Let us be thankful, say I, that memory is so little the servant of the will.  Chance impressions of this kind, unforeseen, involuntary, and inexplicable, make one of the chief delights of traveling, or rather of having traveled.  In the present case, indeed, the permanence of the impression is perhaps not altogether beyond the reach of a plausible conjecture.  We have not always lived in houses; and if we love the sight of a fire out-of-doors,—­a camp-fire, that is to say,—­as we all do, so that the, burning of a brush-heap in a neighbor’s yard will draw us to the window, the feeling is but part of an ancestral inheritance.  We have come by it honestly, as the phrase is.  And so I need not scruple to set down another reminiscence of the same kind,—­an early morning street scene, of no importance in itself, in the village of New Smyrna.  It may have been on the morning next after the “norther” just mentioned.  I cannot say.  We had two or three such touches of winter in early March; none of them at all distressing, be it understood, to persons in ordinary health.  One night water froze,—­“as thick as a silver dollar,”—­and orange growers were alarmed for the next season’s crop, the trees being just ready to blossom.  Some men kept fires burning in their orchards overnight; a pretty spectacle, I should think, especially where the fruit was still ungathered.  On one of these frosty mornings, then, I saw a solitary horseman, not “wending his way,” but warming his hands over a fire that he had built for that purpose in the village street.  One might live and die in a New England village without seeing such a sight.  A Yankee would have betaken himself to the corner grocery.  But here, though that “adjunct of civilization” was directly across the way, most likely it had never had a stove in it.  The sun would give warmth enough in an hour,—­by nine o’clock one would probably be glad of a sunshade; but the man was chilly after his ride; it was still a bit early to go about the business that had brought him into town:  what more natural than to hitch his horse, get together a few sticks, and kindle a blaze?  What an insane idea it would have seemed to him that a passing stranger might remember him and his fire three months afterward, and think them worth talking about in print!  But then, as was long ago said, it is the fate of some men to have greatness thrust upon them.

This main street of the village, by the way, with its hotels and shops, was no other than my river road itself, in its more civilized estate, as I now remember with a sense of surprise.  In my mind the two had never any connection.  It was in this thoroughfare that one saw now and then a group of cavaliers strolling about under broad-brimmed hats, with big spurs at their heels, accosting passers-by with hearty familiarity, first names and hand-shakes, while their horses stood hitched to the branches of roadside trees,—­a typical Southern picture.  Here, on a Sunday afternoon,