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The productiveness of this district is well illustrated by one acre - an agricultural curiosity-belonging to an industrious man who literally "works the earth for all there is in it." On that one-acre patch, and all in thrifty, splendid condition, he had 2,375 pineapple plants, 19 orange-trees, 22 of grape-fruit, 2 lemon, 28 guava, 5 lime, 2 royal poinciana, I Australian oak, 48 bananas, 8 egg-plants, 31 yams, 12 rose-bushes, 2 beds of chrysanthemums, 4 beds of geraniums, 1 bed of tube-roses, I century-plant, a sisal hemp, a cactus, and an oleander!

The district is also rich in fishing grounds. The mullet, red-snapper, pompano, oysters, and clams from about Sarasota Bay are all very fine, and between 3,000,000 and 4,000,000 pounds of fish are annually shipped. The prairies also graze nearly 75,000 head of cattle, and nearly half a million crates of vegetables are shipped every year, besides oranges and other fruits and numbers of hogs, chickens, and eggs. In round figures the exports amount to nearly a million dollars a year, and that with a population of barely 7,000 people

charges of being a "boomer" and a gross exaggerater. Yet if the doubting ones would but make a winter trip of investigation through that really wonderful country the charges would be changed to those of blindness or of wilfully withholding facts.

All these products find their way first to Tampa, the distributing point to the markets for all that country. It is a most interesting town of 30,000 people, nearly 7,000 of whom are Cubans, employed mostly in its cigar factories. A busy port and enterprising town, it experienced a serious falling-off in its usually heavy import commerce during the war; but this loss, however, was largely made up in profits from the government, the soldiers, and the visitors to the great military camps. Essentially a commercial town and comparatively new, it lays no claim. to beauty, though some of its suburbs are very fine; beautiful shade-trees abound, and handsome residences are fast being added to what natural charms it pos

sesses.

The waters and country all about this metropolis of southern Florida are tropic

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fish from their bedroom windows and take a nap in bed between bites. But the naps will be short, though possibly sweet, for the Spanish mackerel, the trout, and the bass seem to like the hotel fare too, judging by their numbers. Ducks and pelicans are to be seen in large flocks, but these you

may not molest. You may feed them, but you must not shoot them. Think of a sportsman feeding wild ducks!

Once in a while may be seen a Seminole and he must not be shot at either who drifts into town to sell his hides and take back shirts and such thingstohis Everglade haunts. One can judge of his wealth and prominence among his own people by the number of shirts he wears, and they are always worn outside of his unmentionables - Chinaman fashion.

A FIVE-SHIRTED SEMINOLE

The Seminole Indian rigged out with

five shirts, as shown in the sketch, is a very Rockefeller in his tribe.

The "keys" or coral islands along the coast add much to the attractiveness of the picture. Egmont Key, with its lighthouse marking the entrance to Tampa Bay, is one of the principal islands, but its charms may only be viewed from a distance; it takes a special permit to enable one to land there. The government is building important fortifications and offers no welcome to visitors.

Just north of Tampa are the great phosphate grounds, and Fort Tampa is the shipping point of all that is sent away from the southern end of those grounds. At any time forty or fifty cars of phosphate may be seen on the tracks awaiting shipment, and English, German, Italian, Spanish, and even Japanese vessels are being loaded from the great bins on the docks. Tampa is the principal port of entry for the Havana line of steamers, as also for the packet-lines to New Orleans, Mobile, and Central American ports. It is a busy enterprising place-the heart, as it were, furnishing life to a healthy, thrifty young country about, whose soil, climate, and possibilities are most attractive to the casual tourist and a source of wonder to the student, and whose charms - the highest test a country can be subjected to have not palled upon its oldest inhabitant.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.

FRANCIS OMEIS.
F. W. FITZPATRICK.

N

AN ENVOY'S WIFE ON JAPAN*

EVER, it may safely be said, has the empire of the Mikados been more delightfully and sympathetically written of than in the pages of the two attractive volumes from the pen of Mrs. Hugh Fraser, wife of the late British Envoy to Japan. In the book-review department of SELF CULTURE for September last we had occasion to comment on a series of tales ("The Custom of the Country") from the same source as these Letters, which not only exhibited Mrs. Fraser's fine literary art, but her intimate acquaintance with the island empire and her hearty delight in and appreciation of its

interesting people. The collection of Letters extends over a period of three years, dating from the spring of 1889, when the author (who, by the way, is a sister of Marion Crawford, the novelist) arrived in Japan and took up her residence at the British Embassy at Tokyo. Mrs. Fraser's correspondence, in the main, leaves native politics, and even local history, out of account and is confined to descriptions of Japanese scenery and to charming narratives dealing with the character and customs of the people among whom she lived or whom she met with in the social relations of an Envoy's

*"Letters from Japan: A Record of Modern Life in the Island Empire." By Mrs. Hugh Fraser, author of "Palladia," "The Custom of the Country." Two volumes, 8vo. Illustrated. London and New York: The Macmillan Co., 1899.

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"MY LITTLE HOSTESS "-(See page 361) of her subject, and she is happy in possessing keen powers of observation and rare gifts which enable her to describe what she saw and felt during her residence in the far East.

In her letters, no motive, the writer tells us, was followed beyond that suggested by the interests and the fancy of the moment. It is in this unstudied, vagrant mood that Mrs. Fraser depicts the "toy country" and its fairy-like inhabitants, who, as she says, have set the doors of their secret shrines ajar and enabled the sympathetic foreigner to become aware of the many-sided and complex character of the people - "simple to frankness, yet full of unexpected reserves, of hidden strength, and dignities of power never flaunted before the eyes of the world." It is the mood, happily, which best suits a writer, gifted with poetic feeling and endowed with fine literary qualities, in portraying character and presenting with great vividness the play of human life, in its wondrous natural setting, which she sees about her during her three years' residence in the country. Hence the effectiveness of her prose sketches of Japan and its people and the charm which she throws over the land, and particularly the human interest which she imparts to Japanese women in the home, where she comes sympathetically in touch with them alike in their joys and in their griefs. The letters, we are told, came to a sudden end in the early summer of 1894, when the writer of them returned to Europe, "in the shadow

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A GLIMPSE OF FUJIYAMA

of a great grief - alone." They are now transcribed and set forth in these attractive volumes with the view, as Mrs. Fraser gratefully explains, of bringing "to-day's Japan a little nearer to the understanding and sympathy of to-day's England." Here, in the opening pages of the work, is a bit of fresh description of scenes witnessed as the author lands in Japan, which will serve to show Mrs. Fraser's joyous enthusiasm as well as her keen eye for the novelties of the situation:

"I think the friendship has begun. The landing at Nagasaki and the sight of the Inland Sea have upset all my wise resolutions about first impressions. The only thing that came to me as I stepped on shore at Nagasaki was a fit of light-hearted laughter - laughter of the joyous and unreasonable kind whose tax is mostly paid in tears. Life suddenly presented itself as a thing of fun and joy: the people, the shops, the galloping jinriksha coolies, the toy houses treated as serious dwellings by fathers of families, all combined to give me a day of the purest amusement that has ever been granted to me yet. For sixpence I would have changed places with a seller of cakes whom I met in the road. His clothes were of the impressionist kind, some rather slight good intentions carried out in cool blue cotton, the rest being brown man and straw sandals. He carried a fairy temple built of snowy wood and delicate paper, with a willow branch for a dusting brush, and little drawers, full of sweets, which pulled out in every direction, as white and close-fitting as the petals of a moon-dahlia. All his dainty wares were white or pink, and at a distance one might have mistaken him and his shrine of

sweets for a bundle of lotus blooms on two brown stems. It seemed unwise to change places with him, and might have caused confusion in the family; but I was sorry that H- would not let me buy him, pack and all, and stand him up in the hall of the new home in Tokyo as my first curio.»

Equally delightful is Mrs. Fraser's pen in describing nature and the wondrous bloom on the flowers of Japan. Here is an account of a visit to the arbors of the Kameido Temple at the capital:

"We are late for the cherry blossoms and must wait till next year to see them in their glory: but, when the wind blows, the petals are stirred from where they have been lying in rosy heaps at the trees' feet, and go whirling down the paths like belated snowflakes. It is really wistaria-time, and I have been out to the Kameido Temple to look at the famous arbors there. It is a lovely and amazing sight. The Temple grounds consist chiefly of flagged paths running round great tanks of water, shaded from end to end by a thick roof of drooping flowers. The pale purple clusters grow so thick that no glimpse of sky is visible between them, and their odorous fringes hang four or five feet deep in many places. Little breezes lift them here and there and sway the blooms

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about, so as to show the soft shadings from pale lilac to dark purple; and the flowers as they move shed drift after drift of loose petals down on the water, where the fat goldfish come up ex. pecting to be fed with lard cakes and rice balls. . . . We found at one corner an arbor entirely overgrown with the white wistaria, which delighted me by its ethereal purity. Why is it that flowers which are usually deep in color are so astonishingly white when the fancy takes them to leave their proper color behind? White violets, white wistaria, seem whiter than anything has a right to be in a sinful world, and new-fallen snow would look almost dark beside a young pomegranate!»

Not less charming are the letters that chronicle expeditions undertaken by Mrs. Fraser and the inmates of the Embassy into the interior of the island, to visit some temple of note or take a peep at close range at Fujiyama, a glimpse of which, with its dazzling white summit, is seen in one of the illustrations in the present paper. Delightful also are the occasional recital of fables, inwoven with the religion or the romance of the country, and the bits of folklore, interspersed through the letters, such as that of the stork, a drawing of which was sent by the Empress to one of the little princes as an augur of long life. Equally attractive are the letters that exhibit the author's delight in nature, in the song of birds, in the bloom of flowers, in the brilliance of color over the landscape, or in the terror and disarray of the typhoon.

But it is in the author's recorded accounts of her contact with the femininity and child-life of Japan that we find her letters most captivating. One of these, given in Chap. XIII, in describing a New Year's Day reception at the Emperor's palace, is very fascinating, especially where Mrs. Fraser tags on to it the recital of incidents connected with the children's entertainment she gave in the compound of the Embassy, to the infinite delight of herself and the little people who shared in the festivity. Her account of the dainty gifts presented to each child, and of their disappearance into the large hanging sleeves of the picturesquely garbed recipients, is entrancingly told, as

is the letter which describes the visit to the little daughter of one of the great nobles, "dressed in sapphire-colored crape, shading from pale blue at the foot to dark purple at the shoulder, embroidered in gold in lovely patterns, and girdled

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JAPANESE CHILDREN

with royal scarlet and gold; her hair, gathered in a shining knot on the top of her head, held in place with jewelled pins."

Most interesting too is Mrs. Fraser's discussion of the subject of native marriages and the interest she feels and manifests in Japanese women. Marriage, she tells us, is in Japan not the supreme relation of life as it is in Europe, since love, in our sense of the word, has little to do with it. And yet, she adds, European history can show us no record of higher, stronger love than the Japanese wife has again and again laid at her lord's feet, despite the fact that marriages are always arranged by parents or friends, the young people's consent being asked only at the

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