The unbroken quiet which has been with us since we left Savannah is interrupted as soon as the steamer touches the Jacksonville wharf. We are importuned and jostled on every side by black boys, dray and carriage-drivers, who worry us for our baggage, raising their whips with the imperious movement of a major-general, and suddenly lowering them at half mast when we say, No! Then the officious hotel-runners, who scream in our ears to patronize the houses that employ them, until we are on the verge of desperation, and feel as though the plagues of Egypt could not have been worse. Most of these public criers are dirty, ragged, and lazy, having no legitimate vocation, except what they can make from visitors, or in drumming for boarding-houses. This city has fine accommodations, and for that reason receives more envy than admiration from other Florida towns. It can furnish more than one hundred good places of entertainment, among which may be found several colossal hotels, capable of containing two or three hundred guests, also boarding-houses of less pretentious dimensions, where, no doubt, a nearer approximation to the acknowledgment for value received is oftener realized. Selections can be made where money may be expended rapidly or slowly, according to the inclination of the visitor. Here, as in other places, we meet with boarding-house complainers. This class of grumblers must remember that hotel-keepers stand fault-finding as quietly as a delinquent schoolboy his deserved punishment; they are used to it; they expect it, and would be disappointed if they did not get it.
The influx of visitors commences sooner some seasons than others. The first cold blast from the North sends the feeble invalid South to bask in the summer sunshine of a milder atmosphere, and when spring comes he returns home like the migratory birds.
Jacksonville and its adjacent towns number a population of over twelve thousand inhabitants, the whole area being three miles long and about two wide. The different names given to this small space of country looks larger on the map than in reality. These corporations are distinguished from each other by the names of Jacksonville, East Jacksonville, Brooklyn, La Villa, Riverside, Springfield, Hansom Town, etc.--each town containing, from fifty to fifteen hundred houses. The inhabitants say they were laid out into lots and named, with the expectation of a large increase of persons; consequently there are desirable building-spots in these surveyed sites for growing cities, for sale at all times upon moderate terms.