Later in the season, on this same shell mound, I might have regaled myself with fresh figs.  Here, at any rate, was a thrifty-looking fig-tree, though its crop, if it bore one, would perhaps not have waited my coming so patiently as the oranges had done.  Here, too, was a red cedar; and to me, who, in my ignorance, had always thought of this tough little evergreen as especially at home on my own bleak and stony hillsides, it seemed an incongruous trio,—­fig-tree, orange-tree, and savin.  In truth, the cedars of Florida were one of my liveliest surprises.  At first I refused to believe that they were red cedars, so strangely exuberant were they, so disdainful of the set, cone-shaped, toy-tree pattern on which I had been used to seeing red cedars built.  And when at last a study of the flora compelled me to admit their identity,[1] I turned about and protested that I had never seen red cedars before.  One, in St. Augustine, near San Marco Avenue, I had the curiosity to measure.  The girth of the trunk at the smallest place was six feet five inches, and the spread of the branches was not less than fifty feet.

[Footnote 1:  I speak as if I had accepted my own study of the manual as conclusive.  I did for the time being, but while writing this paragraph I bethought myself that I might be in error, after all.  I referred the question, therefore, to a friend, a botanist of authority.  “No wonder the red cedars of Florida puzzled you,” he replied.  “No one would suppose at first that they were of the same species as our New England savins.  The habit is entirely different; but botanists have found no characters by which to separate them, and you are safe in considering them as Juniperus Virginiana.”]

The stroller in this road suffered few distractions.  The houses, two or three to the mile, stood well back in the woods, with little or no cleared land about them.  Picnic establishments they seemed to a Northern eye, rather than permanent dwellings.  At one point, in the hammock, a rude camp was occupied by a group of rough-looking men and several small children, who seemed to be getting on as best they could—­none too well, to judge from appearances—­without feminine ministrations.  What they were there for I never made out.  They fished, I think, but whether by way of amusement or as a serious occupation I did not learn.  Perhaps, like the Indians of old, they had come to the river for the oyster season.  They might have done worse.  They never paid the slightest attention to me, nor once gave me any decent excuse for engaging them in talk.  The best thing I remember about them was a tableau caught in passing.  A “norther” had descended upon us unexpectedly (Florida is not a whit behind the rest of the world in sudden changes of temperature), and while hastening homeward, toward nightfall, hugging myself to keep warm, I saw, in the woods, this group of campers disposed about a lively blaze.