ture of the soil, from white sand to red clay; a change indescribably
exhilarating to a New Englander who had been living, if only for two
months, in a country without hills. How good it was to see the land
rising, though never so gently, as it stretched away toward the horizon!
My spirits rose with it. By and by we passed extensive hillside
plantations, on which little groups of negroes, men and women, were at
work. I seemed to see the old South of which I had read and dreamed, a
South not in the least like anything to be found in the wilds of
southern and eastern Florida; a land of cotton, and, better still, a
land of Southern people, instead of Northern tourists and settlers. And
when we stopped at a thrifty-looking village, with neat, homelike
houses, open grounds, and lordly shade-trees, I found myself saying
under my breath, "Now, then, we are getting back into God's country."

As for Tallahassee itself, it was exactly what I had hoped to find it: a
typical Southern town; not a camp in the woods, nor an old city
metamorphosed into a fashionable winter resort; a place untainted by
"Northern enterprise," whose inhabitants were unmistakably at home, and
whose houses, many of them, at least, had no appearance of being for
sale. It is compactly built on a hill,--the state capitol crowning the
top,--down the pretty steep sides of which run roads into the open
country all about. The roads, too, are not so sandy but that it is
comparatively comfortable to walk in them--a blessing which the
pedestrian sorely misses in the towns of lower Florida: at St.
Augustine, for example, where, as soon as one leaves the streets of the
city itself, walking and carriage-riding alike become burdensome and,
for any considerable distance, all but impossible. Here at Tallahassee,
it was plain, I should not be kept indoors for want of invitations from
without.

I arrived, as I have said, rather late in the afternoon; so late that I
did nothing more than ramble a little about the city, noting by the way
the advent of the chimney swifts, which I had not found elsewhere, and
returning to my lodgings with a handful of "banana-shrub"
blossoms,--smelling wonderfully like their name,--which a good woman had
insisted upon giving me when I stopped beside the fence to ask her the
name of the bush. It was my first, but by no means my last, experience
of the floral generosity of Tallahassee people.

The next morning I woke betimes, and to my astonishm