eath, 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 recol