At another time I fell in with an oldish colored man, who, like myself, had taken to the woods for a quiet Sunday stroll. He was from Mississippi, he told me.  Oh, yes, he remembered the war; he was a slave, twenty-one years old, when it broke out.  To his mind, the present generation of “niggers” were a pretty poor lot, for all their “edication.”  He had seen them crowding folks off the sidewalk, and puffing smoke in their faces.  All of which was nothing new; I had found that story more or less common among negroes of his age.  He didn’t believe much in “edication;” but when I asked if he thought the blacks were better off in slavery times, he answered quickly, “I’d rather be a free man, I had.”  He wasn’t married; he had plenty to do to take care of himself.  We separated, he going one way and I the other; but he turned to ask, with much seriousness (the reader must remember that this was only three months after a national election), “Do you think they’ll get free trade?” “Truly,” said I to myself, “’the world is too much with us.’  Even in the flat-woods there is no escaping the tariff question.”  But I answered, in what was meant to be a reassuring tone, “Not yet awhile.  Some time.”  “I hope not,” he said,—­as if liberty to buy and sell would be a dreadful blow to a man living in a shanty in a Florida pine barren!  He was taking the matter rather too much to heart, perhaps; but surely it was encouraging to see such a man interested in broad economical questions, and I realized as never before the truth of what the newspapers so continually tell us, that political campaigns are educational.

BESIDE THE MARSH.

I am sitting upon the upland bank of a narrow winding creek.  Before me is a sea of grass, brown and green of many shades.  To the north the marsh is bounded by live-oak woods,—­a line with numberless indentations,—­beyond which runs the Matanzas River, as I know by the passing and repassing of sails behind the trees.  Eastward are sand-hills, dazzling white in the sun, with a ragged green fringe along their tops.  Then comes a stretch of the open sea, and then, more to the south, St. Anastasia Island, with its tall black-and-white lighthouse and the cluster of lower buildings at its base.  Small sailboats, and now and then a tiny steamer, pass up and down the river to and from St. Augustine.

A delicious south wind is blowing (it is the 15th of February), and I sit in the shade of a cedar-tree and enjoy the air and the scene.  A contrast, this, to the frozen world I was living in, less than a week ago.