clothed in innocent black; but, being a son of Adam, I
rose with involuntary politeness to let it pass. An instant more, and it
slipped into the masonry at my side, and I sat down again. It had been
out taking the sun, and had come back to its hole in the wall. How like
the story of my own day,--of my whole winter vacation! Nay, if we choose
to view it so, how like the story of human life itself!

As I started homeward, leaving the mill and the cabin behind me, some
cattle were feeding in the grassy road. At sight of my umbrella (there
are few places where a sunshade is more welcome than in a Florida
pine-wood) they scampered away into the scrub. Poor, wild-eyed,
hungry-looking things! I thought of Pharaoh's lean kine. They were like
the country itself, I was ready to say. But perhaps I misjudged both,
seeing both, as I did, in the winter season. With the mercury at 80 deg., or
thereabout, it is hard for the Northern tourist to remember that he is
looking at a winter landscape. He compares a Florida winter with a New
England summer, and can hardly find words to tell you how barren and
poverty-stricken the country looks.

After this I went more than once to the sugar mill. Morning and
afternoon I visited it, but somehow I could never renew the joy of my
first visit. Moods are not to be had for the asking, nor earned by a
walk. The place was still interesting, the birds were there, the
sunshine was pleasant, and the sea breeze fanned me. The orange blossoms
were still sweet, and the bees still hummed about them; but it was
another day, or I was another man. In memory, none the less, all my
visits blend in one, and the ruined mill in the dying orchard remains
one of the bright spots in that strange Southern world which, almost
from the moment I left it behind me, began to fade into indistinctness,
like the landscape of a dream.

ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S.

The city of Sanford is a beautiful and interesting place, I hope, to
those who live in it. To the Florida tourist it is important as lying at
the head of steamboat navigation on the St. John's River, which here
expands into a lake--Lake Monroe--some five miles in width, with Sanford
on one side, and Enterprise on the other; or, as a waggish traveler once
expressed it, with Enterprise on the north, and Sanford and enterprise
on the south.

Walking naturalists and lovers of things natural have their own point of
view, individual, unconventional, whimsical, if yo