ree-hours' drive. The stage pompously rolled into the huddled street
of its terminus, and deposited me, in the neighborhood of noon, on the
stoop of the only tavern supported in the deadly-lively place. No long
sojourn, however, was in store for me. Presently--ere I had grown tired
of watching the couple of clodhoppers, well-bespattered as to boots and
undergarments with Jersey mud, who, leaning against a fence in true
agricultural laziness, deliberately eyed, or rather, gloated over the
inoffensive traveller, as though he were that "daily stranger,"
for whom, as is well known, every Jerseyman offers up matutinal
supplications--a buggy appeared in the distance, and I was shortly asked
for. It was the vehicle in which I was to seek my destination in the
Pines; and my back was speedily turned upon the queer little
village with the curiously chosen name. My driver, an intelligent,
sharp-featured old man, soon informs me that he was born and has lived
for fifty years in the forest. A curious, old-world mortal,--our
father's "serving-man," to the very life! The Pines are to him what
Banks and City Halls and Cooper Institutes and Astor Houses are to a
poor _cittadini_; every tree is individualized; and I doubt not he could
find his way by night from one end to the other of the forest.

We had driven no great distance, when my companion lifted his whip, and,
pointing to a long, dark, indistinct line which crossed the road in the
distance, blocking the prospect ahead and on either side, as far as the
eye could reach, exclaimed: "Them's the Pines!" As we approached the
forest, a change, theatrical in its suddenness, took place in the
scenery through which our course was taken. The rich and smiling
pasture-lands, interspersed with fields of luxuriant corn, were left
behind, the red clay of the road was exchanged for a gritty sand, and
the road itself dwindled to a mere pathway through a clearing. The
locality looked like a plagiarism from the Ohio backwoods. On both sides
of our path spread the graceful undergrowth, waving in an ocean of
green, and hiding the stumps with which the plain was covered, while far
away, to right and left, the prospect was bounded by forest walls, and
gloomy bulwarks and parapets of pines arose in front, as if designed, in
their perfect denseness, to exclude the world from some bosky Garden
of Paradise beyond. Not so, however; for our pathway squeezes itself
between two melancholy sentinel-pines, tracin