WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 209 



winter resort ; a place untainted by " North- 

 ern enterprise," whose inhabitants were un- 

 mistakably at home, and whose houses, many 

 of them, at least, had no appearance of being 

 for sale. It is compactly built on a hill, 

 the state capitol crowning the top, down 

 the pretty steep sides of which run roads 

 into the open country all about. The roads, 

 too, are not so sandy but that it is compar- 

 atively comfortable to walk in them a 

 blessing which the pedestrian sorely misses 

 in the towns of lower Florida : at St. Au- 

 gustine, for example, where, as soon as one 

 leaves the streets of the city itself, walking 

 and carriage-riding alike become burden- 

 some and, for any considerable distance, all 

 but impossible. Here at Tallahassee, it was 

 plain, I should not be kept indoors for want 

 of invitations from without. 



I arrived, as I have said, rather late in 

 the afternoon ; so late that I did nothing 

 more than ramble a little about the city, 

 noting by the way the advent of the chim- 

 ney swifts, which I had not found elsewhere, 

 and returning to my lodgings with a hand- 

 ful of " banana-shrub " blossoms, smelling 

 wonderfully like their name, which a good 



