324 HOME LIFE IN FLORIDA. 



Less fortunate were his parents. Burdened with the 

 helpless little ones, the terrible flames caught them up and 

 wrapped them all — father, mother, and three children — in 

 their fiery arms ; and so all that was left of the six human 

 beings and two horses, that only an hour before had en- 

 tered on that fatal road, full of life and hope, was a mass 

 of charred bones, and one little boy. 



And all this, not by any means a solitary instance, that 

 a drove of cattle might be provided with a good supply of 

 new, fresh grass ! 



Every fence outlying the open forest must, early in Jan- 

 uary, be ''protected" by a line of ten or twelve consecu- 

 tive furrows plowed entirely around it, and all tall grass 

 or weeds, that might serve to carry fire across, carefully 

 raked out. A still better plan is to plow another similar 

 strip ten or fifteen feet, outside the first, and then burn 

 ofi* all the trash and grass between the two ; this makes 

 the safest possible bai-rier ; but still the fire does sometimes 

 cross it, so that even when thus guarded it behooves one 

 to watch closely or mischief may ensue. 



A fire may be met and conquered to all appearance, 

 and yet several days thereafter it not unfrequently happens 

 that, without a breath of warning, a thick, black cloud of 

 smoke is seen, an angry roar of flames heard, and the set- 

 tier rushes out to find his "protected" fence burning furi- 

 ously almost at his door ; and no one can tell how it start- 

 ed, except on the theory that some smoldering log has 

 been fanned into a flame by the breeze and a spark wafted 

 . across the line of furrows right into the dry grass along 

 the fence. 



Another cause of the recurrence of fires deemed extin- 

 guished is the tall pine trees, beneath whose bark the flames 

 creep, creep, creep "out of sight, out of mind," till they 

 burst out at the very top, and then, from a height of 



