places. Paddling up river one day, ten miles from any habitation, along a stretch of profuse tropical forest, I heard the cluck of axle-boxes and a voice said “whoa!” Landing I found that the wilderness was but a sham, a thin curtain of verdure, and behind it was a stretch of fertile land covered by grapefruit trees in orderly procession, twenty-four feet apart each way, twelve hundred of them. This man must cart his fruit through ten miles of sandy barrens to the train. He might have set his trees along the railroad so far as cost of land was concerned, but they would not have grown there. Once a week there comes into Fort Pierce a team of eight runt oxen, bred of Florida range cattle stock, drawing a creaking wain laden down with orange and grapefruit boxes. Thirty miles across the barrens these have come, from groves out at Fort Drum, and they will take a load of groceries and provisions back. It takes six days to make the round trip and you may hear the team long before you see it. The man who drives these oxen carries a whipstock as tall as himself with a lash twice its length, long enough to reach the leading off ox from a position on the nigh side of the cart. On the end of this lash is a snapper which gives off a noise like that of a pistol. Hence the Florida woodsman is called a “cracker,” a name which has come to be applied indiscriminately to all natives, whether drivers of oxen or not. Thus do we carelessly corrupt language. The cracker is the man who cracks his whip. Wherever the woodsman drives oxen you will hear it. You find these pretty groves thus scattered in the most picturesque spots and just to wander in them is a delight. The fruit itself I suspect to be an evolution from the shaddock, which is a huge, coarse thing growing on what looks like an orange tree. Just as sometimes out of a rough-natured human family is born some youngster of finer fiber who is an artist or poet instead of clodhopper and we can none of us tell why or how, so no doubt the grapefruit was born from some worthy shaddock tree and astonished and perhaps dismayed its parents. All are great globes of pale gold and surprise one with their size and profusion. How does this close-fibered, tough-wooded tree find in sun and soil the material to produce such fruit? Here is one ten years old that holds by actual measurement twenty boxes, almost a ton, of fruit on a tree that is about fifteen feet high and six inches in diameter at the butt. It is as if a thumbling pear tree in a Northern garden should suddenly take to producing pumpkins and bring forth twelve hundred of them. On the Indian River it is the custom to let the [Illustration: “Thirty miles across the barrens these have come, from groves out at Fort Drum”]