A most glorious sight that
same hundred-acre bog must have been a couple of weeks later, when the
berries had ripened, and a carpet of rosy redness blushed upwards to
the waning sun! Yet 1858 (the even year) was a bad season for
cranberries,--the yield was _only_ sufficient to pay for the land and
fencing, with a modicum over to begin 1859 with!
So cranberries grew to be institutions in the Pines, and all the bogs
for miles around the site of the first experiment were hired by sanguine
farmers. But the cranberry-cultivator has one enemy, which is neither
bird, nor worm, nor blight, but biped,--a Rat, two-legged, erect, or
moderately so, talking, even, in audible and intelligible speech,--the
Pine Rat, namely. Few but New Jerseymen, and of them chiefly those who
dwell about the forest, have heard of this human species; it has not
yet had its Agassiz nor its Wyman,--yet there it flourishes and repeats
itself!
My friend, Mr. B., considerately undertook to initiate me into some
of the mysteries of this race, which has proved minatory, though not
destructive, to his blushing crop,--and accordingly led me through brake
and brier, past wild and gloomy cedar-swamps, over brooks insecurely
bridged with fallen logs, or, perchance, with stepping-blocks of
pine-stumps, far into the silent forest, and to a little dell or
dingle,--a natural clearing,--where a couple of tents were pitched, and
the smoke of a struggling fire told infallibly of human neighborhood.
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