Warwick Woodlands | Page 6

deep waters, and a good sprinkling of trout,
towards this end! Ellis Ketchum killed a five-pounder there this spring!
and heaps of summer-duck, the loveliest in plumage of the genus, and
the best too, me judice, excepting only the inimitable canvass-back.
There are a few deer, too, in the hills, though they are getting scarce of

late years. There, from that headland, I killed one, three summers since;
I was placed at a stand by the lake's edge, and the dogs drove him right
down to me; but I got too eager, and he heard or saw me, and so
fetched a turn; but they were close upon him, and the day was hot, and
he was forced to soil. I never saw him till he was in the act of leaping
from a bluff of ten or twelve feet into the deep lake, but I pitched up my
rifle at him, a snap shot! as I would my gun at a cock in a summer
brake, and by good luck sent my ball through his heart. There is a finer
view yet when we cross this hill, the Bellevale mountain; look out, for
we are just upon it; there! Now admire!"
And on the summit he pulled up, and never did I see a landscape more
extensively magnificent. Ridge after ridge the mountain sloped down
from our feet into a vast rich basin ten miles at least in breadth, by
thirty, if not more, in length, girdled on every side by mountains--the
whole diversified with wood and water, meadow, and pasture-land, and
corn-field--studded with small 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 the shade, and a peal of joyous welcome from all
beings, quadruped or biped, within hearing.
"Hulloa! boys!" cried a deep hearty voice from within the barroom.
"Hulloa! boys! Walk in! walk in! What the eternal h-ll are you about
there?"
Well, we did walk into a large neat bar-room, with a bright hickory log
crackling upon the hearth-stone, a large round table in one corner,
covered with draught-boards, and old newspapers, among which
showed preeminent the "Spirit of the Times;" a range of pegs well
stored with great-coats, fishing-rods, whips, game-bags, spurs, and
every other stray appurtenance of sporting, gracing one end;