Palmetto-Leaves

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Mr. —— spoke of the river-grass as being a real and valuable species of pasturage. On the west side of the river, the flats and shallows along by the shore are covered with a broad-leaved water-grass, very tender and nutritious, of which cattle are very fond. It is a curious sight to see whole herds of cows browsing in the water, as one may do every day along the course of this river.

The subject of dairy-keeping came up; and, at our request, Mrs. —— led the way to hers. It is built out under a dense shade of trees in an airy situation, with double walls like an ice-house. The sight of the snowy shelves set round with pans, on which a rich golden cream was forming, was a sufficient testimony that there could be beautiful, well-kept dairies in Florida, notwithstanding its tropical heats.

The butter is made every morning at an early hour; and we had an opportunity of tasting it at the dinner-table. Like the best butter of France and England, it is sweet and pure, like solidified cream, and as different as can be from the hard, salty mass which most generally passes for butter among us. The buttermilk of a daily churning is also sweet and rich, a delicious nourishing drink, and an excellent adjuvant in the making of various cakes and other household delicacies.

Our friend's experience satisfied us that there was no earthly reason in the climate or surroundings of Florida why milk and butter should be the scarce and expensive luxuries they are now. What one private gentleman can do simply for his own comfort and that of his family, we should think might be repeated on a larger scale by somebody in the neighborhood of Jacksonville as a money speculation. Along the western bank of this river are hundreds of tracts of good grazing land, where cattle might be pastured at small expense; where the products of a dairy on a large scale would meet a ready and certain sale. At present the hotels and boarding-houses are supplied with condensed milk, and butter, imported from the North: and yet land is cheap here; labor is reasonable; the climate genial, requiring no outlay for shelter, and comparatively little necessity of storing food for winter. Fine breeds of animals of improved stock exist already, and can be indefinitely increased; and we wonder that nobody is to be found to improve the opportunity to run a stock and dairy farm which shall supply the hotels and boarding-houses of Jacksonville.

After visiting the dairy, we sauntered about, looking at the poultry-yards, where different breeds of hens, turkeys, pea-fowl, had each their allotted station. Four or five big dogs, hounds and pointers, trotted round with us, or rollicked with a party of grandchildren, assisted by the never-failing addition of a band of giggling little negroes. As in the old times, the servants of the family have their little houses back of the premises; and the laundry-work, &c., is carried on outside. The propensity at the South is to multiply little buildings. At the North, where there is a winter to be calculated on, the tactics of living are different. The effort is to gather all the needs and wants of life under one roof, to be warmed and kept in order at small expense. In the South, where building-material is cheap, and building is a slight matter, there is a separate little building for every thing; and the back part of an estate looks like an eruption of little houses. There is a milk-house, a corn-house, a tool-house, a bake-house, besides a house for each of the leading servants, making quite a village.

Our dinner was a bountiful display of the luxuries of a Southern farm,—finely-flavored fowl choicely cooked, fish from the river, soft-shell turtle-soup, with such a tempting variety of early vegetables as seemed to make it impossible to do justice to all. Mrs. —— offered us a fine sparkling wine made of the juice of the wild-orange. In color it resembled the finest sherry, and was much like it in flavor.

We could not help thinking, as we refused dainty after dainty, from mere inability to take more, of the thoughtless way in which it is often said that there can be nothing fit to eat got in Florida.

Mr. ——'s family is supplied with food almost entirely from the products of his own farm. He has the nicest of fed beef, nice tender pork, poultry of all sorts, besides the resources of an ample, well-kept dairy. He raises and makes his own sirup. He has sweet-potatoes, corn, and all Northern vegetables, in perfection; peaches, grapes of finest quality, besides the strictly tropical fruits; and all that he has, any other farmer might also have with the same care.

After dinner we walked out to look at the grapes, which hung in profuse clusters, just beginning to ripen on the vines. On our way we stopped to admire a great bitter-sweet orange-tree, which seemed to make "Hesperian fables true." It was about thirty feet in height, and with branches that drooped to the ground, weighed down at the same time with great golden balls of fruit, and wreaths of pearly buds and blossoms. Every stage of fruit, from the tiny green ball of a month's growth to the perfected orange, were here; all the processes of life going on together in joyous unity. The tree exemplified what an orange-tree could become when fully fed, when its almost boundless capacity for digesting nutriment meets a full supply; and it certainly stood one of the most royal of trees. Its leaves were large, broad, and of that glossy, varnished green peculiar to the orange; and its young shoots looked like burnished gold. The bitter-sweet orange is much prized by some. The pulp is sweet, with a certain spicy flavor; but the rind, and all the inner membranes that contain the fruit, are bitter as quinine itself. It is held to be healthy to eat of both, as the acid and the bitter are held to be alike correctives of the bilious tendencies of the climate.

But the afternoon sun was casting the shadows the other way, and the little buzzing "Mary Draper" was seen puffing in the distance on her way back from Jacksonville; and we walked leisurely down the live-oak avenues to the wharf, our hands full of roses and Oriental jessamine, and many pleasant memories of our neighbors over the way.