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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