WARWICK WOODLANDS. 95 



of the scattered groups of country-people, which we en- 

 countered every quarter of a mile for the first hour of our 

 route, wending their way toward the village church — 

 but, when we reached the forest-mantled road which 

 clombe the mountain, making the arched woods resoiind 

 to many a jovial catch or merry hunting chorus. 



Mounted sublime on an arm-chair lashed to the forepart 

 of the pig-box, sat Timothy in state — his legs well muffled 

 in a noble scarlet-fringed buffalo skin, and his body en- 

 cased in his livery top-coat — the setters and the spaniels 

 crouching most meekly at his feet, and the two noble 

 bucks — the fellow on whose steaks we had already made 

 an inroad, having been left as fat Tom's portion — securely 

 corded down upon a pile of straw, with their sublime and 

 antlered crests drooping all spiritless and humble over the 

 backboard, toward the frozen soil which crashed and rattled 

 under the ponderous hoofs of the magnificent roan horse — 

 Tom's special favorite — which, though full seventeen 

 hands high, and heavy in proportion, yet showing a good 

 strain of blood, trotted away with his huge load at full 

 ten miles an hour. 



Plunging into the deep recesses of the Greenwoods, hill 

 after hill we scaled, a toilsome length of stony steep as- 

 cents, almost precipitous, until we reached the backbone of 

 the mountain ridge — a rugged, bare, sharp edge of granite 

 rock, without a particle of soil upon it, diving down at an 

 angle not much less than forty-five degrees into a deep 

 ravine, through which thundered and roared a flashing tor- 

 rent. This fearful descent overpast, and that in perfect 

 safety, we rolled merrily away down hill, till we reached 

 Colonel Beam's tavern, a neat, low-browed, Dutch, stone 

 farm-house, situate in an angle scooped out of a green 

 hill side, with half a dozen tall and shadowy elms before 

 it — a bright crystal stream purling along into the horse- 

 trough through a miniature aqueduct of hollowed logs, 

 and a clear cold spring in front of it, with half a score 

 of fat and lazy trout floating in its transparent waters. 



A hearty welcome, and a no less hearty meal having 

 been here encountered and despatched, we rattled off again, 

 through laden orchards and rich meadows; passed the 

 confluence of the three bright rivers which issue from their 

 three mountain gorges, to form, by their junction, the 

 fairest of New Jersey's rivers, the broad Passaic; reached 



