92 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 
feminine ministrations. What they were 
there for I never made out. They fished, 
I think, but whether by way of amusement 
or as a serious occupation I did not learn. 
Perhaps, like the Indians of old, they had 
come to the river for the oyster season. 
They might have done worse. ‘They never 
paid the slightest attention to me, nor once 
gave me any decent excuse for engaging 
them in talk. The best thing I remember 
about them was a tableau caught in passing. 
A “norther ” had descended upon us unex- 
pectedly (Florida is not a whit behind the 
rest of the world in sudden changes of tem- 
perature), and while hastening homeward, 
toward nightfall, hugging myself to keep 
warm, I saw, in the woods, this group of 
campers disposed about a lively blaze. 
Let us be thankful, say I, that memory 
is so little the servant of the will. Chance 
impressions of this kind, unforeseen, invol- 
untary, and inexplicable, make one of the 
chief delights of traveling, or rather of hav- 
ing traveled. In the present case, indeed, 
the permanence of the impression is perhaps 
not altogether beyond the reach of a plau- 
sible conjecture. We have not always lived 
