The Spaniards brought the grapefruit to Florida, and left it behind them. Here it has been ever since, until the last ten or fifteen years neglected and despised, but taking care of itself with cheerful virility. It grew wild, or people planted a few trees about the house for its rapid growth of grateful shade and the picturesque decoration which its huge globes of yellow fruit furnished. These few people considered edible. Now we all know better and the North calls for grapefruit with a demand that this year is only partly satisfied with four million of boxes. Floridians eat the once despised fruit with avidity now and a thrifty grapefruit grove is already recognized as a profitable investment. I say a thrifty grove, for all groves are not thrifty. The tree is lavish to its friends and in congenial surroundings will produce fruit almost beyond belief. I have seen a single limb not larger than my wrist weighed to the ground with ninety-five great yellow globes by actual count. I have seen a whole orchard that had been tended for years with assiduous care calmly dying down from the top and sinking back into the earth from whence it sprang. More than anything else the grapefruit must have the right subsoil under it. If you plant your trees where they may be well drained and where the soil beneath their tap-roots is a good clay, overlaid of course with the all-pervading Florida sand, they will love you for it. Care and fertilizer will do the rest, though even then it must be the right kind of care and of fertilizer. If you plant your trees where there is a “hard-pan bottom” neither love, money nor religion will bring them to good bearing. Why “hard-pan” which seems to be a dense stratum of black sulphuret of iron should be under the surface of one man’s ten-acre lot, while under that of his next-door neighbor lies the beloved red clay, it is difficult to explain. Florida reminds me always of Cape Cod. It seems to be built out of the chips and dust of the making of the near-by continent, dumped irrelevantly. There is no telling why one acre is a desert that one would plough as uselessly as Ulysses ploughed the seashore and the next acre is fat with fertility, but it is so. Hence people plant grapefruit groves not where they will, but where they may, and you discover them in the most delightful out-of-the-way [Illustration: “The tree is lavish to its friends and will produce fruit almost beyond belief”]