ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 93 



in houses ; and if we love the sight of a fire 

 out-of-doors, a camp-fire, that is to say, 

 as we all do, so that the burning of a 

 brush-heap in a neighbor's yard will draw 

 us to the window, the feeling is but part of 

 an ancestral inheritance. We have come 

 by it honestly, as the phrase is. And so I 

 need not scruple to set down another remi- 

 niscence of the same kind, an early morn- 

 ing street scene, of no importance in itself, 

 in the village of New Smyrna. It may 

 have been on the morning next after the 

 " norther " just mentioned. I cannot say. 

 We had two or three such touches of winter 

 in early March ; none of them at all distress- 

 ing, be it understood, to persons in ordinary 

 health. One night water froze, "as thick 

 as a silver dollar," - and orange growers 

 were alarmed for the next season's crop, the 

 trees being just ready to blossom. Some 

 men kept fires burning in their orchards 

 overnight ; a pretty spectacle, I should think, 

 especially where the fruit was still ungath- 

 ered. On one of these frosty mornings, 

 then, I saw a solitary horseman, not " wend- 

 ing his way," but wanning his hands over a 

 fire that he had built for that purpose in 



