were very little in
evidence. I heard Northern visitors remark the fact again and again. On
this pretty road out of Tallahassee--itself a city of flower gardens--I
can recall nothing of the kind except half a dozen strawberry blossoms,
and the oxalis and specularia before mentioned. Probably the
round-leaved houstonia grew here, as it did everywhere, in small
scattered patches. If there were violets as well, I can only say I have
forgotten them.

Be it added, however, that at the time I did not miss them. In a garden
of roses one does not begin by sighing for mignonette and lilies of the
valley. Violets or no violets, there was no lack of beauty. The Southern
highway surveyor, if such a personage exists, is evidently not consumed
by that distressing puritanical passion for "slicking up things" which
too often makes of his Northern brother something scarcely better than a
public nuisance. At the South you will not find a woman cultivating with
pain a few exotics beside the front door, while her husband is mowing
and burning the far more attractive wild garden that nature has planted
just outside the fence. The St. Augustine road, at any rate, after
climbing the hill and getting beyond the wood, runs between natural
hedges,--trees, vines, and shrubs carelessly intermingled,--not dense
enough to conceal the prospect or shut out the breeze ("straight from
the Gulf," as the Tallahassean is careful to inform you), but sufficient
to afford much welcome protection from the sun. Here it was good to find
the sassafras growing side by side with the persimmon, although when,
for old acquaintance' sake, I put a leaf into my mouth I was half glad
to fancy it a thought less savory than some I had tasted in Yankeeland.
I took a kind of foolish satisfaction, too, in the obvious fact that
certain plants--the sumach and the Virginia creeper, to mention no
others--were less at home here than a thousand miles farther north. With
the wild-cherry trees, I was obliged to confess, the case was reversed.
I had seen larger ones in Massachusetts, perhaps, but none that looked
half so clean and thrifty. In truth, their appearance was a puzzle,
rum-cherry trees as by all tokens they undoubtedly were, till of a
sudden it flashed upon me that there were no caterpillars' nests in
them! Then I ceased to wonder at their odd look. It spoke well for my
botanical acumen that I had recognized them at all.

Before I had been a week in Tallahassee I found tha