I went with a fishing party down the coast to Matanzas, an abandoned fort of the early Spanish days, and passed there the most impressive open-air night in my recollection.  We camped on the beach, and my shelter was a gauze mosquito netting stretched over four poles, about three feet high, driven in the sand, and as wide as high, and my bed was the sea sand, no covering being required.  Through the gauze the sea breeze blew gently; on one side of the long, narrow beach the great Atlantic breakers roared a monotonous bass, and on the other there came from the lagoon the many-toned murmur of a thousand bird voices, some familiar and some strange, whooping of cranes and chattering of coots, ducks, and divers, cries of pelicans, and now and then the sound of flapping wings, as if some great bird had been routed out and had changed his feeding-ground.  Around me on the sand ran and crawled the host of crabs, some pulling curiously at the gauze of my shelter; and now and then a huge spider crab climbed up the netting like a squirrel and danced an infernal jig over my head, skipping about on the very tips of his claws, until I tired of his frivolity and hit him from underneath, when he scuttled away, and after half an hour, more or less, was succeeded by another, as if they found an intoxication in dancing over my head.  The gnats sang their monody, and the midges put in their treble, but the meshes of my gauze were too fine to let them pass; and after hours of this strange pandemonium I fell asleep, to be waked in the morning by the sun streaming over me from the broad Atlantic.

It is worthy to note here, in justice to the old days of the Floridian society, a society now utterly extinct, and a subject of history, that the kindliness to the slaves was universal on the St. John’s River.  At nightfall they used to gather in their quarters and sing; and they had a peculiar yodel, which, starting from one plantation, was caught up by the others, and ran round and off along the river into the distance and back, going and coming again and again with a peculiar fascination, like the voice of a happy and careless common life.  It was a kindly and indulgent community, and that it was a slave-holding society never forced itself on the attention.  The lazy social virtues had, no doubt, their lazy vices, but we never saw them on the surface.  The negro quarters were as merry as the day was long, and the negro was a more important and better appreciated element of social life than in the North.  The whole valley joined in unreserved malediction of a planter, one of our neighbors, who had profited by the accidental burning of the free papers of a black family which had been bought out of slavery by the father, with money earned as pilot to the steamers of the United States Army during the Seminole War, to compel him to purchase himself and his wife and children again, and the thief was spoken of as the meanest of white men, out of the social pale of self-respecting folk; cheating a slave being far