grouped about the Big House, who are employed in agricultural labors and occupations connected with the forest.  Yet in this solitary nook the elegances and the tastes of the most cultivated society are to be found.  The Big House, surrounded by its well-trimmed gardens sloping down to the broad Rancocus, with its comfortable apartments, and the diversified prospect which it commands, offers a resting-place which, although deep in the genuine forest, combines urban refinement with the quiet and seclusion of country-life.

Bright and early on the morning after my arrival, Friend B. was at my door; and after a savory, if hasty breakfast, we sounded boute-selle.  Outside the gate a couple of forest-ponies were waiting,—­stout, lively, five-year-olds, equal, if not to a two-forty heat, yet to twenty miles of steady trot without distress,—­brown and sleek as you please, with the knowingest eyes, and intelligence expressed in the impatient stamp of the fore-foot, and good-humor in the twitching of the ear.  Into the saddle and off, with the cheery breeze to bathe us in exhilaration, as it went humming around us laden with aromatic odors and mysterious whisperings of the pine-trees to the sea,—­through the dew-diamonded grass of the little lawn at the top of the hill,—­past the great elm with its glistening foliage, and its carolling crew of just-awakened birds,—­then a canter down the sandy slope to the edge of the forest, and again the pines are around us.

Before us lay a four-mile ride over a devious track among trees which my companion knows by heart.  Paths diverge into the forest on either side, running north and south, east and west, straight and crooked, narrow and broad; but B. follows unerringly the right, though undistinguished trail.  This knowledge of woodcraft,—­how it appalls and wonder-strikes the unlearned metropolitan, accustomed as he is to numbered houses and name-boarded streets!  No omnibus-driver threading the confusion of a great thoroughfare could shape his course with greater assurance and lack of hesitation than does B. through these endless avenues of heavy-foliaged pines, broken only now and then by some tangled, impenetrable brake of cedars, or by a charred and blackened clearing, where the coaler has been at work.  I gradually grew to believe that he could call every tree by its name, as generals have been said to know every soldier in their armies.

At length we reached a clearing of one or two acres in extent, the site of Cranberry Lodge, and the terminus of our ride.  In the centre of the lone expanse two unusually tall pines were left standing, at the base of which a curious structure nestled, which had been for several weeks the occasional hermitage of my companion.  It was built entirely with his own hands, of cedar rails and white-pine planks, which he had cut and sawed from trees that his own hands had felled.  A queer little cabin, some nine feet in length by five or six in breadth, standing all alone in the forest, with not a neighbor within a distance of at least four miles!