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 warming his hands over a 
fire that he had built for that purpose in 
