320 HOME LIFE IN FLORIDA. 



CHAPTER XXI. 



FIRING THE WOODS. 



For many, many years our stately pine woods have been 

 devastated annually by an element which is most truly 

 said to be " a better servant than master." And no one 

 who has once witnessed the fierce Florida fires roaring and 

 rushing through the woods, sweeping every thing before 

 them in their fiery onset, but can realize the full force of 

 this saying. 



All over the State it is the custom to "fire the woods" 

 early in the spring, so that the fine straw and old grass 

 may be burned off, and new grass, the famous wire-grass, 

 grow up, so that, forsooth, the roving stock may find 

 plenty to eat without money and without price, so far as 

 their owners are concerned. 



No matter how much a man may desire to preserve 

 every blade of grass and every leaf that grows on his land 

 so that it may decay and eventually enrich the soil, his 

 neighbor has his cattle to provide for, and so the latter 

 goes out, torch in hand, and sets fire to the grass, and 

 burns it up, every blade of it, deliberately robbing the 

 owner of the land of all the rich humus and fertilizing 

 material that nature had manufactured for that purpose. 



''If," said a noted orange-grower, ''I was ofl^ered two 

 tracts of land, side by side, one where the grass had been 

 burned off* year after year, the other where it had been 

 left to grow and to rot, and the one was oflTered at ten 

 dollars per acre and the other at twenty, I would take the 

 latter on the instant, because the diflference in the quality 

 of the soil would be more than equal to the difference in 

 cost." 



