table, we were ignominiously consigned to a den of a lean-to opening
upon the piazza. A "terribly-strange bed" indeed was the old
four-poster, which swayed and shrieked at the slightest touch, and
myriad the enemies which there lay in wait for our blood. We were not
murdered, however, nor did our unseen foes--as had once been predicted
by a Cracker friend--_quite_ "eat us plum up, bodaciously alive." In
the early morning we fled, though not until we had seen how beautiful a
home the old plantation once had been. These were not Crackers among
whom we had passed the night, but the "native and best." Not a fair
specimen of this class, surely, but such as here and there, in the
remoter corners of the South, are breeding such troubles as may well
become a grave problem to the statesman--the legitimate outgrowth of
the old régime. War-orphaned, untutored, unrestrained, contemning
legitimate authority, spending the intervals of jail-life in wild
revels and wilder crimes,--such were the men in whose ruined home we
had passed the night.

There was yet one more morning among the gorgeous-foliaged
"scrub-hills," one more gypsy meal by a lakeside, one more genial
welcome to a hospitable Cracker board, and we were at home again in the
wide sea of pines which stretches to the St. John's. In the ten days of
our journey we had seen, within a tract of land some thirty miles long
by forty in breadth, more than fifty isolated lakes and three
prairie-chains; had visited four enterprising Northern colonies and
numerous thrifty Southern farms; had found an air clear and
invigorating as that of Switzerland, soft and balmy as in the tropics,
while the gorgeous colorings of tree and flower, of water and sky, were
like a dream of the Orient.

"But there!" said the Small Boy, stopping suddenly with a