Note (return) — ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH.

Later in the season, on this same shell mound, I might have regaled myself with fresh figs. Here, at any rate, was a thrifty-looking fig-tree, though its crop, if it bore one, would perhaps not have waited my coming so patiently as the oranges had done. Here, too, was a red cedar; and to me, who, in my ignorance, had always thought of this tough little evergreen as especially at home on my own bleak and stony hillsides, it seemed an incongruous trio,—fig-tree, orange-tree, and savin. In truth, the cedars of Florida were one of my liveliest surprises. At first I refused to believe that they were red cedars, so strangely exuberant were they, so disdainful of the set, cone-shaped, toy-tree pattern on which I had been used to seeing red cedars built. And when at last a study of the flora compelled me to admit their identity,5 I turned about and protested that I had never seen red cedars before. One, in St. Augustine, near San Marco Avenue, I had the curiosity to measure. The girth of the trunk at the smallest place was six feet five inches, and the spread of the branches was not less than fifty feet.