Our captain suggests that there are some fruit-growers or small farmers in the neighbourhood who would make us welcome and put us up comfortably for a few days; but although we know that hospitality is boundless in these regions, we do not feel disposed to take advantage of it. Some of our fellow-passengers go ashore, intending to camp out and make their way across to the Indian river settlement. We spend a delightful three days and nights upon the river, and return to Jacksonville. It is late in the evening when we arrive; we sleep once more at our delightful hotel, and take the early morning train for New Orleans, where we hope to arrive in about two days. CHAPTER XVI. Retrospective.--A critical conductor.--Montgomery.--Train wreckers at work.--Weird scenes in the moonlight.--Silent watchers.--“Wild Cat” train to New Orleans. In the light of the early morning we bid adieu to Florida, its fruits, its flowers, its sunshine and its people. We have found our own country-people largely represented in all parts of the state, and everywhere they are doing well, and look healthy, happy, bright and contented; and on all sides we see evidence of their thrift, industry, and general prosperity. We inquire to whom belongs some lovely extensive orange groves, or some picturesque luxurious dwelling, and we are told to “some English settlers,” who perhaps began with a shanty in the wilderness, and have transformed it into an earthly paradise of peace and plenty. Then a thriving farm, with its abundant cattle, its corn or cotton-fields, and peach or pine orchards stretching away till they are lost in the distance; the farmer is a man from the “old country”--in fact, wherever the Anglo-Saxon spirit stirs, prosperity follows: “When he sets his hand to the plough he doeth it with all his might.” There are very few Irish in Florida, in fact so few that when the familiar accent greets our ears it sounds strange to us in these latitudes, and we turn round to look at the speaker. Their scanty numbers is somewhat surprising, as nowhere could the tide of immigration set in with such promise of success; indeed here is a veritable “Tom Tiddler’s ground,” it needs but the shovel and pickaxe to turn over the soil, when all who will may “pick up the gold and silver.” The foreign element is altogether rather conspicuous from its absence, for there is but a poor sprinkling of German settlers, and the Latin races are scarcely represented at all; even the Spaniards who once were rulers in the land have left but here and there a solitary specimen of their races, and they are not often to be found in the great army of workers. A little fruit, a little corn--such as can be obtained by little labour--contents them; they have no ambition, either for the advancement of themselves, or of their children who follow in their footsteps, and live as their parents lived; if they can sit and smoke and dream under their own fig-tree their cup of happiness is full.