178 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 
latures, I believe, —and was even consider- 
ing a proposition to reduce the salary and 
mileage of its members. Under such cir- 
cumstances, it ought not to have been a mat- 
ter of surprise, perhaps, that no flag floated 
from the cupola of the capitol. The people’s 
money should not be wasted. And possibly 
I should never have remarked the omission 
but for a certain curiosity, natural, if not in- 
evitable, on the part of a Northern visitor, as 
to the real feeling of the South toward the 
national government. Day after day I had 
seen a portly gentleman — with an air, or 
with airs, as the spectator might choose to 
express it — going in and out of the State 
House gate, dressed ostentatiously in a suit 
of Confederate gray. He had worn nothing 
else since the war, I was told. But of course 
the State of Florida was not to be judged by 
the freak of one man, and he only amember 
of the “third house.” And even when I 
went into the governor’s office, and saw the 
original “ ordinance of secession” hanging 
in a conspicuous place on the wall, as if it 
were an heirloom to be proud of, I felt no 
stirring of sectional animosity, thorough-bred 
Massachusetts Yankee and _ old-fashioned 
