hat I had lately been in southern Florida, and found this region a
strong contrast. "Yes," he returned; and, pointing to the grass, he
remarked upon the richness of the soil. "This yere land would fertilize
that," he said, speaking of southern Florida. "I shouldn't wonder," said
I. I meant to be understood as concurring in his opinion, but such a
qualified, Yankeefied assent seemed to him no assent at all. "Oh, it
will, it will!" he responded, as if the point were one about which I
must on no account be left unconvinced. He told me that the fine house
at which I had looked, a little distance back, through a long vista of
trees, was the residence of Captain H., who owned all the land along the
road for a good distance. I inquired how far the road was pretty, like
this. "For forty miles," he said. That was farther than I was ready to
walk, and coming soon to the top of the hill, or, more exactly, of the
plateau, I stopped in the shade of a china-tree, and looked at the
pleasing prospect. Behind me was a plantation of young pear-trees, and
before me, among the hills northward, lay broad, cultivated slopes,
dotted here and there with cabins and tall, solitary trees. On the
nearer slope, perhaps a sixteenth of a mile away, a negro was ploughing,
with a single ox harnessed in some primitive manner,--with pieces of
wood, for the most part, as well as I could make out through an
opera-glass. The soil offered the least possible hindrance, and both he
and the ox seemed to be having a literal "walk-over." Beyond him--a full
half-mile away, perhaps--another man was ploughing with a mule; and in
another direction a third was doing likewise, with a woman following in
his wake. A colored boy of seventeen--I guessed his age at
twenty-three--came up the road in a cart, and I stopped him to inquire
about the crops and other matters. The land in front of me was planted
with cotton, he said; and the men ploughing in the distance were getting
ready to plant the same. They hired the land and the cabins of Captain
H., paying him so much cotton (not so much an acre, but so much a mule,
if I understood him rightly) by way of rent. We talked a long time about
one thing and another. He had been south as far as the Indian River
country, but was glad to be back again in Tallahassee, where he was
born. I asked him about the road, how far it went. "They tell me it goes
smack to St. Augustine," he replied; "I ain't tried it." It was an
unlikely story, i