for the J.B. Lippincott Company. Upon arriving at Tampa, he wrote to a
friend:

Tampa is the most forlorn collection of little one-story frame
houses imaginable, and as May and I walked behind our landlord,
who was piloting us to Orange Grove Hotel, our hearts fell nearer
and nearer towards the sand through which we dragged. Presently
we turned a corner and were agreeably surprised to find ourselves
in front of a large three-story house with old nooks and corners,
clean and comfortable in appearance and surrounded by orange
trees in full fruit. We have a large room in the second story,
opening upon a generous balcony fifty feet long, into which
stretch the liberal arms of a fine orange tree holding out their
fruitage to our very lips. In front is a sort of open plaza
containing a pretty group of gnarled live-oaks full of moss and
mistletoe.

[Illustration: SIDNEY LANIER
From a photograph owned by H.W. Lanier]

In May he made an excursion of which he wrote:

For a perfect journey God gave us a perfect day. The little
Ocklawaha steamboat _Marion_--a steamboat which is like nothing
in the world so much as a Pensacola gopher with a preposterously
exaggerated back--had started from Palatka some hours before
daylight, having taken on her passengers the night previous; and
by seven o'clock of such a May morning as no words could
describe, unless words were themselves May mornings, we had made
the twenty-five miles up the St. John's to where the Ocklawaha