G(j IN FLORIDA. 



John's being one of tlie few of the North American 

 rivers which seem to run the wrong way, that is, from 

 the south to the north. In our short stay in Jack- 

 sonville we had learned that alligator- tooth jewelry 

 is occasionally made of celluloid ; that one of the 

 best drinks in the world of bar-keeping is a punch 

 compounded from the native sour orange ; that 

 Florida stories are always reliable, even when they 

 assert that mosquitoes are so abundant that hogs 

 make meals of them, or inform us that the favorite 

 game fish of Florida, the tarpon, jumps six feet out 

 of v/ater when he is hooked, or that sharks will seize 

 a man if they have to leap as high as the deck of the 

 yacht to do so. In leaving Jacksonville, we supposed 

 we were leaving all this behind us, not knowing that 

 Florida is full of quaint jewelry made, as the jewelry 

 of no other part of the world, out of fish scales, sau- 

 rian teeth, sea beans, shells, orange tree woods, and 

 sharks' molars ; that everywhere there are wonder- 

 ful stories which only differ from one another in 

 size ; that palmetto hats were to be bought in every 

 village store, and that sour oranges hang from innu- 

 merable trees, valueless for traffic, and only begging 

 to be made into nectar fit for gods. 



By the time the Doctor had made these i^hilo- 

 sophical reflections. Heartsease was tearing along 

 before a favoring breeze past Mandarin, past the 

 Magnolia Hotel and Green Cove Spring; past Tocoi, 

 the terminus of the St. Augustine liailroad, till she 

 made anchorage by nightfall off Pilatka. On the 

 way we had put up many ducks, had seen the cows 



