“Yes; I went to Florida.”

“Oh, that must be a delightful country!”

“Yes, it’s a very delightful land, or will be when it is finished.  It needs advertising now.  It needs somebody to call attention to it.  The modest Northerners who have got hold of it, and staked it all out into city lots, seem to want to keep it all to themselves.”

“How do you mean ’finished’?”

“Why, the State is big enough, and a considerable portion of it has a good foundation.  What it wants is building up.  There’s plenty of water and sand, and palmetto roots and palmetto trees, and swamps, and a perfectly wonderful vegetation of vines and plants and flowers.  What it needs is land—­at least what the Yankees call land.  But it is coming on.  A good deal of the State below Jacksonville is already ten to fifteen feet above the ocean.”

“But it’s such a place for invalids!”

“Yes, it is a place for invalids.  There are two kinds of people there —­invalids and speculators.  Thousands of people in the bleak North, and especially in the Northwest, cannot live in the winter anywhere else than in Florida.  It’s a great blessing to this country to have such a sanitarium.  As I said, all it needs is building up, and then it wouldn’t be so monotonous and malarious.”

“But I had such a different idea of it!”

“Well, your idea is probably right.  You cannot do justice to a place by describing it literally.  Most people are fascinated by Florida:  the fact is that anything is preferable to our Northern climate from February to May.”

“And you didn’t buy an orange plantation, or a town?”

“No; I was discouraged.  Almost any one can have a town who will take a boat and go off somewhere with a surveyor, and make a map.”

The truth is—­the present writer had it from Major Blifill, who runs a little steamboat upon one of the inland creeks where the alligator is still numerous enough to be an entertainment—­that Mr. King was no doubt malarious himself when he sailed over Florida.  Blifill says he offended a whole boatfull one day when they were sailing up the St. John’s.  Probably he was tired of water, and swamp and water, and scraggy trees and water.  The captain was on the bow, expatiating to a crowd of listeners on the fertility of the soil and the salubrity of the climate.  He had himself bought a piece of ground away up there somewhere for two hundred dollars, cleared it up, and put in orange-trees, and thousands wouldn’t buy it now.  And Mr. King, who listened attentively, finally joined in with the questioners, and said, “Captain, what is the average price of land down in this part of Florida by the—­gallon?”

They had come down to the booths, and Mrs. Benson was showing the artist the shells, piles of conchs, and other outlandish sea-fabrications in which it is said the roar of the ocean can be heard when they are hundreds of miles away from the sea.  It was a pretty thought, Mr. Forbes said, and he admired the open shells that were painted on the inside —­painted in bright blues and greens, with dabs of white sails and a lighthouse, or a boat with a bare-armed, resolute young woman in it, sending her bark spinning over waves mountain-high.