48 IN LOIVER FLORIDA WILDS 



the latter island for several miles in the vicinity of 

 Cross Key. The Florida East Coast Railway cut 

 a right of way through this for the Key West 

 extension of its line and piled the felled timber 

 along the edges of the clearing. When it was 

 fairly dried out it was set on fire by sparks from 

 the locomotives (so claimed) and this unfor- 

 tunately communicated to the forest. For months 

 the fire slowly ate its way through the peatlike 

 soil and as it crept along its ruinous way the grand 

 old giants of the hammock toppled and fell, a 

 tragedy in every fall. Every vestage of the soil 

 was consumed and to-day the charred ruin glares 

 in the sun as a silent and pathetic protest against 

 useless waste and folly. A few young trees are 

 springing up here and there and thorny vines 

 are beginning to scramble over the melancholy 

 wreck. Nature will in time conceal her wound 

 beneath a green mantle — ^but the fine forest* is 

 forever gone. 



Several years ago there was an almost equally 

 fine hammock on No Name Key but the settler's 

 fire and ax have changed the greater part of it 

 into a desert. In 1907 I became lost in a splendid 

 forest of silver palms on Bahia Honda Key but 



