r and some strange, whooping of cranes and
chattering of coots, ducks, and divers, cries of pelicans, and now
and then the sound of flapping wings, as if some great bird had been
routed out and had changed his feeding-ground. Around me on the sand
ran and crawled the host of crabs, some pulling curiously at the gauze
of my shelter; and now and then a huge spider crab climbed up the
netting like a squirrel and danced an infernal jig over my head,
skipping about on the very tips of his claws, until I tired of his
frivolity and hit him from underneath, when he scuttled away, and
after half an hour, more or less, was succeeded by another, as if they
found an intoxication in dancing over my head. The gnats sang their
monody, and the midges put in their treble, but the meshes of my
gauze were too fine to let them pass; and after hours of this strange
pandemonium I fell asleep, to be waked in the morning by the sun
streaming over me from the broad Atlantic.

It is worthy to note here, in justice to the old days of the Floridian
society, a society now utterly extinct, and a subject of history, that
the kindliness to the slaves was universal on the St. John's River. At
nightfall they used to gather in their quarters and sing; and they had
a peculiar yodel, which, starting from one plantation, was caught up
by the others, and ran round and off along the river into the
distance and back, going and coming again and again with a peculiar
fascination, like the voice of a happy and careless common life. It
was a kindly and indulgent community, and that it was a slave-holding
society never forced itself on the attention. The lazy social virtues
had, no doubt, their lazy vices, but we never saw them on the surface.
The negro quarters were as merry as the day was long, and the negro
was a more important and better appreciated element of social life
than in the North. The whole valley joined in unreserved malediction
of a planter, one of our neighbors, who had profited by the accidental
burning of the free papers of a black family which had been bought out
of slavery by the father, with money earned as pilot to the steamers
of the United States Army during the Seminole War, to compel him to
purchase himself and his wife and children again, and the thief was
spoken of as the meanest of white men, out of the social pale of
self-respecting folk; cheating a slave being far worse than cheating
one of his own class. The old scoundrel was the re