Warwick Woodlands | Page 5

most
pleasantly with the spiced beef, white biscuit, and good wine, which
came out of the waterfall as cool as Gunter could have made it with all
his icing. When we had pretty well got through, and were engaged with
our cheroots, up came Tim Matlock.
"T' horses have got through wi' t' corn--they have fed rarely so I
harnessed them, sur, all to the bridles--we can start when you will."
"Sit down, and get your dinner then, sir--there's a heel tap in that bottle
we have left for you--and when you have done, put up the things, and
we'll be off. I say, Frank, let us try a shot with the pistols--I'll get the
case--stick up that fellow-commoner upon the fence there, and mark off
a twenty paces."

The marking irons were produced, and
loaded--"Fire--one--two--three"-- bang! and the shivering of the glass
announced that never more would that chap hold the generous liquor;
the ball had struck it plump in the centre, and broken off the whole
above the shoulder, for it was fixed neck downward on the stake.
"It is my turn now," said I; and more by luck, I fancy, than by skill, I
took the neck off, leaving nothing but the thick ring of the mouth still
sticking on the summit of the fence.
"I'll hold you a dozen of my best Regalias against as many of Manillas,
that I break the ring."
"Done, Harry!"
"Done!"
Again the pistol cracked, and the unerring ball drove the small
fragment into a thousand splinters.
"That fotched 'um!" exclaimed Tim, who had come up to announce all
ready. "Ecod, measter Frank, you munna wager i' that gate* [*Gate--
Yorkshire; Anglice, way.] wi' master, or my name beant Tim, but
thou'lt be clean bamboozled."
Well, not to make a short story long, we got under way again, and, with
speed unabated, spanked along at full twelve miles an hour for five
miles farther. There, down a wild looking glen, on the left hand, comes
brawling, over stump and stone, a tributary streamlet, by the side of
which a rough track, made by the charcoal burners and the iron miners,
intersects the main road; and up this miserable looking path, for it was
little more, Harry wheeled at full trot. "Now for twelve miles of
mountain, the roughest road and wildest country you ever saw crossed
in a phaeton, good master Frank."
And wild it was, indeed, and rough enough in all conscience; narrow,
unfenced in many places, winding along the brow of precipices without
rail or breast-work, encumbered with huge blocks of stone, and broken

by the summer rains! An English stage coachman would have stared
aghast at the steep zigzags up the hills, the awkward turns on the
descents, the sudden pitches, with now an unsafe bridge, and now a
stony ford at the bottom; but through all this, the delicate quick finger,
keen eye, and cool head of Harry, assisted by the rare mouths of his
exquisitely bitted cattle, piloted us at the rate of full ten miles the hour;
the scenery, through which the wild track ran, being entirely of the
most wild and savage character of woodland; the bottom filled with
gigantic timber trees, cedar, and pine, and hemlock, with a dense
undergrowth of rhododendron, calmia, and azalia, which, as my friend
informed me, made the whole mountains in the summer season one rich
bed of bloom. About six miles from the point where we had entered
them we scaled the highest ridge of the hills, by three almost
precipitous zigzags, the topmost ledge paved by a stratum of broken
shaley limestone; and, passing at once from the forest into well
cultivated fields, came on a new and lovelier prospect--a narrow deep
vale scarce a mile in breadth--scooped, as it were, out of the mighty
mountains which embosomed it on every side--in the highest state of
culture, with rich orchards, and deep meadows, and brown stubbles,
whereon the shocks of maize stood fair and frequent; and westward of
the road, which, diving down obliquely to the bottom, loses itself in the
woods of the opposite hill-side, and only becomes visible again when it
emerges to cross over the next summit--the loveliest sheet of water my
eyes has ever seen, varying from half a mile to a mile in breadth, and
about five miles long, with shores indented deeply with the capes and
promontories of the wood-clothed hills, which sink abruptly to its very
margin.
"That is the Greenwood Lake, Frank, called by the monsters here Long
Pond!--'the fiends receive their souls therefor,' as Walter Scott says-- in
my mind prettier than Lake George by far, though known to few except
chance sportsmen like myself! Full of fish, perch of a pound in weight,
and yellow bass in the