d found, as he expected,
traces of the six paths which had once led from this little plaza to the
various fields and the sugar plantation, their course still marked by
the tops of the bitter-sweet orange-trees, which showed themselves
glossily, in regular lines, amid the duller foliage around them. He took
their bearings and cut them out slowly, one by one. Now the low-arched
aisles, eighty feet in length, were clear, with the thick leaves
interlacing overhead, and the daylight shining through at their far
ends, golden against the green. Here, where the north path terminated,
Deal was now working.

He was a man slightly below middle height, broad-shouldered, and
muscular, with the outlines which are called thick-set. He appeared
forty-five, and was not quite thirty-five. Although weather-beaten and
bronzed, there was yet a pinched look in his face, which was peculiar.
He was working in an old field, preparing it for sweet potatoes--those
omnipresent, monotonous vegetables of Florida which will grow anywhere,
and which at last, with their ugly, gray-mottled skins, are regarded
with absolute aversion by the Northern visitor.

The furrows of half a century before were still visible in the field. No
frost had disturbed the winterless earth; no atom had changed its place,
save where the gopher had burrowed beneath, or the snake left its waving
trail above in the sand which constitutes the strange, white, desolate
soil, wherever there is what may be called by comparison solid ground,
in the lake-dotted, sieve-like land. There are many such traces of
former cultivation in Florida: we come suddenly upon old tracks,
furrows, and drains in what we thought primeval forest; rose-bushes run
wild, and distorted old fig-trees meet us in a jungle where we supposed
no white man's foot had ever before penetrated; the ruins of a chimney
gleam whitely through a waste of thorny _chaparral_. It is all natural
enough, if one stops to remember that fifty years before the first
settlement was made in Virginia, and sixty-three before the Mayflower
touched the shores of the New World, there were flourishing Spanish
plantations on this Southern coast--more flourishing, apparently, than
any the indolent peninsula has since known. But one does not stop to
remember it; the belief is imbedded in all our Northern hearts that,
because the narrow, sun-bathed State is far away and wild and empty, it
is also new and virgin, like the lands of the West; whe