, he told me. Oh, yes, he remembered the war; he was a slave,
twenty-one years old, when it broke out. To his mind, the present
generation of "niggers" were a pretty poor lot, for all their
"edication." He had seen them crowding folks off the sidewalk, and
puffing smoke in their faces. All of which was nothing new; I had found
that story more or less common among negroes of his age. He didn't
believe much in "edication;" but when I asked if he thought the blacks
were better off in slavery times, he answered quickly, "I'd rather be a
free man, _I_ had." He wasn't married; he had plenty to do to take care
of himself. We separated, he going one way and I the other; but he
turned to ask, with much seriousness (the reader must remember that this
was only three months after a national election), "Do you think they'll
get free trade?" "Truly," said I to myself, "'the world is too much with
us.' Even in the flat-woods there is no escaping the tariff question."
But I answered, in what was meant to be a reassuring tone, "Not yet
awhile. Some time." "I hope not," he said,--as if liberty to buy and
sell would be a dreadful blow to a man living in a shanty in a Florida
pine barren! He was taking the matter rather too much to heart, perhaps;
but surely it was encouraging to see such a man interested in broad
economical questions, and I realized as never before the truth of what
the newspapers so continually tell us, that political campaigns are
educational.

BESIDE THE MARSH.

I am sitting upon the upland bank of a narrow winding creek. Before me
is a sea of grass, brown and green of many shades. To the north the
marsh is bounded by live-oak woods,--a line with numberless
indentations,--beyond which runs the Matanzas River, as I know by the
passing and repassing of sails behind the trees. Eastward are
sand-hills, dazzling white in the sun, with a ragged green fringe along
their tops. Then comes a stretch of the open sea, and then, more to the
south, St. Anastasia Island, with its tall black-and-white lighthouse
and the cluster of lower buildings at its base. Small sailboats, and now
and then a tiny steamer, pass up and down the river to and from St.
Augustine.

A delicious south wind is blowing (it is the 15th of February), and I
sit in the shade of a cedar-tree and enjoy the air and the scene. A
contrast, this, to the frozen world I was living in, less than a week
ago.

As I approached the creek, a single spotted sandpi