no air more pure and elastic, and the winds
of the south and southwest, which are so hot on the prairies, arrive here
tempered to a grateful coolness by the waters over which they have swept.
The nights are always, in the hottest season, agreeably cool, and the
health of the place is proverbial. The world has not many islands so
beautiful as Mackinaw, as you may judge from the description I have
already given of parts of it. The surface is singularly irregular, with
summits of rock and pleasant hollows, open glades of pasturage and shady
nooks. To some, the savage visitors, who occasionally set up their lodges
on its beach, as well as on that of the surrounding islands, and paddle
their canoes in its waters, will be an additional attraction. I can not
but think with a kind of regret on the time which, I suppose is near at
hand, when its wild and lonely woods will be intersected with highways,
and filled with cottages and boarding-houses.

Letter XXXVIII.

An Excursion to the Water Gap.

Stroudsberg, Monroe Co., Penn. _October_ 23, 1846.

I reached this place last evening, having taken Easton in my way. Did it
ever occur to you, in passing through New Jersey, how much the northern
part of the state is, in some respects, like New York, and how much the
southern part resembles Pennsylvania? For twenty miles before reaching
Easton, you see spacious dwelling-houses, often of stone, substantially
built, and barns of the size of churches, and large farms with extensive
woods of tall trees, as in Pennsylvania, where the right of soil has not
undergone so many subdivisions as with us. I was shown in Warren county,
in a region apparently of great fertility, a farm which was said to be two
miles square. It belonged to a farmer of German origin, whose comfortable
mansion stood by the way, and who came into the state many years ago, a
young man.

"I have heard him say," said a passenger, "that when his father brought
him out with his young wife into Warren county, and set him down upon what
then appeared a barren little farm, now a part of his large and productive
estate, his heart failed him. However he went to work industriously,
practicing the strictest economy, and by applying lime copiously to the
soil made it highly fertile. It is lime which makes this region the
richest land in New Jersey; the farmers find limestone close at hand, burn
it in their kilns, and scatter it on the surface. The person of whom I
sp