Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/380

 these boxes are full appear stalwart negroes, often fantastically clad, dipping the accumulated pitch into buckets and filling casks that are drawn by solemn mules, whose faces are so inscrutably stupid that they appear wise with an elder, satyr-*like wisdom.

The negroes, in the freedom of the old wood, lose the veneer which civilization is giving the race and work with a care-free swing. Often you hear them in the distance singing some song that lilts and croons, that ignores the studied interrelation of tonic and sub-dominant, that has neither beginning nor end, but chimes in its minor cadences with the music of the wind in the tree tops. It might well be impossible to reduce such songs to the bonds of modern notation. It is a music that grew in the marrow of the race before tunes were invented—a music grown sad and fragmentary now, I fear, but surely that which Amphion learned and to which the free-footed trees danced in his days. The negro of the pineries is careless, often brutal, always happy-go-lucky, but the men who employ him say that he works well with right management; in fact, is the best labor that can be had for the place, and that the business would not know what to do without him. He surely fits the scene and one would be sorry to miss him from it.

The old crude method of boxing the trees is,