FLORIDA AND THE WEST INDIES 75 



Seen from the railroad, Florida looks a dreamy 

 backwater of swamp and tree fern. Its ideal of 

 movement, where movement is required at all, is 

 the pace set by the tortoise and the alligator, and 

 the locomotive takes these reptiles for its models 

 and crawls deprecatingly to the journey's end. 

 The first moiety was achieved in darkness, and the 

 slowness of our advance went unnoticed. At 

 Lakeland there was a long halt, with some shunt- 

 ing of cars, and I was thrown from side to side of 

 my sleeping berth more than once, while (though I 

 knew it not at the time), the guard was solicitously 

 putting out the belongings that should have gone 

 on with me to Punta Gorda. 



Next morning, little dreaming that every turn 

 of the wheels was bearing me farther from my 

 luggage, I looked sleepily forth on a monotonous 

 landscape of hot, moist desolation relieved by an 

 occasional grove of pineapple or orange, with a 

 few draggled human beings at work on the crops. 

 I congratulated myself on the approaching end of 

 a long and tiresome journey. Pelicans, which I 

 had not seen in the wild state since I was in the 

 Suez Canal ten years earlier, floated lazily over 

 muddy creeks ; clouds of mosquitoes hovered about 

 every ditch ; all Nature seemed only half awake, 

 and of human dwellings there were few signs, 

 though the driver of the locomotive evidently re- 

 garded it as a moral obligation to pull the train 

 up at every pig-pen or hen-house on the off-chance 

 of some passenger emerging from the long grass. 

 Is it possible that this land of sun and sleep can be 

 the theatre of the revolting drama of white slavery, 

 in the course of which black overseers flog hapless 



