to the nearest bar-room, where the most scientific method of “springing the arch” is discussed over a glass of whiskey, at three cents the quart.  Springing the arch, though few may be able to interpret the phrase, is a trick by which every housewife has suffered.  It is the secret of piling the coal into the measure in such a manner as to make the smaller quantity pass for the larger, or, in other words, to make three pecks go for a bushel.  So the Pine Rat vindicates his claim to a common humanity with all the rest of us men and women; for have not we all our secret and most approved method of springing the arch,—­of palming off our three short pecks for a full and bounteous imperial bushel?  Ah, yes! brothers and sisters, whisper it, if you will, below your breath, but we all can do the Pine Rat’s trick!

We shall not suffer his company much longer in this world,—­poor, neglected, pitiable, darkened soul that he is, this fellow-citizen of ours.  He must move on; for civilization, like a stern, prosaic policeman, will have no idlers in the path.  There must be no vagrants, not even in the forest, the once free and merry greenwood, our policeman-civilization says; nay, the forest, even, must keep a-moving!  We must have farms here, and happy homesteads, and orchards heavy with promise of cider, and wheat golden as hope, instead of silent aisles and avenues of mournful pine-trees, sheltering such forlorn miscreations as our poor cranberry-stealing friends!  Railways are piercing the Pines; surveyors are marking them out in imaginary squares; market-gardeners are engaging land; and farmers are clearing it.  The Rat is driven from point to point, from one means of subsistence to another; and shortly, he will have to make the bitter choice between regulated labor and starvation clean off from the face of the earth.  There is no room for a gypsy in all our wide America!  The Rat must follow the Indian,—­must fade like breath from a window-pane in winter!

In fact, the forest, left so long in its aboriginal savagery, is about to be regenerated.  A railroad is to be constructed, this year, which will place Hanover and the centre of the forest within one hour’s travel of Philadelphia; and it is scarcely too much to anticipate, that, within five years, thousands of acres, now dense with pines and cedars of a hundred rings, will be laid out in blooming market-gardens and in fields of generous corn.  Such little cultivation as has hitherto been attempted has been attended by the most astonishing results; and persons have actually returned from the West and South, in order to occupy farms in the neighborhood of Hanover.

In one respect c’est dommage; one is grieved to part with the game that is now so plentiful in the Pines.  Owing to the beneficent provision of the laws of New Jersey, which stringently forbid every description of hunting in the State during alternate periods of five years, game of all kinds has an opportunity to multiply; and at the termination of the season of rest, in October, 1858, there was some noble hunting in the neighborhood of Hanover.  Five years hence, bears and deer will be a tradition, panthers and raccoons a myth, partridges and quails a vain and melancholy recollection, in what shall then be known as what was once the Pines.