Elsewhere there was nothing but the dwarfed vegetation to be seen, till we came to what had been spoken of at the outset as the main feature of the ride around the island—“Old Sandie’s farm.” A rude fence separated this from the surrounding waste land, but the soil was equally stony, and apparently sterile; and it was hard to see how any exertions could make it productive. So everybody in Key West had always thought, and till “Sandie” came the islanders didn’t grow their own vegetables. The carriages drew up at a little hut with two rooms, which was announced as “Sandie’s house,” and “Auntie” (his wife), who came to the door, led us to a little, open “lean-to,” which she called a piazza. Presently there came hurrying up a stalwart negro, with the _physique_ of a prize fighter; body round as a barrel, arms knotted, with muscles that might have belonged to a race-horse’s leg, chest broad and deep, with room inside for the play of an ox’s lungs. So magnificent a physical development I have never seen, before or since. The head was large, but the broad forehead was very low. Above it rose the crisp, grizzled wool, almost perpendicularly, for a hight quite as great as that of the exposed part of the forehead; and the bumps above the ears and at the back of the head were of a corresponding magnitude. The face was unmistakably African, glossy black, with widely-distended nostrils, thick lips and a liquid but gleaming eye. This was Sandie himself, an old man—“now in my sebenty-tree yeah, sah,” he said—yet the strongest man on the island, the richest of the negroes, the best farmer here, and with a history as romantic as that of any Indian whom song and story have combined to make famous.