"This yere land would fertilize
that," he said, speaking of southern Florida. "I shouldn't wonder," said
I. I meant to be understood as concurring in his opinion, but such a
qualified, Yankeefied assent seemed to him no assent at all. "Oh, it
will, it will!" he responded, as if the point were one about which I
must on no account be left unconvinced. He told me that the fine house
at which I had looked, a little distance back, through a long vista of
trees, was the residence of Captain H., who owned all the land along the
road for a good distance. I inquired how far the road was pretty, like
this. "For forty miles," he said. That was farther than I was ready to
walk, and coming soon to the top of the hill, or, more exactly, of the
plateau, I stopped in the shade of a china-tree, and looked at the
pleasing prospect. Behind me was a plantation of young pear-trees, and
before me, among the hills northward, lay broad, cultivated slopes,
dotted here and there with cabins and tall, solitary trees. On the
nearer slope, perhaps a sixteenth of a mile away, a negro was ploughing,
with a single ox harnessed in some primitive manner,--with pieces of
wood, for the most part, as well as I could make out through an
opera-glass. The soil offered the least possible hindrance, and both he
and the ox seemed to be having a literal "walk-over." Beyond him--a full
half-mile away, perhaps--another man was ploughing with a mule; and in
another direction a third was doing likewise, with a woman following in
his wake.
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