A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK.




IN THE FLAT-WOODS.


In approaching Jacksonville by rail, the traveler rides hour after
hour through seemingly endless pine barrens, otherwise known as low
pine-woods and flat-woods, till he wearies of the sight. It would be
hard, he thinks, to imagine a region more unwholesome looking and
uninteresting, more poverty-stricken and God-forsaken, in its entire
aspect. Surely, men who would risk life in behalf of such a country
deserved to win their cause.

Monotonous as the flat-woods were, however, and malarious as they
looked,--arid wastes and stretches of stagnant water flying past the car
window in perpetual alternation, I was impatient to get into them. They
were a world the like of which I had never seen; and wherever I went in
eastern Florida, I made it one of my earliest concerns to seek them out.

My first impression was one of disappointment, or perhaps I should
rather say, of bewilderment. In fact, I returned from my first visit to
the flat-woods under the delusion that I had not been into them at all.
This was at St. Augustine, whither I had gone after a night only in