Letter XXXVIII.

An Excursion to the Water Gap.

Stroudsberg, Monroe Co., Penn. October 23, 1846.

I reached this place last evening, having taken Easton in my way.  Did it ever occur to you, in passing through New Jersey, how much the northern part of the state is, in some respects, like New York, and how much the southern part resembles Pennsylvania?  For twenty miles before reaching Easton, you see spacious dwelling-houses, often of stone, substantially built, and barns of the size of churches, and large farms with extensive woods of tall trees, as in Pennsylvania, where the right of soil has not undergone so many subdivisions as with us.  I was shown in Warren county, in a region apparently of great fertility, a farm which was said to be two miles square.  It belonged to a farmer of German origin, whose comfortable mansion stood by the way, and who came into the state many years ago, a young man.

“I have heard him say,” said a passenger, “that when his father brought him out with his young wife into Warren county, and set him down upon what then appeared a barren little farm, now a part of his large and productive estate, his heart failed him.  However he went to work industriously, practicing the strictest economy, and by applying lime copiously to the soil made it highly fertile.  It is lime which makes this region the richest land in New Jersey; the farmers find limestone close at hand, burn it in their kilns, and scatter it on the surface.  The person of whom I speak took off large crops from his little farm, and as soon as he had any money beforehand, he added a few acres more, so that it gradually grew to its present size.  Rich as he is, he is a worthy man; his sons, who are numerous, are all fine fellows, not a scape-grace among them, and he has settled them all on farms around him.”

Easton, which we entered soon after dark, is a pretty little town of seven thousand inhabitants, much more substantially built than towns of the same size in this country.  Many of the houses are of stone, and to the sides of some of them you see the ivy clinging and hiding the masonry with a veil of evergreen foliage.  The middle of the streets is unpaved and very dusty, but the broad flagging on the sides, under the windows of the houses, is sedulously swept.  The situation of the place is uncommonly picturesque.  If ever the little borough of Easton shall grow into a great town, it will stand on one of the most commanding sites in the world, unless its inhabitants shall have spoiled it by improvements.  The Delaware, which forms the eastern bound of the borough, approaches it from the north through high wooded banks, and flows away to join the Susquehanna between craggy precipices.  On the south side, the Lehigh comes down through a deep, verdant hollow, and on the north the Bushkill winds through a glen shaded with trees, on the rocky banks of which is one of the finest drives in the