: Palmetto-Leaves by Stowe Harriet Beecher - Florida Description and travel; Saint Johns River Valley (Fla.) Description and travel; Mandarin (Jacksonville Fla.) Description and travel; Saint Johns River Valley (Fla.) Social life and customs 19th century; Ma

@FreeBooksWed 07 Jun, 2023

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now, being a little later than the jessamine, and coming into its glory when the jessamine is passing away.

The regular employment now of every afternoon is to go out in the mule-cart with old Fly into the woods, flower-hunting.

To an uninstructed eye, the pine-woods in which we ride look like a flat, monotonous scene. The pines rise seventy, eighty, and a hundred feet in the air, so that their tops are far above, and cast no shade. This is a consideration of value, however, for a winter's ride; for one enjoys the calm sunshine. Even in days when high winds are prevailing along the river-front, the depth of these pine-woods is calm, sunny, and still; and one can always have a pleasant walk there. When the hotter months come on, the live-oaks and water-oaks have thick, new foliage, and the black-jacks and hickory and sweet-gum trees throw out their shade to shelter the traveller. Every mile or two, our path is traversed by a brook on its way to the St. John's. The natives here call a brook a "branch;" and a branch is no small circumstance, since all the finest trees and shrubbery grow upon its banks. You can look through the high, open pillars of the pine-trees, and watch the course of a branch half a mile from you by the gorgeous vegetation of the trees which line its shores.

The short palmettoes here are grown to the height of fifteen feet. Their roots look like great scaly serpents, which, after knotting and convoluting a while, suddenly raise their crests high in air, and burst forth into a graceful crest of waving green fans. These waving clumps of fan-like leaves are the first and peculiar feature of the foliage. Along the shore here, clumps of pale pink azaleas grow high up, and fill the air with sweetness. It is for azaleas we are come; and so we tread our way cautiously,--cautiously, because we have heard tales of the moccasin-snake--fearful gnome!--said to infest damp places, and banks of rivers. In all our Floridian rambles, we never yet have got sight of this creature; though we have explored all the moist places, and sedgy, swampy dells, where azaleas and blue iris and white lilies grow. But the tradition that such things are inspires a wholesome care never to set a foot down without looking exactly where it goes. "The branch," we find, is lighted up in many places by the white, showy blossoms of the dogwood, of which, also, we gather great store. We pile in flowers--azalea and dogwood--till our wagon is full, and then proceed with a trowel to take up many nameless beauties.

There is one which grows on a high, slender stalk, resembling in its form a primrose, that has the purest and intensest yellow that we ever saw in a flower. There is a purple variety of the same species, that grows in the same neighborhoods. We have made a bed of these woodland beauties at the roots of our great oak, so that they may finish their growth, and seed, if possible, under our own eye.

But now the sun falls west, and we plod homeward. If you want to see a new and peculiar beauty, watch a golden sunset through a grove draperied with gray moss. The swaying, filmy bands turn golden and rose-colored; and the long, swaying avenues are like a scene in fairyland. We come home, and disembark our treasures. Our house looks like a perfect flower-show. Every available vase and jar is full,--dogwood, azaleas, blue iris, wreaths of yellow jessamine, blue and white violets, and the golden unknown, which we christen primroses. The daily sorting of the vases is no small charge: but there is a hand to that department which never neglects; and so we breathe their air and refresh our eyes with their beauty daily.

Your cold Northern snow-storms hold back our spring. The orange-buds appear, but hang back. They are three weeks later than usual. Our letters tell us frightful stories of thermometers no end of the way below zero. When you have a snow-storm, we have a cold rain: so you must keep bright lookout on your ways up there, or we shall get no orange-blossoms.

We have received several letters containing questions about Florida. It is our intention to devote our next paper to answering these. We are perfectly ready to answer any number of inquiries, so long as we can lump them all together, and answer them through "The Christian Union."

One class of letters, however, we cannot too thankfully remember. Those who have read our papers with so much of sympathy as to send in contributions to our church here have done us great good. We have now a sum contributed with which we hope soon to replace our loss. And now, as the mail is closing, we must close.

What an adornment would this be for one of the gigantic Japanese vases that figure in New-York drawing-rooms! What would such a bouquet sell for?

"FLORIDA FOR INVALIDS."

Little did we suppose when we met our good friend at Magnolia, apparently in the height of spirits, the life of the establishment, and head promoter of all sorts of hilarity, that, under all this delightful cheerfulness, he was contending with such dreary experiences as his article in "The Independent" would lead one to suppose. Really, any one who should know the doctor only from that article might mistake him for a wretched hypochondriac; whereas we saw him, and heard of him by universal repute at Magnolia, as one of the cheeriest and sunniest of the inmates, taking every thing by the smoothest handle, and not only looking on the bright side himself, but making everybody else do the same. Imagine, therefore, our utter astonishment at finding our buoyant doctor summing up his Florida experience in such paragraphs as these:--

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