Varieties of the Foreign and Native Species. 



179 



remembered that several other freight boats divide this traffic with the 

 Kingston steamers. 



When we consider what a delicate and perishable fruit this is, it can be 

 understood that gathering and packing it properly is no bagatelle. Some- 

 times you will find the fruit grower's family in the field, from the matron 

 down to the little ones that cannot reach the highest berries. But the home 

 force is wholly insufficient, and any one who will pick man, woman or child 

 is employed. Therefore, drifting through the river towns during June and 

 July, are found specimens almost as picturesque, if not so highly colored, 

 as those we saw at Norfolk, poor whites from the back country and 

 mountains ; people from the cities on a humble " lark," who cannot afford 

 to rusticate at a hotel ; semi-tramps, who have not attained to the final 

 stage of aristocratic idleness, wherein the offer of work is an insult which 

 they resent by burning a barn. Rude shanties, with bunks, are fitted up to 

 give all the shelter they require. Here they lead a gypsy life, quite as 

 much to their taste as camping in the Adirondacks, cooking and smoking 

 through the June twilight, and as oblivious of the exquisite scenery about 



Picking Raspberries on a Hill-side. 



them as the onion-eating peasants of Italy ; but when picking the fruit on 

 a sunny slope, and half hidden by the raspberry bushes, Nature blends 

 them with the scene so deftly that even they become picturesque. 



