20 FLORIDA FRUITS ORANGES. 



invalid ; all he sought was a quiet place in a mild climate, 

 that "his days might be prolonged in the land;" so he se- 

 lected his homestead on the St. John's River, in Orange 

 County. He built him a little hut on a small shell-mound, 

 where about fifty wild orange trees were growing, and 

 there, with fish and game at his door, and a small garden 

 patch by his side, he dwelt alone for twenty years. 



Some one came along after he had been there a short 

 time, and initiated him into the mysteries of budding ; and 

 then, more from curiosity than with any thought of profit, 

 he budded his fifty wild trees. 



He " builded better than he knew ;" in a few years these 

 hitherto despised trees brought him all, and more than all 

 the cash he needed. 



When the lonely recluse died no heir came forward to 

 claim his property, so after due time the State stepped in 

 and sold it to the highest bidder. And thus John Eaton's 

 grove became the property of the Hon. W. W. Woodruff, 

 for the sum of three thousand dollars. 



The property would have brought much more if it had 

 not been that the soldier had made so very poor a selection 

 of land that only a few of the hundred and sixty acres 

 are good for any thing, and these are only a few feet above 

 the river, so that in unusually high tides the grove suffers ; 

 besides this, the only building site is so near the river that 

 it is not healthy to live there, and so much overflowed 

 land extends all around it that whoever dwells there must 

 be content without neighbors. 



Yet in spite of these serious drawbacks the little place 

 sold, at JM^' Woodruff's death, for nine thousand dollars, 

 triple the price, you see, that he paid for it. 



There -are, we have said, only fifty trees in this grove, 

 ]but from those fifty trees crops often net from fifteen hun- 

 dred to eighteen hundred dollars in a season. 



