Nathaniel Parker Willis

“ With his early savings (as a sloop-skipper and steamboat pilot) , he bought the river farm of which Idlewild was a part, and has since turned everything to account within reach—supplying Newburgh and New York with shad and bass in immense quantities by his skillful hauling and netting, growing the best fruit, stopping the drift-timber after the freshets, killing more wild game than all the other neighbors together, raising famous grain, breeding the best fowls and pigs, and—taking summer boarders. ”

“ Ward mentioned one of our well-known neighbors who has lately taken to a new amusement. He seems to be fond of sitting on a cake of ice, any sunny noon, and floating down the river, just in front of us. This idler—a bald eagle, and the largest remember in this part of the country—has haunted Idlewild for a year past, and his circlings of swoop around the projecting eminence on which our house stands, are the admiration of man, woman and child, for some distance. He lives, as is well known, by taking tribute of the fish-hawk, from whom he receives the fish just dived for, on presenting his bill ”

“ Ward himself is a native growth of "American," in which I take a patriotic delight. The country's reliance, for energy in daily matters and for resource and courage in emergencies, is in the likes of him—few though they be, and yet constituting the centre that holds together the whole wheel of our national energy. His life is to mind his business. He says little—his ideas always keeping ahead of his words. ”

“ I never sent you one of those homespun letters, in fact, without quite a persuasion that it will be the last. But life always seems to keep new, somehow; and apresent hour always seems to me worthy any two of the past or the future. ”

“ As the reclining cow commonly rises first behind, the declivity for us was doubtless towards the head—though the improbability that a gentleman and his horse would ever travel over the horns of old Smith's cow, the most vicious animal in the neighborhood, without a scratch, makes it likely again that we dismounted over the tail. ”

“ We had some lesser gossip about snakes and drift-timber, ice-cracks and snow-floods, and then we got Ward upon experiences that will be of more interest to the public at large—his winter-pilotings of the steamboats that made their passes while sleighs were running on the river.
The railroad has lessened the urgency of the demand for the winter navigation of the Hudson, but it could always be done "when it would pay." The damage to boats was very great. A gang of ship carpenters was kept waiting on the dock, both at Newburgh and New York, to commence repairs at the moment of arrival. ”

“ A pipe was arranged to turn steam out upon the wheels, and this melted the ice and dried the wood immediately, so that the carpenters could handle them. They never lost a passage from breakage of paddle-boxes, though they were sometimes terribly shattered. The railroad was then building, and the demand for freight of tools and materials, and passage of workmen, was very great; so that Ward's boat, the Highlander, tried to make two passages in the twenty-four hours—down in the day time and up at night—but the ice in the dark proved too much for them. ”

“ Spontaneousness in Writing—An Adventure in Riding—Mounted at one time on a Horse and a Cow—A Story by a neighbor Fisherman—Cathcing a Snapping-turtle—Ward's Adventures—The Difficulties of Winter Pilotage of Steamboats, before the Railroad on the Hudson—Bald Eagle on the Ice, etc., etc. ”