186 FLORIDA DAYS.

 "Do you think it is better to live in iere
quietly and pleasantly, or to be in a great
city and have noise and thought all around
you?"
 The man shakes his head vaguely. There
is a faint, helpless anxiety in his face, which is
almost pathetic; he even sends a shifting glnce
toward his companion, and is silent. He
seems incapable of answering. One says gpod-
by; perforce, and a turn in the creek hidesj the
two motionless figures, leaving the observer vith
an odd feeling that they belong to the lnd-
scape, and that they will be there in the ctUm-
bling dugout, under the moss of the dead cypress,
a hundred years hence.

 The difference between the Crackers ,who
exist here now, and the Indians who'once pad-
dled noiselessly up and down these still ri ers,
is most striking. The solitude and appealing
shades did, to be sure, give the savages a cer-
tain gravity, but they were not. thus dead while
they lived. In the Indian no soul had been
stunted, because no soul had been evolved;









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