While I am about owning this unavailing regret, I may as well remember how I one day bought a wagon-load of fat pine from a thin little old woman, who proved, on the testimony of our colored maid, a widow trying to work the bit of farm her husband’s death had left her, and whom I ought to have bought a load of fat pine from every day, but I did not think to order even another load, and so never saw her again. This also lies heavy on my soul, but I thank Heaven we bought all the tumblers of delicious guava jelly which a little neighbor girl offered us; and since we did this I wish she had seemed needier than she probably was. Not many people came to us with things to sell, but we soon began getting boxes of delicious strawberries from the farm-wife whom once we found working in her own field, and we never ceased buying them as long as they lasted. It was a quaint place, of wooden Gothic, holding its own against age, and charming the air with an effect of personal history. She led us over it, and invited us to tell any one who asked that it was to let furnished, as I now tell the reader. A lady not otherwise of our acquaintance accompanied us on her own incentive, as by mere force of habit, and said she always liked to visit that house, it was so picturesque. Very little of the country life showed itself about the town, and when it did it was mostly colored; there was one white orange-farmer who came at first with his fruit, and then, on our question of the sweetness of his tangerines, promptly ceased to come. But there is a famous orange grove northward of the city where the tangerines are better, and you may be shown on a ladder plucking them from the tree, if you are of a mind to be so photographed. It is perhaps a little too conscious, but the orchard is not the less sincere for that, and you may see there the preparation which the orange-growers of northern Florida have provided against frost ever since the Great Freeze: pots and pans of combustibles, to make a heavy smudge and blanket the fruit against the inclemency of the skies. When the spring began to thicken in leaf and blossom upon our vernal world, the perfume of the orange flowers struck through the air a quarter of a mile off and involved us in its dense sweetness as we drove by on our often way “Round the Horn.” As is well known, the orange-trees are always flowering and fruiting together, but it may not be so well known that in St. Augustine they have infected the peach-trees with their habit. When we arrived the first week of January these were already trying the temperature with a bud here and there, and when we left in the second week of April, they were still tentatively blowing, as the New England country folks say, while their earlier ventures were rewarded with half-grown peaches. There was never that passionate flush of bloom which makes the peach-tree a thing of unspeakable beauty at the North; with the whole season from Christmas to