is overlaid with strips of turf, called “floats,” which form an almost air-tight covering.  When the pile is overlaid, fire is set at various small apertures in the sides, and when the whole “pit” is fairly burning, the chimney is closed, in order to prevent too rapid combustion, and the whole pile is slowly converted into charcoal.  The application of the term “pit” to these piles is worthy of remark.  It is due, of course, to the fact, that for centuries it was customary to burn charcoal in excavated pits, until it was discovered that gradual combustion could be as well secured by another and less tedious method.

The Pine Rat glories in his surreptitious coal-pits.  In secluded portions of the forest, he may continually be discovered pottering over a “coaling,” for which he has stolen the wood.  This, indeed, is his only handicraft,—­the single labor to which he condescends or is equal.  Two or three men sometimes band together and build themselves huts after the curious fashion peculiar to the Rat, namely, by piling sticks or branches in a slope on each side of some tall pine, so that a wigwam, with the trunk of the tree in the centre, is constructed.  Inside this triangular shelter—­the idea of which was probably borrowed from the Indians—­the Pine Rat ensconces himself with his whiskey-bottle at night, crouching in dread of the darkness, or of Leeds’s devil, aforesaid.  In this respect he singularly resembles the Bohemian charcoal-burner, who trembles at the thought of Ruebezahl, that malicious goblin, who has an army of mountain-dwarfs and gnomes at his command.  So long as the sunlight inspires our Rat with confidence, however, he will work at his coal-pit, while one comrade is away in the forest, snaring game, and another has, perhaps, been dispatched to the precincts of civilization with his wagon-load of coal.  Yes! the Pine Rat sometimes treads the streets of cities,—­nay, even extends his wanderings to the banks of the Delaware and the Hudson, to Philadelphia and Trenton, to Jersey City and New York.  Then, who so sharp as the grimy tatterdemalion, who passes from street to street and from house to house, with his swart and rickety wagon, and his jangling bell, the discordant clangor of which, when we hear it, calls up horrible recollections of the bells that froze our hearts in plague-stricken cities of other lands, when doomed galley-slaves and forcats wheeled awful vehicles of putrefaction through the streets, clashing and clinking their clamorous bells for more and still more corpses, and foully jesting over the Death which they knew was already upon them!  But the long-drawn, monotonous, nasal cry of the charcoal-vender—­who has not heard it?—­“Cha-r-coa’!  Cha-r-coa’!”—­is more cheerful than the demoniac laughter of the desperate galley-slaves, and his bell sounds musically when we hear it and think of theirs.  Sometimes a couple of these peregrinants may be seen to encounter each other in the streets, and straightway there is an adjournment