WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 209 
winter resort ; a place untainted by ‘“ North- 
ern enterprise,’ whose inhabitants were un- 
mistakably at home, and whose houses, many 
of them, at least, had no appearance of being 
for sale. It is compactly built on a hill, — 
the state capitol crowning the top, — down 
the pretty steep sides of which run roads 
into the open country all about. The roads, 
too, are not so sandy but that it is compar- 
atively comfortable to walk in them—a 
blessing which the pedestrian sorely misses 
in the towns of lower Florida: at St. Au- 
gustine, for example, where, as soon as one 
leaves the streets of the city itself, walking 
and carriage-riding alike become burden- 
. some and, for any considerable distance, all 
but impossible. Here at Tallahassee, it was 
plain, I should not be kept indoors for want 
of invitations from without. 
I arrived, as I have said, rather late in 
the afternoon; so late that I did nothing 
more than ramble a little about the city, 
noting by the way the advent of the chim- 
ney swifts, which I had not found elsewhere, 
and returning to my lodgings with a hand- 
ful of “ banana-shrub ” blossoms, — smelling 
wonderfully like their name, — which a good 
