corners, clean and comfortable in appearance and surrounded by orange trees in full fruit.  We have a large room in the second story, opening upon a generous balcony fifty feet long, into which stretch the liberal arms of a fine orange tree holding out their fruitage to our very lips.  In front is a sort of open plaza containing a pretty group of gnarled live-oaks full of moss and mistletoe.

[Illustration:  Sidney Lanier From a photograph owned by H.W.  Lanier]

In May he made an excursion of which he wrote: 

For a perfect journey God gave us a perfect day.  The little Ocklawaha steamboat Marion—­a steamboat which is like nothing in the world so much as a Pensacola gopher with a preposterously exaggerated back—­had started from Palatka some hours before daylight, having taken on her passengers the night previous; and by seven o’clock of such a May morning as no words could describe, unless words were themselves May mornings, we had made the twenty-five miles up the St. John’s to where the Ocklawaha flows into that stream nearly opposite Welaka, one hundred miles above Jacksonville.

It was on this journey that he saw the most magnificent residence that he had ever beheld, the home of an old friend of his, an alligator, who possessed a number of such palatial mansions and could change his residence at any time by the simple process of swimming from one to another.

On his return to Baltimore he lived at 55 Lexington in four rooms arranged as a French flat.  He makes mention of a gas stove “on which my comrade magically produces the best coffee in the world, and this, with fresh eggs (boiled through the same handy little machine), bread, butter, and milk, forms our breakfast.”  December 3 he writes from the little French flat, announcing that he “has plunged in and brought forth captive a long Christmas poem for Every Saturday,” a Baltimore weekly publication.  The poem was “Hard Times in Elfland.”  He says, “Wife and I have been to look at a lovely house with eight rooms and many charming appliances,” whereof the rent was less than that of the four rooms.

The next month he writes from 33 Denmead Street, the eight-room house, to which he had gone, with the attendant necessity of buying “at least three hundred twenty-seven household utensils” and “hiring a colored gentlewoman who is willing to wear out my carpets, burn out my range, freeze out my water-pipes, and be generally useful.”  He mentions having written a couple of poems, and part of an essay on Beethoven and Bismarck, but his chief delight is in his new home, which invests him with the dignity of paying taxes and water rates.  He takes the view that no man is a Bohemian who has to pay water rates and street tax.

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