of the hill, or, more exactly, of the plateau, I stopped in the shade of a china-tree, and looked at the pleasing prospect.  Behind me was a plantation of young pear-trees, and before me, among the hills northward, lay broad, cultivated slopes, dotted here and there with cabins and tall, solitary trees.  On the nearer slope, perhaps a sixteenth of a mile away, a negro was ploughing, with a single ox harnessed in some primitive manner,—­with pieces of wood, for the most part, as well as I could make out through an opera-glass.  The soil offered the least possible hindrance, and both he and the ox seemed to be having a literal “walk-over.”  Beyond him—­a full half-mile away, perhaps—­another man was ploughing with a mule; and in another direction a third was doing likewise, with a woman following in his wake.  A colored boy of seventeen—­I guessed his age at twenty-three—­came up the road in a cart, and I stopped him to inquire about the crops and other matters.  The land in front of me was planted with cotton, he said; and the men ploughing in the distance were getting ready to plant the same.  They hired the land and the cabins of Captain H., paying him so much cotton (not so much an acre, but so much a mule, if I understood him rightly) by way of rent.  We talked a long time about one thing and another.  He had been south as far as the Indian River country, but was glad to be back again in Tallahassee, where he was born.  I asked him about the road, how far it went.  “They tell me it goes smack to St. Augustine,” he replied; “I ain’t tried it.”  It was an unlikely story, it seemed to me, but I was assured afterward that he was right; that the road actually runs across the country from Tallahassee to St. Augustine, a distance of about two hundred miles.  With company of my own choosing, and in cooler weather, I thought I should like to walk its whole length.[1] My young man was in no haste.  With the reins (made of rope, after a fashion much followed in Florida) lying on the forward axle of his cart, he seemed to have put himself entirely at my service.  He had to the full that peculiar urbanity which I began after a while to look upon as characteristic of Tallahassee negroes,—­a gentleness of speech, and a kindly, deferential air, neither forward nor servile, such as sits well on any man, whatever the color of his skin.

[Footnote 1:  But let no enthusiast set out to walk from one city to the other on the strength of what is here written.  After this sketch was first printed—­in The Atlantic Monthly—­a gentleman who ought to know whereof he speaks sent me word that my informants were all of them wrong—­that the road does not run to St. Augustine.  For myself, I assert nothing.  As my colored boy said, “I ain’t tried it.”]