WARWICK WOODLANDS. 11 



ft Ay'd been a fouil else, and aye so often oop t' road too," an- 

 swered he with a grin, " and C moostard is mixed, and t' pilot 

 biscuit in, and a good bit o' Cheshire cheese-! wee's doo, Ay 

 reckon. Ha! hal hal" 



And now my friend's boast was indeed fulfilled; for when we 

 had driven a few miles farther, the country became undulating, 

 with many and bright streams of water ; the hill sides clothed 

 with luxuriant woodlands, now in their many-colored garb of 

 autumn beauty ; the meadow-land rich in unchanged fresh 

 greenery for the summer had been mild and rainy with here 

 and there a buckwheat stubble showing its ruddy face, replete 

 with promise of quail in the present, and of hot cakes in future ; 

 and the bold chain of mountains, which, under many names, 

 but always beautiful and wild, sweeps from the Highlands of 

 the Hudson, west and southwardly, quite through New Jersey, 

 Conning a link between the White and Green Mountains of New 

 Hampshire and Vermont, and the more famous Alleghanies of 

 the South. 



A few miles farther yet, the road wheeled round the base of 

 the Tourne Mountain, a magnificent bold hill, with a bare craggy 

 head, its sides and skirts thick set with cedars and hickory en- 

 tering a defile through which the liamapo, one of the loveliest 

 streams eye ever looked upon, comes rippling with its crystal 

 waters over bright pebbles, on its way to join the two kindred 

 rivulets which form the fair Passaic. Throughout the whole of 

 that defile, nothing -can possibly surpass the loveliness of nature ; 

 the road hard, and smooth, arid level, winding and wheeling 

 parallel to the gurgling river, crossing it two or three times in 

 each mile, now on one side, and now on the other the valley 

 now barely broad enough to permit the highway and the stream 

 to pass between the abrupt masses of rock and forest, and now 

 expanding into rich basins of green meadow-land, the deepest 

 and most fertile possible the hills of every shape and size 

 here bold, and bare, and rocky there swelling up in grand 

 round masses, pile above pile of verdure, to the blue firmament 

 of autumn. By and by we drove through a thriving little vil- 

 lage, nestling in a hollow of the hills, beside a broad bright 

 pond, whose waters keep a dozen manufactories of cotton and 

 of iron with which mineral these hills abound in constant 

 operation ; and passing by the tavern, the departure of whose 

 owner Harry had so patheticallly mourned, we wheeled again 

 round a projecting spur of hill into a narrower defile, and reached 

 1* 



