g their faces had a strong salty odor, the
sedges along shore were stiff with brine. Tall herons waded about, or,
poised on one leg among the reeds, gazed at them, as they passed, with
high-shouldered indifference; now and then a gray bird rose from the
green as they approached, and with a whir of wings sped away before
them, sounding his peculiar wild cry. The blue seemed to come down and
rest on the edge of the marsh all round them, like the top of a tent; it
was like sailing through a picture of which they could always see
(though they never reached it) the frame.

The stream they were following was not one of the marsh channels; it was
a tide-water creek which penetrated several miles into Patricio, and
after a while they came to the solid land.

"The odor of Florida--I perceive it," said Lucian; "the odor of a
pitch-pine fire! And I don't know any odor I like better." The stream
wound on, the banks grew higher, palmettoes began to appear; they all
leaned forward a little in the golden air, they formed the most graceful
groups of curiosity. At length as the skiffs turned the last bend, a
house came into sight. It was a ruin.

But the pitch-pine fire was there, all the same; it had been made on the
ground behind a small out-building. This out-building had preserved
three of its sides and the framework of its roof; the roof had been
completed by a thatch of palmetto, the vanished facade had been gayly
replaced by a couple of red calico counterpanes suspended from the
thatch. Here lived a family of "poor whites"--father, mother, and six
children; their drawing-room was the green space before the kitchen;
their bedchambers were behind the calico facade; their kitchen was an
iron pot, at this moment suspended over the fragrant fire. The father
had just come home in his roughly made cart, drawn by the most wizened
of ponies, with a bear which he had killed in a neighboring swamp; the
elder boys were bringing up fish from their dug-out in the creek; the
mother, her baby on her arm, lifted her bed-quilt wall to smile
hospitably upon the visitors. They did not own the land, these people;
they were not even tenants; they were squatters, and mere temporary
squatters at that. They had nothing in the world beyond the few poor
possessions their cart could hold; they were all brown and well, and
apparently perfectly happy.

"They look contented," said Margaret, as, after accepting the
hospitalities of the place, which the fami