Petals Plucked from Sunny ClimesBrooks, A. M. (Abbie M.)
History
Petals Plucked from Sunny Climes
Brooks, A. M. (Abbie M.)
Cuba -- Description and travel; Florida -- Description and travel; Florida -- History
These crackers have few local attachments; moving twice in a year does
not inconvenience them; indeed, no earthly state of existence can be
imagined freer from care and less fraught with toil than the one they
lead. When settled, they are not fastidious about their habitations, as
the mild climate does not require close quarters; a good shelter will
subserve their purpose. Like birds of the air, they only want a
roosting-place when night overtakes them. Their houses are mostly made
of logs, notched to fit at the corners, the floors being oftentimes of
earth, but usually boards sawed by hand. These tenements are scoured
once a week, when the beds are sunned, and every thing turned out. The
men are not always dressed in "store-clothes," with a corresponding
outfit, but usually country-made cotton home-spun. The genuine cracker
wears a broad-brimmed hat, braided from palmetto, a brown-jean coat and
breeches, a deer-skin vest with the fur left on, and a pair of stout,
useful cow-skin boots, or shoes. He supports a very unkempt mustache and
whiskers, before which a Broadway dandy would shrink with the most
intense disgust. This natural growth obscures a mouth well filled with
teeth, which were nature's gift, and the handiwork of no dentist--from
whence is kept a constant ejecting of tobacco juice. He always has a
body-guard of dogs whenever and wherever you find him, the number
varying according to his condition in life--the poorer the man, the
larger the number of canines. These animals are very thin, whether from
a deficiency in their master's larder, or the constant rambling life
they lead, has not been exactly determined. Around his master's neck is
suspended a flask of shot and powder-horn, while in his hands is a rifle
named "Sure-fire," which he says was never known to flicker, warranted
to bring down any game within a range of two hundred yards, running or
flying. These people, like the patriarchs of old, have large families,
which require about the same attention as puppies or kittens. When night
comes the children curl up in almost any corner to sleep, and at dawn of
day, when the early songsters dash the dew-drops from the grass and
flowers, they are out hunting for berries, or watching the birds
building their nests, that they may know where to find the eggs, in
which enterprise they are experts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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