It had been long years since we had seen the relative who was living there, and childish memories did not tell us that he was the most visionary and unpractical of men. We could not trust our own judgment in such a topsy-turvy country as Florida, where the conditions were all so new to us; so it is no wonder that we took his word for a number of wild statements and decided to buy and settle there. We bought a tract of land from a friend and client of his, who offered us the use of a small homestead shanty near our land, to live in while we were building. This shanty looked decidedly uninviting, but the alternative was a room in the house of our relative, a full mile away from our place; so we decided in favor of the shanty. It was built of rived boards, slabs split out of the native logs. It had one door and no windows. In fact, it needed none; for the boards lapped roughly on each other, leaving cracks like those in window-blinds, so we could put our fingers through the walls almost anywhere. Besides affording a means of light and ventilation, this was vastly convenient for various flying and creeping things. The floor was of rough ten-inch boards, with inch-wide cracks between them. Julius escorted me over to inspect it, saying,-- "If we try to live in this excuse for a house, we shall be pioneering with a vengeance." After a searching glance around the premises, I answered,-- "The pioneering is all right, if we can just make it clean." "Oh, that's easy enough!" exclaimed Julius, in a relieved tone. "If you think we can stand its other short-comings, I can whitewash the whole thing, and make it so fresh and sweet you won't know it." We sent a message for our freight, which we had left at Jacksonville, and Julius took a team to the nearest town to buy a few necessaries. We had brought no furniture South with us, knowing that what we had in our Northern home would be unsuitable for pioneering. Our freight, therefore, was mostly books and pictures, with a few boxes of clothes, bedding, etc. The shanty was wonderfully improved by a coat or two of whitewash, and after an old tapestry carpet had been put down to cover the cracks in the floor, extending up on the walls to form a dado, it began to look quite livable. The bed and a row of trunks filled one end, there being just room to squeeze in between them. At the foot of the bed was a table, used by turns as kitchen, dining, and library table; there was also a box holding a kerosene stove, with shelves above it for dishes and supplies. We had two wooden chairs, and a bench which we put to various uses. When these things were all in place, and our books arranged on boards which were laid across the rafters overhead, we felt as snug as was Robinson Crusoe in his cave.