“There is yet another reason, which you will understand from what I am about to say.  Before the war broke out, the Indians of this country, those very men who suddenly became so bloodthirsty and so formidable, were a quiet and inoffensive race, badly treated for the most part by the whites, and passively submitting to ill treatment without any appearance of feeling or spirit.  When they at length resolved upon war, they concealed their families in the islands of the Everglades, whither they supposed the whites would never be able to follow them.  Their rule of warfare was this, never to endanger the life of one of their warriors for the sake of gaining the greatest advantage over their enemies; they struck only when they felt themselves in perfect safety.  If they saw an opportunity of destroying twenty white men by the sacrifice of a single Indian, the whites were allowed to escape.  Acting on this principle, if their retreat had been as inaccessible as they supposed it, they would have kept up the warfare until they had driven the whites out of the territory.

“When, however, General Worth introduced a new method of prosecuting the war, following up the Indians with a close and perpetual pursuit, chasing them into their great shallow lake, the Everglades, and to its most secret islands, they saw at once that they were conquered.  They saw that further hostilities were hopeless, and returned to their former submissive and quiet demeanor.

“It is well, perhaps,” added my friend in a kind of postscript, “that a few Indians should remain in Florida.  They are the best hunters of runaway slaves in the world, and may save us from a Maroon war.”

The Indian name of the Everglades, I am told, signifies Grass-water, a term which well expresses its appearance.  It is a vast lake, broader by thousands of acres in a wet than in a dry season, and so shallow that the grass everywhere grows from the bottom and overtops its surface The bottom is of hard sand, so firm that it can be forded almost everywhere on horseback, and here and there are deep channels which the traveller crosses by swimming his horse.

General Worth’s success in quelling the insurrection of the Seminoles, has made him very popular in Florida, where the energy and sagacity with which the closing campaign of the war was conducted are spoken of in the highest terms.  He has lately fixed his head-quarters at St Augustine.

In the afternoon, our steamer put in between two sandy points of land and we arrived at St Mary’s, formerly a buccaneer settlement, but now so zealous for good order that our captain told us the inhabitants objected to his taking in wood for his steamboat on Sunday.  The place is full of groves of the orange and lime—­young trees which have grown up since 1835, and which, not having suffered, like those of St. Augustine, by the gale, I found beautifully luxuriant.  In this place, it was my fate to experience the plague of sand-flies.  Clouds of them came into the steamboat alighting on our faces and hands and stinging wherever they alighted.  The little creatures got into our hair and into our eyes, and crawled up our sleeves and down our necks, giving us no rest, until late in the night the vessel left the wharf and stood out into the river, where the current of air swept most of our tormentors away.