In that respect he was like another boy of about his own age, who lived in the cabin directly before us, but whom I did not see till I had been several times over the road.  Then he happened to be at work near the edge of the field, and I beckoned him to me.  He, too, was serious and manly in his bearing, and showed no disposition to go back to his hoe till I broke off the interview,—­as if it were a point of good manners with him to await my pleasure.  Yes, the plantation was a good one and easily cultivated, he said, in response to some remark of my own.  There were five in the family, and they all worked.  “We are all big enough to eat,” he added, quite simply.  He had never been North, but had lately declined the offer of a gentleman who wished to take him there,—­him and “another fellow.”  He once went to Jacksonville, but couldn’t stay.  “You can get along without your father pretty well, but it’s another thing to do without your mother.”  He never meant to leave home again as long as his mother lived; which was likely to be for some years, I thought, if she were still able to do her part in the cotton-field.  As a general thing, the colored tenants of the cabins made out pretty well, he believed, unless something happened to the crops.  As for the old servants of the H. family, they didn’t have to work,—­they were provided for; Captain H.’s father “left it so in his testimonial.”  I spoke of the purple martins which were flying back and forth over the field with many cheerful noises, and of the calabashes that hung from a tall pole in one corner of the cabin yard, for their accommodation.  On my way South, I told him, I had noticed these dangling long-necked squashes everywhere, and had wondered what they were for.  I had found out since that they were the colored man’s martin-boxes, and was glad to see the people so fond of the birds.  “Yes,” he said, “there’s no danger of hawks carrying off the chickens as long as the martins are round.”

Twice afterward, as I went up the road, I found him ploughing between the cotton rows; but he was too far away to be accosted without shouting, and I did not feel justified in interrupting him at his work.  Back and forth he went through the long furrow after the patient ox, the hens and chickens following.  No doubt they thought the work was all for their benefit.  Farther away, a man and two women were hoeing.  The family deserved to prosper, I said to myself, as I lay under a big magnolia-tree (just beginning to open its large white flowers) and idly enjoyed the scene.  And it was just here, by the bye, that I solved an interesting etymological puzzle, to wit, the origin and precise meaning of the word “baygall,”—­a word which the visitor often hears upon the lips of Florida people.  An old hunter in Smyrna, when I questioned him about it, told me that it meant a swampy piece of wood, and took its origin, he had always supposed, from the fact that bay-trees and gall-bushes commonly grew in such places.  A Tallahassee gentleman agreed with this explanation, and promised to bring home some gall-berries the next time he came across any, that I might see what they were; but the berries were never forthcoming, and I was none the wiser, till, on one of my last trips up the St. Augustine road, as I stood under the large magnolia just mentioned, a colored man came along, hat in hand, and a bag of grain balanced on his head.