The orange-trees yielded other things beside shadow, though perhaps nothing better than that.  They were resplendent with fruit, and on my earlier visits were also in bloom.  One did not need to climb the hill to learn the fact.  For an out-of-door sweetness it would be hard, I think, to improve upon the scent of orange blossoms.  As for the oranges themselves, they seemed to be in little demand, large and handsome as they were.  Southern people in general, I fancy, look upon wild fruit of this kind as not exactly edible.  I remember asking two colored men in Tallahassee whether the oranges still hanging conspicuously from a tree just over the wall (a sight not so very common in that part of the State) were sweet or sour.  I have forgotten just what they said, but I remember how they looked.  I meant the inquiry as a mild bit of humor, but to them it was a thousandfold better than that:  it was wit ineffable.  What Shakespeare said about the prosperity of a jest was never more strikingly exemplified.  In New Smyrna, with orange groves on every hand, the wild fruit went begging with natives and tourists alike; so that I feel a little hesitancy about confessing my own relish for it, lest I should be accused of affectation.  Not that I devoured wild oranges by the dozen, or in place of sweet ones; one sour orange goes a good way, as the common saying is; but I ate them, nevertheless, or rather drank them, and found them, in a thirsty hour, decidedly refreshing.

The unusual coldness of the past season (Florida winters, from what I heard about them, must have fallen of late into a queer habit of being regularly exceptional) had made it difficult to buy sweet oranges that were not dry and “punky"[1] toward the stem; but the hardier wild fruit had weathered the frost, and was so juicy that, as I say, you did not so much eat one as drink it.  As for the taste, it was a wholesome bitter-sour, as if a lemon had been flavored with quinine; not quite so sour as a lemon, perhaps, nor quite so bitter as Peruvian bark, but, as it were, an agreeable compromise between the two.  When I drank one, I not only quenched my thirst, but felt that I had taken an infallible prophylactic against the malarial fever.  Better still, I had surprised myself.  For one who had felt a lifelong distaste, unsocial and almost unmanly, for the bitter drinks which humanity in general esteems so essential to its health and comfort, I was developing new and unexpected capabilities; than which few things can be more encouraging as years increase upon a man’s head, and the world seems to be closing in about him.

[Footnote 1:  I have heard this useful word all my life, and now am surprised to find it wanting in the dictionaries.]