“And now, something about Leeds’s devil!” I said to my friend, after satisfactory definition of the Pine Rat; “what fiend may he be, if you please?”

“I will answer,—­I will tell you,” replies Mr. B.  “There lived, in the year 1735, in the township of Burlington, a woman.  Her name was Leeds, and she was shrewdly suspected of a little amateur witchcraft.  Be that as it may, it is well established, that, one stormy, gusty night, when the wind was howling in turret and tree, Mother Leeds gave birth to a son, whose father could have been no other than the Prince of Darkness.  No sooner did he see the light than he assumed the form of a fiend, with a horse’s head, wings of bat, and a serpent’s tail.  The first thought of the newborn Caliban was to fall foul of his mother, whom he scratched and bepommelled soundly, and then flew through the window out into the village, where he played the mischief generally.  Little children he devoured, maidens he abused, young men he mauled and battered; and it was many days before a holy man succeeded in repeating the enchantment of Prospero.  At length, however, Leeds’s devil was laid,—­but only for one hundred years.

“During an entire century, the memory of that awful monster was preserved, and, as 1835 drew nigh, the denizens of Burlington and the Pines looked tremblingly for his rising.  Strange to say, however, no one but Hannah Butler has had a personal interview with the fiend; though, since 1835, he has frequently been heard howling and screaming in the forest at night, to the terror of the Rats in their lonely encampments.  Hannah Butler saw the devil, one stormy night, long ago; though some skeptical individuals affirm, that very possibly she may have been led, under the influence of liquid Jersey lightning, to invest a pine-stump, or, possibly, a belated bear, with diabolical attributes and a Satanic voice.  However that may be, you cannot induce a Rat to leave his hut after dark,—­nor, indeed, will you find many Jerseymen, though of a higher order of intelligence, who will brave the supernatural terrors of the gloomy forest at night, unless secure in the strength of numbers.”

The Pine Rat, in his vocation as a picker-up of every unconsidered trifle, is an adept at charcoal-burning, on the sly.  The business of legitimate charcoal-manufacture is also largely practised in the Pines, although the growing value of wood interferes sadly with the coalers.  Here and there, however, a few acres are marked out every year for charring, and the coal-pits are established in the clearing made by felling the trees.  The “coaling,” as it is technically termed, is an assemblage of “pits,” or piles of wood, conical in form, and about ten feet in height by twenty in diameter.  The wood is cut in equal lengths, and is piled three or four tiers high, each log resting on the end of that below it, and inclining slightly inwards.  An opening is left in the centre of the pile, serving as a chimney; and the exterior