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.
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