FLORIDA AND THE WEST INDIES 71 



To myself the place came as an agreeable 

 surprise, for instead of the hot, dusty and unsightly 

 counterpart of Clapham Junction in the wilderness, 

 which a waggish friend at home had led me to 

 expect, I found a delightful city with comfortable 

 hotels, shady and picturesque streets and alluring- 

 stores, with the dreamy life of the South relieved 

 by touches of Northern energy. Perchance the 

 luxury of the Windsor Hotel was enhanced by 

 contrast with the inhospitable famine of the Blue 

 Ridge, but it certainly proved a welcome asylum 

 for the long day before the departure of the 

 Southern " express," and a bath, lunch and dinner — 

 the meals well cooked and served by deft, quiet, 

 coloured waiters — did much to restore my self- 

 respect and to efface the unwelcome memory of 

 recent discomfort at Hendersonville. 



Even for a lover of the wild, the first ramble 

 in the streets of a new city is never wanting 

 in interest, and there was that about Jackson- 

 ville which, I confess, attracted me more than 

 ofreater centres of the North. 



On the street cars, with their special benches 

 for coloured folk, I gained my first impression of 

 the Southern attitude towards the emancipated 

 negro within its gates. After the colourless liberty 

 of New York and Washington, these distinctions 

 came with something of a shock, yet there are not 

 a few, if they dared say so, who would gladly see 

 them adopted in the islands of the Caribbean. In 

 Jamaica, I have ridden on an afternoon car from 

 Kingston out to Constant Springs, hemmed in by 

 dusky belles bound for hovels in the hills, and their 

 perfume was not that of myrrh. Those great- 



