Draining The Everglades

The drainage of the strange región of the Everglades is one of the most wonderf ui enterprises of the tiraes. Ta most people ït would appear an utter impossibility to tame this wild región and bring it into peaceable and pleasant subjection to human industry; bvt the uudertaking has already been inaugurated. It is progressing with perfect assurance of success. All the necessary data have been obtained; aJ' themoney and men and skill are j, hand. The territory thus to be i"eO''jeine(j s nearly or quite half as Ir .a ag the wliole of Alabama. Ita clilLate is al. most tropical, and It3 soq wh6n reclaimed must be as ' ertile and famoug as the al luvial law iS o{ the There are stül living a the iOnely localities of this curio-., region the remnant of a brave lnt)au race he Seminole)which in da ag0De gQgt i,e Government so 110 ''ch trouble and treasure to subdue. This little remnant is now variously estimated at from 200 to 600. They cultívate corn and vegetables and utiliza the game and ÍJsh that there abound in inexbaustible quantities. There is not so weird a country in all the South, if anywkere, as these Florida Everglades. Their numberless little low islandsarecovered with a thick jungle of vines and slirubs - such as are nowhere to be found in the states. Some of them are said to be exactly similar to Uie vegetable growth of the West-Indies. One thing that adds much to the wildness and strangeness of this singular country is the tall grass that grows in the water and waves in the wind of ten several feet above the suiface. The water is generally from four to six feet deep. Lake Okeechobee, which is included in the work, is f orty miles long by thirty wide, and from six to ten feet deep- nowhere exceeding twelve feet. The "dredge boats," which are to do1 the drainage work, are wonderful machines. The one recently eompleted at Cedar-Keys has a capacity for excavating in twenty-four hours a canal twenty-two feet wide. six feet deep and eight hundred feet in length, and will at one handling deposit the material excavated at a convenient distance fi om the sido of the canal. A dredge oe fctill greater exeavating capacity is nearly finished on the Ivissimee river,, and will be in operatiou by the end" of' January. It will begin by cutting from Laka Okeechobee out to tide water. . ♦ ■ The poet says: "A kiss without a mustache is like an egg without salt." Maybe it is; we can't say positively, for the girls we've been used to kissing for the last twenty-flveyearsdon'two;ir m ustaches. - .