“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.
“Yes,” said the artist, “what cheerfulness those works of art will give to the little parlors up in the country, when they are set up with other shells on the what-not in the corner! These shells always used to remind me of missionaries and the cause of the heathen; but when I see them now I shall think of Atlantic City.”
“But the representative things here,” interrupted Irene, “are the photographs, the tintypes. To see them is just as good as staying here to see the people when they come.”
“Yes,” responded Mr. King, “I think art cannot go much further in this direction.”