the head of steamboat navigation on the St. John's River, which here
expands into a lake--Lake Monroe--some five miles in width, with Sanford
on one side, and Enterprise on the other; or, as a waggish traveler once
expressed it, with Enterprise on the north, and Sanford and enterprise
on the south.

Walking naturalists and lovers of things natural have their own point of
view, individual, unconventional, whimsical, if you please,--very
different, at all events, from that of clearer-witted and more
serious-minded men; and the inhabitants of Sanford will doubtless take
it as a compliment, and be amused rather than annoyed, when I confess
that I found their city a discouragement, a widespread desolation of
houses and shops. If there is a pleasant country road leading out of it
in any direction, I was unlucky enough to miss it. My melancholy
condition was hit off before my eyes in a parable, as it were, by a
crowd of young fellows, black and white, whom I found one afternoon in a
sand-lot just outside the city, engaged in what was intended for a game
of baseball. They were doing their best,--certainly they made noise
enough; but circumstances were against them. When the ball came to the
ground, from no matter what height or with what impetus, it fell dead in
the sand; if it had been made of solid rubber, it could not have
rebounded. "Base-running" was little better than base-walking. "Sliding"
was safe, but, by the same token, impossible. Worse yet, at every "foul
strike" or "wild throw" the ball was lost, and the barefooted fielders
had to pick their way painfully about in the outlying saw-palmetto scrub
till they found it. I had never seen our "national game" played under
conditions so untoward. None but true patriots would have the heart to
try it, I thought, and I meditated writing to Washington, where the
quadrennial purification of the civil service was just then in
progress,--under a new broom,--to secure, if possible, a few bits of