all white villages--with more than one bright
lakelet glittering like beaten gold in the declining sun, and several
isolated hills standing up boldly from the vale!

"Glorious indeed! Most glorious!" I exclaimed.

"Right, Frank," he said; "a man may travel many a day, and not see any
thing to beat the vale of Sugar-loaf--so named from that cone-like hill,
over the pond there--that peak is eight hundred feet above tide water.
Those blue hills, to the far right, are the Hudson Highlands; that bold
bluff is the far-famed Anthony's Nose; that ridge across the vale, the
second ridge I mean, is the Shawangunks; and those three rounded
summits, farther yet--those are the Kaatskills! But now a truce with the
romantic, for there lies Warwick, and this keen mountain air has found
me a fresh appetite!"

Away we went again, rattling down the hills, nothing daunted at their
steep pitches, with the nags just as fresh as when they started,
champing and snapping at their curbs, till on a table-land above the
brook, with the tin steeple of its church peering from out the massy
foliage of sycamore and locust, the haven of our journey lay before us.

"Hilloa, hill-oa ho! whoop! who-whoop!" and with a cheery shout, as we
clattered across the wooden bridge, he roused out half the population of
the village.

"Ya ha ha!--ya yah!" yelled a great woolly-headed coal-black negro.
"Here 'm massa Archer back again--massa ben well, I spect--"

"Well--to be sure I have, Sam," cried Harry. "How's old Poll? Bid her
come up to Draw's to-morrow night--I've got a red and yellow frock for
her--a deuce of a concern!"

"Ya ha! yah ha ha yaah!" and amid a most discordant chorus of African
merriment, we passed by a neat farm-house shaded by two glorious locusts
on the right, and a new red brick mansion, the pride of the village,
with a flourishing store on the left--and wheeled up to the famous Tom
Draw's tavern--a long white house with a piazza six feet wide, at the
top of eight steep steps, and a one-story kitchen at the end of it; a
pump with a gilt pineapple at the top of it, and horse-trough, a wagon
shed and stable sixty feet long; a sign-post with an indescribable
female figure swinging upon it, and an ice house over the way!

Such was the house, before which we pulled up just as the sun was
setting, amid a gabbling of ducks, a barking of terriers, mixed with the
deep bay of two or three large heavy fox-hounds which had been lounging
about in t