But, oh! the horrors of those New Jersey roads!  Mud?  ’Tis as if all the rains of heaven had been concentrated upon all the marls and clays of earth, and all the sticky stratum plastered down in a wiggling line of unascertainable length and breadth!  Holes?  As if a legion of sharpshooters had been detailed for the defence of Sandy Hook, and had excavated for themselves innumerable rifle-pits or caverns for the discomfiture of unhappy passengers!  Up hill and down dale,—­with merciless ruts and savage ridges,—­now, a slough, to all appearance destitute of bottom, and, next, a treacherous stretch of sand, into which the wheels sink deeper and deeper at every revolution, as if the vehicle were France, and the road disorder,—­such is a faint adumbration of the state of affairs in the benighted interior of our petulant little whiskey-drinking sister State!

But all earthly things come to an end, and so, accordingly, did our three-hours’ drive.  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.

We had driven no great distance, when my companion lifted his whip, and, pointing to a long, dark, indistinct line which crossed the road in the distance, blocking the prospect ahead and on either side, as far as the eye could reach, exclaimed:  “Them’s the Pines!” As we approached the forest, a change, theatrical in its suddenness, took place in the scenery through which our course was taken.  The rich and smiling pasture-lands, interspersed with fields of luxuriant corn, were left behind, the red clay of the road was exchanged for a gritty sand, and the road itself dwindled to a mere pathway through a clearing.  The locality looked like a plagiarism from the Ohio backwoods.  On both sides of our path spread the graceful undergrowth, waving in an ocean of green,