IN FLORIDA 3 
warmer parts of the state. The live oaks and some other trees 
are draped with wonderful festoons of long moss, the strange and 
startling cabbage palmettos are in evidence everywhere, wild 
coffee and other handsome shining leaved shrubs carpet the 
ground, and an orgy of vines and creepers sprawl and clamber 
over all. The trees are veritable air gardens, being loaded to the 
breaking point with epiphytic orchids, Tillandsias, Peperomias, 
Guzmannias, Catopsis and a variety of beautiful ferns. 
I wish it were in my power to persuade my readers who come 
into possession of such land to leave this glorious vegetation 
just as nature has created it. The small remnant of this un- 
touched beauty is fast disappearing before the settler’s fire and 
ax and especially before the real estate man. Mankind every- 
where has an insane desire to waste and destroy the good and 
beautiful things that nature has lavished upon him. 
Several years ago a man from the North spent a winter near 
my home and was a frequent visitor in my hammock. He 
claimed to be a lover of nature but he wrote atrocious doggerel 
poetry, and what was worse, he insisted on inflicting it on me. 
One day he dragged me to a seat in the hammock and read me one 
-of these effusions containing some fifty or sixty stanzas and then 
looking around he said: ‘‘Do you know what I would do with 
this timber if I had it?” and when I gave it up he said: “If this 
was mine I would take my ax and chop out all the underbrush and 
all the crooked and little trees, and I’d clean out all those gnarly 
oaks that is layin’ round and I’d pull off that long moss an’ all 
that rubbish that’s growin’ on them trees and then it would look 
as tho’ somebody had been here and done something for it.’’ 
Sure enough, that is just what the average person seems to be 
crazy to do, he wants to clean up, to improve, to let people know 
that he has been there and with his wisdom has fixed things and 
made them “look purty.” 
It seems to be an instinct among humans to want to mutilate, 
cut down and destroy trees. Sir James Brooke tells how the 
lazy natives of Borneo cut down and burn up new tracts of 
beautiful virgin forest with an outlay of an immense amount of 
labor, in preference to working the land they already have cleared, 
though of course the new land is full of roots and stumps. 
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