Indeed, it was a common saying in that region that it was "too poor
even to raise a disturbance upon."

To the westward of the road running north and south there had once
been an open field of some thirty or forty acres, where the wagoners
were wont to camp and the drovers to picket their stock in the
halcyon days of the old hostelry. It had been the muster-ground
of the militia too, and there were men yet alive, at the time of
which we write, whose fathers had mustered with the county forces
on that ground. When it was "turned out," however, and the Ordinary
ceased to be a place of entertainment, the pines shot up, almost
as thick as grass-blades in a meadow, over its whole expanse. It
is strange how they came there. Only black-jacks and the lighter
decidua which cover such sandy ridges had grown there before, but
after these were cleared away by the hand of man and the plow for
a few years had tickled the thin soil, when nature again resumed
her sway, she sent a countless army of evergreens, of mysterious
origin, to take and hold this desecrated portion of her domain. They
sprang up between the corn-rows before the stalks had disappeared
from sight; they shot through the charred embers of the deserted
camp-fire; everywhere, under the shade of each deciduous bush,
protected by the shadow of the rank weeds which sprang up where
the stock had fed, the young pines grew, and protected others, and
shot slimly up, until their dense growth shut out the sunlight and
choked the lately protecting shrubbery. Then they grew larger, and
the weaker ones were overtopped by the stronger and shut out from
the sunlight and starved to death, and their mouldering fragments
mingled with the carpet of cones and needles which became thicker
and thicker under their shade, until at the beginning of the war a
solid, dark mass of pines fit for house-logs, and many even larger,