Island immediately upon settling on
its western extremity, but it is said upon good authority--and the fact
is a notable one in the history of the island--that slavery never
existed there except in name. The work of the farms and houses was
divided with the utmost impartiality among the nominal slaves and the
white men and boys of the household. Possibly, then, there is not only
no dark background to the lives of these Port Jefferson negroes, but one
that in comfort and happiness is a contrast to the present. One little
fellow--a darkling he should be called--peeped out shyly as we passed,
and then disappeared in a hut which, though embowered in creeping plants
and bushes, did not suggest either comfort or beauty when the trees are
bare and the winds of winter are moaning through the woods. Beyond these
cabins the path leads to the pebbly and shell-covered shore of Poquott.

To the east of Port Jefferson the shore runs in bolder outline to Orient
Point, but within thirty or forty miles to the west there are
innumerable points and well-sheltered bays and inlets that give the
scenery the same picturesque character that is found at Port Jefferson.
It may be taken, in short, as representing the northern side of the
island.

When the shore is left a few miles behind the country assumes an
entirely different aspect. The roads run through a wide tract covered as
far as the eye can see with young timber and brushwood. In places the
charred trunks give evidence that it has at no distant period been
passed over by a forest-fire. The view to the south is bounded by the
low range of hills that runs nearly the entire length of the island. In
a hollow in this rising ground, a few miles east of Comac Hills, about
two miles north-east of Mount Pleasant and near the eastern continuation
of the Comac range, we drop suddenly upon the most charming of the lakes
of Long Island--Ronkonkoma. It matters little from which side it is
approached or from what point it is viewed--Lake Ronkonkoma is in every
way and in every aspect beautiful. Around it on all sides is an
undulating country comprising both woodland and farm, and dotted with
quaint old houses of the many-gabled order, and a few that affect a
certain latter-day primness. The architectural patriarchs and juveniles
represent two different orders of things. The first tell of the early
colonists of two hundred years ago making their way through the dense
woods from the northern shore, and