In the present case, indeed, the permanence of the
impression is perhaps not altogether beyond the reach of a plausible
conjecture. We have not always lived in houses; and if we love the sight
of a fire out-of-doors,--a camp-fire, that is to say,--as we all do, so
that the, burning of a brush-heap in a neighbor's yard will draw us to
the window, the feeling is but part of an ancestral inheritance. We have
come by it honestly, as the phrase is. And so I need not scruple to set
down another reminiscence of the same kind,--an early morning street
scene, of no importance in itself, in the village of New Smyrna. It may
have been on the morning next after the "norther" just mentioned. I
cannot say. We had two or three such touches of winter in early March;
none of them at all distressing, be it understood, to persons in
ordinary health. One night water froze,--"as thick as a silver
dollar,"--and orange growers were alarmed for the next season's crop,
the trees being just ready to blossom. Some men kept fires burning in
their orchards overnight; a pretty spectacle, I should think, especially
where the fruit was still ungathered. On one of these frosty mornings,
then, I saw a solitary horseman, not "wending his way," but warming his
hands over a fire that he had built for that purpose in the village
street. One might live and die in a New England village without seeing
such a sight.
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