"Avocadoes," she answered, interest in the task of farm guide
making her forget her momentary bewilderment at his scraps of
local knowledge. "They're one of our best crops. Sometimes a
single avocado will sell in open market here for as much as
forty cents. There's money in them, nearly always. Good
money. And the spoiled ones are great for the pigs. Then the
Northern market for them--"
"Avocadoes?" he repeated curiously. "There! Now you see how
much I know about Florida. From this distance, their fruits
look to me exactly like alligator pears or--"
Again, her laugh interrupted him.
"If only you'd happened to look in one or two more government
reports at the library," she teased, "you'd
know that an avocado and an alligator pear are the same
thing."
"Anyhow," he boasted, picking up a gold-red fruit at the edge
of a smaller grove they were passing, "anyhow, I know what
this is, without being told. I've seen them a hundred times
in the New York markets. This is a tangerine."
"In that statement," she made judicial reply, "you've made
only two mistakes. You're improving. In the first place,
that isn't a tangerine, though it looks like one--or would if
it were half as large. That's a king orange. In the second
place, you've hardly ever seen them in any New York market.
They don't transport as well as some other varieties. And
very few of them go North. Northerners don't know them. And
they miss a lot. For the king is the most delicious orange in
the world. And it's the trickiest and hardest for us to
raise. See, the skin comes off it as easily as off of a
tangerine, and it breaks apart in the same way. The rust mite
has gotten at this one. See that russet patch on one side of
it? You'll often see it on oranges that go North. Sometimes
they're russet all over. That means the rust mite has dried
the oil in the skin and made the skin thinner and more
brittle. It doesn't seem to injure the taste. But it--"
"There's a grand tree over toward the road," he said, his
attention wandering. "It must be nearly a century old. It
has the most magnificent sweep of foliage I've seen since I
left the North. What is it?"
"That?" she queried. "Oh, that's another of Milo's prides.
It's an Egyptian fig. 'Ficus Something or
other.' Isn't it beautiful? But it isn't a century old. It
isn't more than fifteen years old. It grows tremendously
fast. Milo has been trying to interest the authorities in
Miami in planting lines of them for shade trees and having
them in the city parks. There's nothing more beautiful. And
nothing, except the Australian pine, grows faster.... There's
another of Milo's delights," she continued, pointing to the
left. "It's ever so old. The natives around here call it 'The
Ghost Tree.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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