[Footnote 1:  He did not say “upon” any more than Northern white boys do.]

Here, however, there could be no thought of such a contingency.  Here were no vagabonds (one inoffensive Yankee specimen excepted), but hard-working people going into the city or out again, each on his own lawful business.  Scarcely one of them, man or woman, but greeted me kindly.  One, a white man on horseback, invited, and even urged me, to mount his horse, and let him walk a piece.  I must be fatigued, he was sure,—­how could I help it?—­and he would as soon walk as not.  Finding me obstinate, he walked his horse at my side, chatting about the country, the trees, and the crops.  He it was who called my particular attention to the abundance of blackberry vines.  “Are the berries sweet?” I asked.  He smacked his lips.  “Sweet as honey, and big as that,” measuring off a liberal portion of his thumb.  I spoke of them half an hour later to a middle-aged colored man.  Yes, he said, the blackberries were plenty enough and sweet enough; but, for his part, he didn’t trouble them a great deal.  The vines (and he pointed at them, fringing the roadside indefinitely) were great places for rattlesnakes.  He liked the berries, but he liked somebody else to pick them.  He was awfully afraid of snakes; they were so dangerous.  “Yes, sir” (this in answer to an inquiry), “there are plenty of rattlesnakes here clean up to Christmas.”  I liked him for his frank avowal of cowardice, and still more for his quiet bearing.  He remembered the days of slavery,—­“before the surrender,” as the current Southern phrase is,—­and his face beamed when I spoke of my joy in thinking that his people were free, no matter what might befall them.  He, too, raised cotton on hired land, and was bringing up his children—­there were eight of them, he said—­to habits of industry.

My second stroll toward St. Augustine carried me perhaps three miles,—­say one sixty-sixth of the entire distance,—­and none of my subsequent excursions took me any farther; and having just now commended a negro for his candor, I am moved to acknowledge that, between the sand underfoot and the sun overhead, I found the six miles, which I spent at least four hours in accomplishing, more fatiguing than twice that distance would have been over New Hampshire hills.  If I were to settle in that country, I should probably fall into the way of riding more, and walking less.  I remember thinking how comfortable a certain ponderous black mammy looked, whom I met on one of these same sunny and sandy tramps.  She sat in the very middle of a tipcart, with an old and truly picturesque man’s hat on her head (quite in the fashion, feminine readers will notice), driving a one-horned ox with a pair of clothes-line reins.  She was traveling slowly, just as I like to travel; and, as I say, I was impressed by her comfortable appearance.  Why would not an equipage like that be just the thing for a naturalistic idler?