Easter for its work, it felt no hurry here. It was so with most other fruits and flowers, especially with the nondescript fruit called a loquat in Bermuda, and in St. Augustine a Japanese plum, which began with no perceptible flower, and slowly yellowed and mellowed to the hand of predatory boyhood, though that might have had it for the asking in any dooryard. In the first days of April the mulberries were black enough to be eaten by the black boys. We made no account of roses and violets; but the poinsettia seemed to merit attention by keeping its fire-red spikes on till they dropped at the coming of spring, and left the bougainvillea to take up the tale. That famous orange orchard which we must not leave behind yet, is admirable for the avenues first of palms, and then of live-oaks which form its approach; the oaks stretch their writhing limbs across the driveway, and put a still weirder disposition on from their hearsing with long plumes of Spanish moss, in perhaps the least endearing appeal of nature to human nature. Half an acre from the stooping trunks the branches reach far out as in some strife of “dragons of the prime,” hairy with the hideous gray of the parasite, which waves funerally in the air. It is said to be finally the death of the tree, but there is here and there one which escapes its throttling grip, and especially we knew one which in a neglected garden spread itself abroad over half an acre of ground. Always it was a pleasure to drive by that vast oak, as it was a pleasure to drive under the oaks which border the long Avenue San Marco on the way to the road Round the Horn. Last year it seemed to have been ravaged by some sort of insect, but it was putting out its gray-green leaves anew, with the water-oak in young verdure bulking freshly and refreshingly beside it.