We were fairly in the Pines; and a drive of
somewhat more than three miles lay before us still.
The immense forest region I had thus entered covers an extensive portion
of Burlington County, and nearly the whole of Ocean, beside parts
of Monmouth, Camden, Atlantic, Gloucester, and other counties. The
prevailing soils of this great area--some sixty miles in length by ten
in breadth, and reaching from the river Delaware to the very shore of
the Atlantic--are marls and sands of different qualities, of which the
most common is a fine, white, angular sand, of the kind so much in
request for building-purposes and the manufacture of glass. In such an
arid soil the _coniferae_ alone could flourish, and accordingly we find
that the wide-spreading region is overgrown almost entirely with white
and yellow pine, hemlock, and cedar. Hence its distinctive appellation.
It was a most lovely afternoon, warm and serene as only an American
autumn afternoon knows how to be; and while we hurried past the mute,
monotonous, yet ever-shifting array of pines and cedars, the very rays
of the sun seemed to be perfumed with the aroma of the fragrant twigs,
about which humming-birds now and then whirred and fluttered as we
startled them, scarcely more brilliant in color than the gorgeous maples
which grew in one or two dry and open spots.
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