more comely and presuming farm land.
Groves of cedars, meandering creeks, scattered remnants of woodland,
old deserted houses looking seaward from their eyeless windows,
blanched by the cold salt winds, falling wearily to ruin in the arms of
creeping tendrilous plants, but holding hard onto life yet with their
strong floors and enduring beams, yield lovely pictures.
The
sea line rising into steep gravel cliffs at Princess Bay, here and
there where some distinction of color or form as a tree, lighthouse, or
moldering dock, intensifies the foreground, offers bolder and
different scenes.
On
the northwestern border of the island, leaping right over the middle
hill country, the observer enters a unique and isolated community,
living in a region of sand-dunes, marshes, creeks and pene-Saharal
loneliness.
Here
is Watchogue, or Watch-oak (reached by Thompson's Road from Arlington
station on the Rapid Transit Railroad), where the delusive edges of the
island dip beneath the waters of Staten Island Sound, showing resistant
centers which refuse submergence in island-like dunes, forks, and
points of land. Northward and southward from Watch-oak is much meadow
land.
But
the interior of the island within and around and on its belt of
serpentine hills, with their many features of extreme attractiveness,
their wide outlooks, their ponds and trees, houses, roads, glades,
valleys, and distances, will more keenly attract the visitor. Richmond,
an old hamlet and former county seat, is at the center of the island.
Jt lies at the foot of the serpentine hills that terminate in the slope
of the Old English Fort, and catches a glimpse of the ancient Latourettg
