u please,--very
different, at all events, from that of clearer-witted and more
serious-minded men; and the inhabitants of Sanford will doubtless take
it as a compliment, and be amused rather than annoyed, when I confess
that I found their city a discouragement, a widespread desolation of
houses and shops. If there is a pleasant country road leading out of it
in any direction, I was unlucky enough to miss it. My melancholy
condition was hit off before my eyes in a parable, as it were, by a
crowd of young fellows, black and white, whom I found one afternoon in a
sand-lot just outside the city, engaged in what was intended for a game
of baseball. They were doing their best,--certainly they made noise
enough; but circumstances were against them. When the ball came to the
ground, from no matter what height or with what impetus, it fell dead in
the sand; if it had been made of solid rubber, it could not have
rebounded. "Base-running" was little better than base-walking. "Sliding"
was safe, but, by the same token, impossible. Worse yet, at every "foul
strike" or "wild throw" the ball was lost, and the barefooted fielders
had to pick their way painfully about in the outlying saw-palmetto scrub
till they found it. I had never seen our "national game" played under
conditions so untoward. None but true patriots would have the heart to
try it, I thought, and I meditated writing to Washington, where the
quadrennial purification of the civil service was just then in
progress,--under a new broom,--to secure, if possible, a few bits of
recognition ("plums" is the technical term, I believe) for men so
deserving. The first baseman certainly, who had oftenest to wade into
the scrub, should have received a consulate, at the very least. Yet they
were a merry crew, those national gamesters. Their patriotism was of the
noblest type,--the unconscious. They had no thought of being heroes, nor
dreamed of bounties or pensions. They quarreled with the umpire, of
course, but not with Fate; and I hope I profited by their example. My
errand in Sanford was to see something of the river in its narrower and
better part; and having done that, I did not regret what otherwise might
have seemed a profitless week.
First, however, I walked about the city. Here, as already at St.
Augustine, and afterward at Tallahassee, I found the mocking-birds in
free song. They are birds of the town. And the same is true of the
loggerhead shrikes, a pair of which had built
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