ooms,--sage, perhaps, or something akin to it. For the moment I feel
no curiosity. But withal the place is unkempt, as becomes a ruin.
"Winter's ragged hand" has been rather heavy upon it. Withered palmetto
leaves and leaf-stalks litter the ground, and of course, being in
Florida, there is no lack of orange-peel lying about. Ever since I
entered the State a new Scrip-ture text has been running in my head: In
the place where the orange-peel falleth, there shall it lie.

The mill, as I said, is now the centre of an orange grove. There must be
hundreds of trees. All of them are small, but the greater part are
already dead, and the rest are dying. Those nearest the walls are
fullest of leaves, as if the walls somehow gave them protection. The
forest is creeping into the inclosure. Here and there the graceful
palm-like tassel of a young long-leaved pine rises above the tall
winter-killed grass. It is not the worst thing about the world that it
tends to run wild.

Now the quail sings again, this time in two notes, and now the hummer is
again in the orange-tree. And all the while the redbird whistles in the
shrubbery. He feels the beauty of the day. If I were a bird, I would
sing with him. From far away comes the chant of a pine-wood sparrow. I
can just hear it.

This is a place for dreams and quietness. Nothing else seems worth the
having. Let us feel no more the fever of life. Surely they are the wise
who seek Nirvana; who insist not upon themselves, but wait absorption
--reabsorption--into the infinite. The dead have the better part. I
think of the stirring, adventurous man who built these walls and dug
these canals. His life was full of action, full of journeyings and
fightings. Now he is at peace, and his works do follow him--into the
land of forgetfulness. Blessed are the dead. Blessed, too, are the bees,
the birds, the butterflies, and the lizards. Next to the dead, perhaps,
they are happy. And I also am happy, for I too am under the spell. To me
also the sun and the air are sweet, and I too, for to-day at least, am
careless of the world and all its doings.

So I sat dreaming, when suddenly there was a stir in the grass at my
feet. A snake was coming straight toward me. Only the evening before a
cracker had filled my ears with stories of "rattlers" and "moccasins."
He seemed to have seen them everywhere, and to have killed them as one
kills mosquitoes. I looked a second time at the moving thing in the
grass. It was