[Transcriber's Note: The original scan for text page 142 is missingThis is noted where it occurs in the text. ]

A FLORIDA SKETCH BOOK

By

BRADFORD TORREY

Books by Mr. Torrey. 

BIRDS IN THE BUSH. A RAMBLER'S LEASE. THE FOOT-PATH WAY. A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 

1894

CONTENTS

IN THE FLAT-WOODS

BESIDE THE MARSH

ON THE BEACH AT DAYTONA

ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH

A MORNING AT THE OLD SUGAR MILL

ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S

ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD

ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLANTATION

A FLORIDA SHRINE

WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE

A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 

IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

In approaching Jacksonville by rail, the traveler rides hour afterhour through seemingly endless pine barrens, otherwise known as lowpine-woods and flat-woods, till he wearies of the sight. It would behard, he thinks, to imagine a region more unwholesome looking anduninteresting, more poverty-stricken and God-forsaken, in its entireaspect. Surely, men who would risk life in behalf of such a countrydeserved to win their cause. 

Monotonous as the flat-woods were, however, and malarious as theylooked, --arid wastes and stretches of stagnant water flying past the carwindow in perpetual alternation, I was impatient to get into them. Theywere a world the like of which I had never seen; and wherever I went ineastern Florida, I made it one of my earliest concerns to seek them out. 

My first impression was one of disappointment, or perhaps I shouldrather say, of bewilderment. In fact, I returned from my first visit tothe flat-woods under the delusion that I had not been into them at all. This was at St. Augustine, whither I had gone after a night only inJacksonville. I looked about the quaint little city, of course, and wentto the South Beach, on St. Anastasia Island; then I wished to see thepine lands. They were to be found, I was told, on the other side of theSan Sebastian. The sun was hot (or so it seemed to a man fresh from therigors of a New England winter), and the sand was deep; but I saunteredthrough New Augustine, and pushed on up the road toward Moultrie (Ibelieve it was), till the last houses were passed and I came to the edgeof the pine-woods. Here, presently, the roads began to fork in a veryconfusing manner. The first man I met--a kindly cracker--cautioned meagainst getting lost; but I had no thought of taking the slightest riskof that kind. I was not going to _explore_ the woods, but only to enterthem, sit down, look about me, and listen. The difficulty was to getinto them. As I advanced, they receded. It was still only the beginningof a wood; the trees far apart and comparatively small, the groundcovered thickly with saw palmetto, interspersed here and there withpatches of brown grass or sedge. 

In many places the roads were under water, and as I seemed to be makinglittle progress, I pretty soon sat down in a pleasantly shaded spot. Wagons came along at intervals, all going toward the city, most of themwith loads of wood; ridiculously small loads, such as a Yankee boy wouldput upon a wheelbarrow. "A fine day, " said I to the driver of such acart. "Yes, sir, " he answered, "it's a _pretty_ day. " He spoke with anemphasis which seemed to imply that he accepted my remark as well meant, but hardly adequate to the occasion. Perhaps, if the day had been a fewshades brighter, he would have called it "handsome, " or even "goodlooking. " Expressions of this kind, however, are matters of local orindividual taste, and as such are not to be disputed about. Thus, a manstopped me in Tallahassee to inquire what time it was. I told him, andhe said, "Ah, a little sooner than I thought. " And why not "sooner" aswell as "earlier"? But when, on the same road, two white girls in anox-cart hailed me with the question, "What time 't is?" I thought theinterrogative idiom a little queer; almost as queer, shall we say, as"How do you do?" may have sounded to the first man who heard it, --if thereader is able to imagine such a person. 

Meanwhile, let the morning be "fine" or "pretty, " it was all one to thebirds. The woods were vocal with the cackling of robins, the warble ofbluebirds, and the trills of pine warblers. Flickers were shouting--orlaughing, if one pleased to hear it so--with true flickerish prolixity, and a single downy woodpecker called sharply again and again. Amocking-bird near me (there is _always_ a mocking-bird near you, inFlorida) added his voice for a time, but soon relapsed into silence. Thefact was characteristic; for, wherever I went, I found it true that themocker grew less musical as the place grew wilder. By instinct he is apublic performer, he demands an audience; and it is only in cities, likeSt. Augustine and Tallahassee, that he is heard at his freest and best. A loggerhead shrike--now close at my elbow, now farther away--waspracticing his extensive vocabulary with perseverance, if not withenthusiasm. Like his relative the "great northern, " though perhaps in aless degree, the loggerhead is commonly at an extreme, either loquaciousor dumb; as if he could not let his moderation be known unto any man. Sometimes I fancied him possessed with an insane ambition to match themocking-bird in song as well as in personal appearance. If so, it is notsurprising that he should be subject to fits of discouragement andsilence. Aiming at the sun, though a good and virtuous exercise, as wehave all heard, is apt to prove dispiriting to sensible marksmen. Crows(fish crows, in all probability, but at the time I did not know it)uttered strange, hoarse, flat-sounding caws. Everv bird of them musthave been born without a palate, it seemed to me. White-eyed chewinkswere at home in the dense palmetto scrub, whence they announcedthemselves unmistakably by sharp whistles. Now and then one of themmounted a leaf, and allowed me to see his pale yellow iris. Except forthis mark, recognizable almost as far as the bird could be distinguishedat all, he looked exactly like our common New England towhee. Somewherebehind me was a kingfisher's rattle, and from a savanna in the samedirection came the songs of meadow larks; familiar, but with somethingunfamiliar about them at the same time, unless my ears deceived me. 

More interesting than any of the birds yet named, because more strictlycharacteristic of the place, as well as more strictly new to me, werethe brown-headed nuthatches. I was on the watch for them: they were oneof the three novelties which I knew were to be found in the pine lands, and nowhere else, --the other two being the red-cockaded woodpecker andthe pine-wood sparrow; and being thus on the lookout, I did not expectto be taken by surprise, if such a paradox (it is nothing worse) maybeallowed to pass. But when I heard them twittering in the distance, as Idid almost immediately, I had no suspicion of what they were. The voicehad nothing of that nasal quality, that Yankee twang, as some peoplewould call it, which I had always associated with the nuthatch family. On the contrary, it was decidedly finchlike, --so much so that some ofthe notes, taken by themselves, would have been ascribed withouthesitation to the goldfinch or the pine finch, had I heard them in NewEngland; and even as things were, I was more than once deceived for themoment. As for the birds themselves, they were evidently a cheerful andthrifty race, much more numerous than the red-cockaded woodpeckers, andmuch less easily overlooked than the pine-wood sparrows. I seldomentered the flat-woods anywhere without finding them. They seek theirfood largely about the leafy ends of the pine branches, resembling theCanadian nuthatches in this respect, so that it is only on rareoccasions that one sees them creeping about the trunks or larger limbs. Unlike their two Northern relatives, they are eminently social, oftentraveling in small flocks, even in the breeding season, and keeping upan almost incessant chorus of shrill twitters as they flit hither andthither through the woods. The first one to come near me was full ofinquisitiveness; he flew back and forth past my head, exactly aschickadees do in a similar mood, and once seemed almost ready to alighton my hat. "Let us have a look at this stranger, " he appeared to besaying. Possibly his nest was not far off, but I made no search for it. Afterwards I found two nests, one in a low stump, and one in the trunkof a pine, fifteen or twenty feet from the ground. Both of themcontained young ones (March 31 and April 2), as I knew by the continualgoings-in-and-out of the fathers and mothers. In dress the brown-head isdingy, with little or nothing of the neat and attractive appearance ofour New England nuthatches. 

In this pine-wood on the road to Moultrie I found no sign of the newwoodpecker or the new sparrow. Nor was I greatly disappointed. The placeitself was a sufficient novelty, --the place and the summer weather. Thepines murmured overhead, and the palmettos rustled all about. Now abutterfly fluttered past me, and now a dragonfly. More than one littleflock of tree swallows went over the wood, and once a pair of phoebesamused me by an uncommonly pretty lover's quarrel. Truly it was apleasant hour. In the midst of it there came along a man in a cart, witha load of wood. We exchanged the time of day, and I remarked upon thesmallness of his load. Yes, he said; but it was a pretty heavy load todrag seven or eight miles over such roads. Possibly he understood me asimplying that he seemed to be in rather small business, although I hadno such purpose, for he went on to say: "In 1861, when this beautifulwar broke out between our countries, my father owned niggers. We didn'thave to do _this_. But I don't complain. If I hadn't got a bullet in me, I should do pretty well. "

"Then you were in the war?" I said. 

"Oh, yes, yes, sir! I was in the Confederate service. Yes, sir, I'm aSoutherner to the backbone. My grandfather was a ----" (I missed thepatronymic), "and commanded St. Augustine. "

The name had a foreign sound, and the man's complexion was swarthy, andin all simplicity I asked if he was a Minorcan. I might as well havetouched a lighted match to powder. His eyes flashed, and he came roundthe tail of the cart, gesticulating with his stick. 

"Minorcan!" he broke out. "Spain and the island of Minorca are twoplaces, ain't they?" I admitted meekly that they were. 

"You are English, ain't you?" he went on. "You are English, --Yankeeborn, --ain't you?"

I owned it. 

"Well, I'm Spanish. That ain't Minorcan. My grandfather was a ----, andcommanded St. Augustine. He couldn't have done that if he had beenMinorcan. "

By this time he was quieting down a bit. His father remembered theIndian war. The son had heard him tell about it. 

"Those were dangerous times, " he remarked. "You couldn't have beenstanding out here in the woods then. "

"There is no danger here now, is there?" said I. 

"No, no, not now. " But as he drove along he turned to say that _he_wasn't afraid of _any_ thing; he wasn't that kind of a man. Then, with afinal turn, he added, what I could not dispute, "A man's life is alwaysin danger. "

After he was gone, I regretted that I had offered no apology for myunintentionally offensive question; but I was so taken by surprise, andso much interested in the man as a specimen, that I quite forgot mymanners till it was too late. One thing I learned: that it is notprudent, in these days, to judge a Southern man's blood, in either senseof the word, by his dress or occupation. This man had brought seven oreight miles a load of wood that might possibly be worth seventy-fivecents (I questioned the owner of what looked like just such a loadafterward, and found his asking price half a dollar), and for clothinghad on a pair of trousers and a blue cotton shirt, the latter full ofholes, through which the skin was visible; yet his father was a ---- andhad "owned niggers. "

A still more picturesque figure in this procession of wood-carters was aboy of perhaps ten or eleven. He rode his horse, and was barefooted andbarelegged; but he had a cigarette in his mouth, and to each brown heelwas fastened an enormous spur. Who was it that infected the world withthe foolish and disastrous notion that work and play are two differentthings? And was it Emerson, or some other wise man, who said that a boywas the true philosopher?

When it came time to think of returning to St. Augustine, for dinner, Iappreciated my cracker's friendly warning against losing my way; forthough I had hardly so much as entered the woods, and had taken, as Ithought, good heed to my steps, I was almost at once in a quandary as tomy road. There was no occasion for worry, --with the sun out, and mygeneral course perfectly plain; but here was a fork in the road, andwhether to bear to the left or to the right was a simple matter ofguess-work. I made the best guess I could, and guessed wrong, as wasapparent after a while, when I found the road under deep water forseveral rods. I objected to wading, and there was no ready way of goinground, since the oak and palmetto scrub crowded close up to theroadside, and just here was all but impenetrable. What was still moreconclusive, the road was the wrong one, as the inundation proved, and, for aught I could tell, might carry me far out of my course. I turnedback, therefore, under the midday sun, and by good luck a second attemptbrought me out of the woods very near where I had entered them. 

I visited this particular piece of country but once afterward, having inthe mean time discovered a better place of the same sort along therailroad, in the direction of Palatka. There, on a Sunday morning, Iheard my first pine-wood sparrow. Time and tune could hardly have beenin truer accord. The hour was of the quietest, the strain was of thesimplest, and the bird sang as if he were dreaming. For a long time Ilet him go on without attempting to make certain who he was. He seemedto be rather far off: if I waited his pleasure, he would perhaps movetoward me; if I disturbed him, he would probably become silent. So I saton the end of a sleeper and listened. It was not great music. It made methink of the swamp sparrow; and the swamp sparrow is far from being agreat singer. A single prolonged, drawling note (in that respect unlikethe swamp sparrow, of course), followed by a succession of softer andsweeter ones, --that was all, when I came to analyze it; but that is nofair description of what I heard. The quality of the song is not there;and it was the quality, the feeling, the soul of it, if I may say what Imean, that made it, in the true sense of a much-abused word, charming. 

There could be little doubt that the bird was a pine-wood sparrow; butsuch things are not to be taken for granted. Once or twice, indeed, thethought of some unfamiliar warbler had crossed my mind. At last, therefore, as the singer still kept out of sight, I leaped the ditch andpushed into the scrub. Happily I had not far to go; he had been muchnearer than I thought. A small bird flew up before me, and droppedalmost immediately into a clump of palmetto. I edged toward the spot andwaited. Then the song began again, this time directly in front of me, but still far-away-sounding and dreamy. I find that last word in myhasty note penciled at the time, and can think of no other thatexpresses the effect half so well. I looked and looked, and all at oncethere sat the bird on a palmetto leaf. Once again he sang, putting uphis head. Then he dropped out of sight, and I heard nothing more. I hadseen only his head and neck, --enough to show him a sparrow, and almostof necessity the pine-wood sparrow. No other strange member of the finchfamily was to be looked for in such a place. 

On further acquaintance, let me say at once, _Pucaea aestivalis_ provedto be a more versatile singer than the performances of my first birdwould have led me to suppose. He varies his tune freely, but alwayswithin a pretty narrow compass; as is true, also, of the field sparrow, with whom, as I soon came to feel, he has not a little in common. It isin musical form only that he suggests the swamp sparrow. In tone andspirit, in the qualities of sweetness and expressiveness, he is nearlyakin to _Spizella pusilla_. One does for the Southern pine barren whatthe other does for the Northern berry pasture. And this is high praise;for though in New England we have many singers more brilliant than thefield sparrow, we have none that are sweeter, and few that in the longrun give more pleasure to sensitive hearers. 

I found the pine-wood sparrow afterward in New Smyrna, Port Orange, Sanford, and Tallahassee. So far as I could tell, it was always the samebird; but I shot no specimens, and speak with no authority. [1] Livingalways in the pine lands, and haunting the dense undergrowth, it isheard a hundred times where it is seen once, --a point greatly in favorof its effectiveness as a musician. Mr. Brewster speaks of it as singingalways from an elevated perch, while the birds that I saw in the act ofsong, a very limited number, were invariably perched low. One that Iwatched in New Smyrna (one of a small chorus, the others beinginvisible) sang for a quarter of an hour from a stake or stump whichrose perhaps a foot above the dwarf palmetto. It was the same song thatI had heard in St. Augustine; only the birds here were in a liveliermood, and sang _out_ instead of _sotto voce_. The long introductory notesounded sometimes as if it were indrawn, and often, if not always, had aconsiderable burr in it. Once in a while the strain was caught up at theend and sung over again, after the manner of the field sparrow, --one ofthat bird's prettiest tricks. At other times the song was delivered withfull voice, and then repeated almost under the singer's breath. This wasdone beautifully in the Port Orange flat-woods, the bird being almost atmy feet. I had seen him a moment before, and saw him again half a minutelater, but at that instant he was out of sight in the scrub, andseemingly on the ground. This feature of the song, one of its chiefmerits and its most striking peculiarity, is well described by Mr. Brewster. "Now, " he says, "it has a full, bell-like ring that seems tofill the air around; next it is soft and low and inexpressibly tender;now it is clear again, but so modulated that the sound seems to comefrom a great distance. "[2]

[Footnote 1: Two races of the pine-wood sparrow are recognized byornithologists, _Pucaea aestivalis_ and _P. Aestivalis bachmanii_, andboth of them have been found in Florida; but, if I understand the matterright, _Pucaea aestivalis_ is the common and typical Florida bird. ]

[Footnote 2: _Bulletin on the Nuttall Ornithological Club_, vol. Vii. P. 98. ]

Not many other birds, I think (I cannot recall any), habitually varytheir song in this manner. Other birds sing almost inaudibly at times, especially in the autumnal season. Even the brown thrasher, whoseordinary performance, is so full-voiced, not to say boisterous, willsometimes soliloquize, or seem to soliloquize, in the faintest ofundertones. The formless autumnal warble of the song sparrow is familiarto every one. And in this connection I remember, and am not likely everto forget, a winter wren who favored me with what I thought the mostbewitching bit of vocalism to which I had ever listened. He was in thebushes close at my side, in the Franconia Notch, and delivered his wholesong, with all its customary length, intricacy, and speed, in a tone--awhisper, I may almost say--that ran along the very edge of silence. Theunexpected proximity of a stranger may have had something to do with hisconduct, as it often appears to have with the thrasher's; but, howeverthat may be, the cases are not parallel with that of the pine-woodsparrow, inasmuch as the latter bird not merely sings under his breathon special occasions, whether on account of the nearness of a listeneror for any other reason, but in his ordinary singing uses louder andsofter tones interchangeably, almost exactly as human singers andplayers do; as if, in the practice of his art, he had learned toappreciate, consciously or unconsciously (and practice naturally goesbefore theory), the expressive value of what I believe is called musicaldynamics. 

I spent many half-days in the pine lands (how gladly now would I spendanother!), but never got far into them. ("Into their depths, " my pen wason the point of making me say; but that would have been a false note. The flat-woods have no "depths. ") Whether I followed the railway, --inmany respects a pretty satisfactory method, --or some roundabout, aimlesscarriage road, a mile or two was generally enough. The country offers notemptation to pedestrian feats, nor does the imagination find itsaccount in going farther and farther. For the reader is not to think ofthe flat-woods as in the least resembling a Northern forest, which atevery turn opens before the visitor and beckons him forward. Beyond andbehind, and on either side, the pine-woods are ever the same. It is thismonotony, by the bye, this utter absence of landmarks, that makes it sounsafe for the stranger to wander far from the beaten track. The sand isdeep, the sun is hot; one place is as good as another. What use, then, to tire yourself? And so, unless the traveler is going somewhere, as Iseldom was, he is continually stopping by the way. Now a shady spotentices him to put down his umbrella, --for there _is_ a shady spot, hereand there, even in a Florida pine-wood; or blossoms are to be plucked;or a butterfly, some gorgeous and nameless creature, brightens the woodas it passes; or a bird is singing; or an eagle is soaring far overhead, and must be watched out of sight; or a buzzard, with upturned wings, floats suspiciously near the wanderer, as if with sinister intent(buzzard shadows are a regular feature of the flat-wood landscape, justas cloud shadows are in a mountainous country); or a snake liesstretched out in the sun, --a "whip snake, " perhaps, that frightens theunwary stroller by the amazing swiftness with which it runs away fromhim; or some strange invisible insect is making uncanny noises in theunderbrush. One of my recollections of the railway woods at St. Augustine is of a cricket, or locust, or something else, --I never sawit, --that amused me often with a formless rattling or drumming sound. Icould think of nothing but a boy's first lesson upon the bones, therhythm of the beats was so comically mistimed and bungled. 

One fine morning, --it was the 18th of February, --I had gone down therailroad a little farther than usual, attracted by the encouragingappearance of a swampy patch of rather large deciduous trees. Some ofthem, I remember, were red maples, already full of handsome, high-colored fruit. As I drew near, I heard indistinctly from among themwhat might have been the song of a black-throated green warbler, a birdthat would have made a valued addition to my Florida list, especially atthat early date. [1] No sooner was the song repeated, however, than I sawthat I had been deceived; it was something I had never heard before. Butit certainly had much of the black-throated green's quality, and withoutquestion was the note of a warbler of some kind. What a shame if thebird should give me the slip! Meanwhile, it kept on singing at briefintervals, and was not so far away but that, with my glass, I should bewell able to make it out, if only I could once get my eyes on it. Thatwas the difficulty. Something stirred among the branches. Yes, ayellow-throated warbler (_Dendroica dominica_), a bird of which I hadseen my first specimens, all of them silent, during the last eight days. Probably he was the singer. I hoped so, at any rate. That would be anideal case of a beautiful bird with a song to match. I kept him under myglass, and presently the strain was repeated, but not by him. Then itceased, and I was none the wiser. Perhaps I never should be. It wasindeed a shame. Such a _taking_ song; so simple, and yet so pretty, andso thoroughly distinctive. I wrote it down thus: _tee-koi, tee-koo_, --two couplets, the first syllable of each a little emphasizedand dwelt upon, not drawled, and a little higher in pitch than itsfellow. Perhaps it might be expressed thus:--

[Illustration]

I cannot profess to be sure of that, however, nor have I unqualifiedconfidence in the adequacy of musical notation, no matter how skillfullyemployed, to convey a truthful idea of any bird song. 

[Footnote 1: As it was, I did not find _Dendroica virens_ in Florida. Onmy way home, in Atlanta, April 20, I saw one bird in a dooryardshade-tree. ]

The affair remained a mystery till, in Daytona, nine days afterward, thesame notes were heard again, this time in lower trees that did not standin deep water. Then it transpired that my mysterious warbler was not awarbler at all, but the Carolina chickadee. That was an outcome quiteunexpected, although I now remembered that chickadees were in or nearthe St. Augustine swamp; and what was more to the purpose, I could nowdiscern some relationship between the _tee-koi, tee-koo_ (or, as I nowwrote it, _see-toi, see-too_), and the familiar so-called phoebe whistleof the black-capped titmouse. The Southern bird, I am bound toacknowledge, is much the more accomplished singer of the two. Sometimeshe repeats the second dissyllable, making six notes in all. At othertimes he breaks out with a characteristic volley of fine chickadeenotes, and runs without a break into the _see-toi, see-too_, with ahighly pleasing effect. Then if, on the top of this, he doubles the_see-too_, we have a really prolonged and elaborate musical effort, quite putting into the shade our New England bird's _hear, hear me_, sweet and welcome as that always is. 

The Southern chickadee, it should be said, is not to be distinguishedfrom its Northern relative--in the bush, I mean--except by its notes. Itis slightly smaller, like Southern birds in general, but is practicallyidentical in plumage. Apart from its song, what most impressed me wasits scarcity. It was found, sooner or later, wherever I went, I believe, but always in surprisingly small numbers, and I saw only one nest. Thatwas built in a roadside china-tree in Tallahassee, and contained youngones (April 17), as was clear from the conduct of its owners. 

It must not be supposed that I left St. Augustine without another searchfor my unknown "warbler. " The very next morning found me again at theswamp, where for at least an hour I sat and listened. I heard no_tee-koi, tee-koo_, but was rewarded twice over for my walk. In thefirst place, before reaching the swamp, I found the third of myflat-wood novelties, the red-cockaded woodpecker. As had happened withthe nuthatch and the sparrow, I heard him before seeing him: first somenotes, which by themselves would hardly have suggested a woodpeckerorigin, and then a noise of hammering. Taken together, the two sounds, left little doubt as to their author; and presently I saw him, --orrather them, for there were two birds. I learned nothing about them, either then or afterwards (I saw perhaps eight individuals during my tenweeks' visit), but it was worth something barely to see and hear them. Henceforth _Dryobates borealis_ is a bird, and not merely a name. This, as I have said, was among the pines, before reaching the swamp. In theswamp itself, there suddenly appeared from somewhere, as if by magic (adramatic entrance is not without its value, even out-of-doors), a lessnovel but far more impressive figure, a pileated woodpecker; a trulysplendid fellow, with the scarlet cheek-patches. When I caught sight ofhim, he stood on one of the upper branches of a tall pine, lookingwonderfully alert and wide-awake; now stretching out his scrawny neck, and now drawing it in again, his long crest all the while erect andflaming. After a little he dropped into the underbrush, out of whichcame at intervals a succession of raps. I would have given something tohave had him under my glass just then, for I had long felt curious tosee him in the act of chiseling out those big, oblong, clean-cut, sharp-angled "peck-holes" which, close to the base of the tree, make socommon and notable a feature of Vermont and New Hampshire forests; but, though I did my best, I could not find him, till all at once he came upagain and took to a tall pine, --the tallest in the wood, --where hepranced about for a while, striking sundry picturesque but seeminglyaimless attitudes, and then made off for good. All in all, he was awild-looking bird, if ever I saw one. 

I was no sooner in St. Augustine, of course, than my eyes were open forwild flowers. Perhaps I felt a little disappointed. Certainly the landwas not ablaze with color. In the grass about the old fort fhere wasplenty of the yellow oxalis and the creeping white houstonia; and from acrevice in the wall, out of reach, leaned a stalk of goldenrod in fullbloom. The reader may smile, if he will, but this last flower was asurprise and a stumbling-block. A vernal goldenrod! Dr. Chapman's Floramade no mention of such an anomaly. Sow thistles, too, looked strangelyanachronistic. I had never thought of them as harbingers of springtime. The truth did not break upon me till a week or so afterward. Then, onthe way to the beach at Daytona, where the pleasant peninsula roadtraverses a thick forest of short-leaved pines, every tree of whichleans heavily inland at the same angle ("the leaning pines of Daytona, "I always said to myself, as I passed), I came upon some whitebeggar's-ticks, --like daisies; and as I stopped to see what they were, I noticed the presence of ripe seeds. The plant had been in flower along time. And then I laughed at my own dullness. It fairly deserved amedal. As if, even in Massachusetts, autumnal flowers--the groundsel, at least--did not sometimes persist in blossoming far into the winter! Aday or two after this, I saw a mullein stalk still presenting arms, asit were (the mullein, always looks the soldier to me), with one brightflower. If I had found _that_ in St. Augustine, I flatter myself Ishould have been less easily fooled. 

There were no such last-year relics in the flat-woods, so far as Iremember, but spring blossoms were beginning to make their appearancethere by the middle of February, particularly along therailroad, --violets in abundance (_Viola cucullata_), dwarforange-colored dandelions (_Krigia_), the Judas-tree, or redbud, St. Peter's-wort, blackberry, the yellow star-flower (_Hypoxis juncea_), andbutterworts. I recall, too, in a swampy spot, a fine fresh tuft of thegolden club, with its gorgeous yellow spadix, --a plant that I had neverseen in bloom before, although I had once admired a Cape Cod "hollow"full of the rank tropical leaves. St. Peter's-wort, a low shrub, thriveseverywhere in the pine barrens, and, without being especiallyattractive, its rather sparse yellow flowers--not unlike the St. John's-wort--do something to enliven the general waste. The butterwortsare beauties, and true children of the spring. I picked my first ones, which by chance were of the smaller purple species (_Pinguiculapumila_), on my way down from the woods, on a moist bank. At that momenta white man came up the road. "What do you call this flower?" said I. "Valentine's flower, " he answered at once. "Ah, " said I, "because it isin bloom on St. Valentine's Day, I suppose?" "No, sir, " he said. "Do youspeak Spanish?" I had to shake my head. "Because I could explain itbetter in Spanish, " he continued, as if by way of apology; but he wenton in perfectly good English: "If you put one of them under your pillow, and think of some one you would like very much to see, --some one who hasbeen dead a long time, --you will be likely to dream of him. It is a verypretty flower, " he added. And so it is; hardly prettier, however, to mythinking, than the blossoms of the early creeping blackberry (_Rubustrivialis_). With them I fairly fell in love: true white roses, I calledthem, each with its central ring of dark purplish stamens; as beautifulas the cloudberry, which once, ten years before, I had found, on thesummit of Mount Clinton, in New Hampshire, and refused to believe a_Rubus_, though Dr. Gray's key led me to that genus again and again. There _is_ something in a name, say what you will. 

Some weeks later, and a little farther south, --in the flat-woods behindNew Smyrna, --I saw other flowers, but never anything of that tropicalexuberance at which the average Northern tourist expects to find himselfstaring. Boggy places were full of blue iris (the common _Irisversicolor_ of New England, but of ranker growth), and here and there apool was yellow with bladderwort. I was taken also with the larger andtaller (yellow) butterwort, which I used never to see as I went throughthe woods in the morning, but was sure to find standing in the tall drygrass along the border of the sandy road, here one and there one, on myreturn at noon. In similar places grew a "yellow daisy" (_Leptopoda_), asingle big head, of a deep color, at the top of a leafless stem. Itseemed to be one of the most abundant of Florida spring flowers, but Icould not learn that it went by any distinctive vernacular name. Besidethe railway track were blue-eyed grass and pipewort, and a dainty bluelobelia (_L. Feayana_), with once in a while an extremely prettycoreopsis, having a purple centre, and scarcely to be distinguished fromone that is common in gardens. No doubt the advancing season brings anincreasing wealth of such beauty to the flat-woods. No doubt, too, Imissed the larger half of what might have been found even at the time ofmy visit; for I made no pretense of doing any real botanical work, having neither the time nor the equipment. The birds kept me busy, forthe most part, when the country itself did not absorb my attention. 

More interesting, and a thousand times more memorable, than any floweror bird was the pine barren itself. I have given no true idea of it, Iam perfectly aware: open, parklike, flooded with sunshine, level as afloor. "What heartache, " Lanier breaks out, poor exile, dying ofconsumption, --"what heartache! Ne'er a hill!" A dreary country to ridethrough, hour after hour; an impossible country to live in, but mostpleasant for a half-day winter stroll. Notwithstanding I never went farinto it, as I have already said, I had always a profound sensation ofremoteness; as if I might go on forever, and be no farther away. 

Yet even here I had more than one reminder that the world is a smallplace. I met a burly negro in a cart, and fell into talk with him aboutthe Florida climate, an endless topic, out of which a cynical travelermay easily extract almost endless amusement. How abput the summers here?I inquired. Were they really as paradisaical (I did not use that word)as some reports would lead one to suppose? The man smiled, as if he hadheard something like that before. He did not think the Florida summer adream of delight, even on the east coast. "I'm tellin' you the truth, sah; the mosquiters an' sandflies is awful. " Was he born here? I asked. No; he came from B----, Alabama. Everybody in eastern Florida came fromsomewhere, as well as I could make out. 

"Oh, from B----, " said I. "Did you know Mr. W----, of the ---- IronWorks?"

He smiled again. "Yes, sah; I used to work for him. He's a nice man. " Hespoke the truth that time beyond a peradventure. He was healthier herethan in the other place, he thought, and wages were higher; but he likedthe other place better "for pleasure. " It was an odd coincidence, was itnot, that I should meet in this solitude a man who knew the only citizenof Alabama with whom I was ever acquainted. 

At another time I fell in with an oldish colored man, who, like myself, had taken to the woods for a quiet Sunday stroll. _He_ was fromMississippi, he told me. Oh, yes, he remembered the war; he was a slave, twenty-one years old, when it broke out. To his mind, the presentgeneration of "niggers" were a pretty poor lot, for all their"edication. " He had seen them crowding folks off the sidewalk, andpuffing smoke in their faces. All of which was nothing new; I had foundthat story more or less common among negroes of his age. He didn'tbelieve much in "edication;" but when I asked if he thought the blackswere better off in slavery times, he answered quickly, "I'd rather be afree man, _I_ had. " He wasn't married; he had plenty to do to take careof himself. We separated, he going one way and I the other; but heturned to ask, with much seriousness (the reader must remember that thiswas only three months after a national election), "Do you think they'llget free trade?" "Truly, " said I to myself, "'the world is too much withus. ' Even in the flat-woods there is no escaping the tariff question. "But I answered, in what was meant to be a reassuring tone, "Not yetawhile. Some time. " "I hope not, " he said, --as if liberty to buy andsell would be a dreadful blow to a man living in a shanty in a Floridapine barren! He was taking the matter rather too much to heart, perhaps;but surely it was encouraging to see such a man interested in broadeconomical questions, and I realized as never before the truth of whatthe newspapers so continually tell us, that political campaigns areeducational. 

BESIDE THE MARSH. 

I am sitting upon the upland bank of a narrow winding creek. Before meis a sea of grass, brown and green of many shades. To the north themarsh is bounded by live-oak woods, --a line with numberlessindentations, --beyond which runs the Matanzas River, as I know by thepassing and repassing of sails behind the trees. Eastward aresand-hills, dazzling white in the sun, with a ragged green fringe alongtheir tops. Then comes a stretch of the open sea, and then, more to thesouth, St. Anastasia Island, with its tall black-and-white lighthouseand the cluster of lower buildings at its base. Small sailboats, and nowand then a tiny steamer, pass up and down the river to and from St. Augustine. 

A delicious south wind is blowing (it is the 15th of February), and Isit in the shade of a cedar-tree and enjoy the air and the scene. Acontrast, this, to the frozen world I was living in, less than a weekago. 

As I approached the creek, a single spotted sandpiper was teeteringalong the edge of the water, and the next moment a big blue heron rosejust beyond him and went flapping away to the middle of the marsh. Now, an hour afterward, he is still standing there, towering above the tallgrass. Once when I turned that way I saw, as I thought, a stake, andthen something moved upon it, --a bird of some kind. And what an enormousbeak! I raised my field-glass. It was the heron. His body was the post, and his head was the bird. Meanwhile, the sandpiper has stolen away, Iknow not when or where. He must have omitted the _tweet, tweet_, withwhich ordinarily he signalizes his flight. He is the first of his kindthat I have seen during my brief stay in these parts. 

Now a multitude of crows pass over; fish crows, I think they must be, from their small size and their strange, ridiculous voices. And now asecond great blue heron comes in sight, and keeps on over the marsh andover the live-oak wood, on his way to the San Sebastian marshes, or somepoint still more remote. A fine show he makes, with his wide expanse ofwing, and his feet drawn up and standing out behind him. Next a marshhawk in brown plumage comes skimming over the grass. This way and thathe swerves in ever graceful lines. For one to whom ease and grace comeby nature, even the chase of meadow mice is an act of beauty, whileanother goes awkwardly though in pursuit of a goddess. 

Several times I have noticed a kingfisher hovering above the grass (soit looks, but no doubt he is over an arm of the creek), striking the airwith quick strokes, and keeping his head pointed downward, after themanner of a tern. Then he disappeared while I was looking at somethingelse. Now I remark him sitting motionless upon the top of a post in themidst of the marsh. 

A third blue heron appears, and he too flies over without stopping. Number One still keeps his place; through the glass I can see himdressing his feathers with his clumsy beak. The lively strain of awhite-eyed vireo, pertest of songsters, comes to me from somewhere on myright, and the soft chipping of myrtle warblers is all but incessant. Ilook up from my paper to see a turkey buzzard sailing majesticallynorthward. I watch him till he fades in the distance. Not once does heflap his wings, but sails and sails, going with the wind, yet turningagain and again to rise against it, --helping himself thus to itsadverse, uplifting pressure in the place of wing-strokes, perhaps, --andpassing onward all the while in beautiful circles. He, too, scavengerthough he is, has a genius for being graceful. One might almost bewilling to be a buzzard, to fly like that!

The kingfisher and the heron are still at their posts. An exquisiteyellow butterfly, of a sort strange to my Yankee eyes, flits past, followed by a red admiral. The marsh hawk is on the wing again, andwhile looking at him I descry a second hawk, too far away to be madeout. Now the air behind me is dark with crows, --a hundred or two, atleast, circling over the low cedars. Some motive they have for all theirclamor, but it passes my owlish wisdom to guess what it can be. A fourthblue heron appears, and drops into the grass out of sight. 

Between my feet is a single blossom of the yellow oxalis, the onlyflower to be seen; and very pretty it is, each petal with an orange spotat the base. 

Another buzzard, another marsh hawk, another yellow butterfly, and thena smaller one, darker, almost orange. It passes too quickly over thecreek and away. The marsh hawk comes nearer, and I see the strong yellowtinge of his plumage, especially underneath. He will grow handsomer ashe grows older. A pity the same could not be true of men. Behind me aresharp cries of titlarks. From the direction of the river come frequentreports of guns. Somebody is doing his best to be happy! All at once Iprick up my ears. From the grass just across the creek rises the brief, hurried song of a long-billed marsh wren. So _he_ is in Florida, is he?Already I have heard confused noises which I feel sure are the work ofrails of some kind. No doubt there is abundant life concealed in thoseacres on acres of close grass. 

The heron and the kingfisher are still quiet. Their morning hunt wassuccessful, and for to-day Fate cannot harm them. A buzzard, withnervous, rustling beats, goes directly above the low cedar under which Iam resting. 

At last, after a siesta of two hours, the heron has changed his place. Ilooked up just in season to see him sweeping over the grass, into whichhe dropped the next instant. The tide is falling. The distant sand-hillsare winking in the heat, but the breeze is deliciously cool, the veryperfection of temperature, if a man is to sit still in the shade. It iseleven o'clock. I have a mile to go in the hot sun, and turn away. Butfirst I sweep the line once more with my glass. Yonder to the south aretwo more blue herons standing in the grass. Perhaps there are morestill. I sweep the line. Yes, far, far away I can see four heads in arow. Heads and necks rise above the grass. But so far away! Are theybirds, or only posts made alive by my imagination? I look again. Ibelieve I was deceived. They are nothing but stakes. See how in a rowthey stand. I smile at myself. Just then one of them moves, and anotheris pulled down suddenly into the grass. I smile again. "Ten great blueherons, " I say to myself. 

All this has detained me, and meantime the kingfisher has taken wing andgone noisily up the creek. The marsh hawk appears once more. Akilldeer's sharp, rasping note--a familiar sound in St. Augustine--comesfrom I know not where. A procession of more than twenty black vulturespasses over my head. I can see their feet drawn up under them. My own Imust use in plodding homeward. 

ON THE BEACH AT DAYTONA. 

The first eight days of my stay in Daytona were so delightful that Ifelt as if I had never before seen fine weather, even in my dreams. Myeast window looked across the Halifax River to the peninsula woods. Beyond them was the ocean. Immediately after breakfast, therefore, Imade toward the north bridge, and in half an hour or less was on thebeach. Beaches are much the same the world over, and there is no need todescribe this one--Silver Beach, I think I heard it called--except tosay that it is broad, hard, and, for a pleasure-seeker's purpose, endless. It is backed by low sand-hills covered with impenetrablescrub, --oak and palmetto, --beyond which is a dense growth ofshort-leaved pines. Perfect weather, a perfect beach, and no throng ofpeople: here were the conditions of happiness; and here for eight days Ifound it. The ocean itself was a solitude. Day after day not a sail wasin sight. Looking up and down the beach, I could usually see somewherein the distance a carriage or two, and as many foot passengers; but Ioften walked a mile, or sat for half an hour, without being within hailof any one. Never were airs more gentle or colors more exquisite. 

As for birds, they were surprisingly scarce, but never wantingaltogether. If everything else failed, a few fish-hawks were sure to bein sight. I watched them at first with eager interest. Up and down thebeach they went, each by himself, with heads pointed downward, scanningthe shallow water. Often they stopped in their course, and by means oflaborious flappings held themselves poised over a certain spot. Then, perhaps, they set their wings and shot downward clean under water. Ifthe plunge was unsuccessful, they shook their feathers dry and wereready to begin again. They had the fisherman's gift. The second, andeven the third attempt might fail, but no matter; it was simply aquestion of time and patience. If the fish was caught, their firstconcern seemed to be to shift their hold upon it, till its head pointedto the front. That done, they shook themselves vigorously and startedlandward, the shining white victim wriggling vainly in the clutch of thetalons. I took it for granted that they retired with their quarry tosome secluded spot on the peninsula, till one day I happened to bestanding upon a sand-hill as one passed overhead. Then I perceived thathe kept on straight across the peninsula and the river. More than once, however, I saw one of them in no haste to go inland. On my second visit, a hawk came circling about my head, carrying a fish. I was surprised atthe action, but gave it no second thought, nor once imagined that he wasmaking me his protector, till suddenly a large bird dropped ratherawkwardly upon the sand, not far before me. He stood for an instant onhis long, ungainly legs, and then, showing a white head and a whitetail, rose with a fish in his talons, and swept away landward out ofsight. Here was the osprey's parasite, the bald eagle, for which I hadbeen on the watch. Meantime, the hawk too had disappeared. Whether itwas his fish which the eagle had picked up (having missed it in the air)I cannot say. I did not see it fall, and knew nothing of the eagle'spresence until he fluttered to the beach. 

Some days later, I saw the big thief--emblem of American liberty--playhis sharp game to the finish. I was crossing the bridge, and by accidentturned and looked upward. (By accident, I say, but I was always doingit. ) High in the air were two birds, one chasing the other, --a fish-hawkand a young eagle with dark head and tail. The hawk meant to save hisdinner if he could. Round and round he went, ascending at every turn, his pursuer after him hotly. For aught I could see, he stood a goodchance of escape, till all at once another pair of wings swept into thefield of my glass. 

 "A third is in the race! Who is the third, Speeding away swift as the eagle bird?"

It _was_ an eagle, an adult, with head and tail white. Only once morethe osprey circled. The odds were against him, and he let go the fish. As it fell, the old eagle swooped after it, missed it, swooped again, and this time, long before it could reach the water, had it fast in hisclaws. Then off he went, the younger one in pursuit. They passed out ofsight behind the trees of an island, one close upon the other, and I donot know how the controversy ended; but I would have wagered a trifle onthe old white-head, the bird of Washington. 

The scene reminded me of one I had witnessed in Georgia a fortnightbefore, on my way south. The train stopped at a backwoods station; someof the passengers gathered upon the steps of the car, and the usual bevyof young negroes came alongside. "Stand on my head for a nickel?" saidone. A passenger put his hand into his pocket; the boy did as he hadpromised, --in no very professional style, be it said, --and with a grinstretched out his hand. The nickel glistened in the sun, and on theinstant a second boy sprang forward, snatched it out of the sand, andmade off in triumph amid the hilarious applause of his fellows. Theacrobat's countenance indicated a sense of injustice, and I had no doubtthat my younger eagle was similarly affected. "Where is our boastedhonor among thieves?" I imagined him asking. The bird of freedom is agreat bird, and the land of the free is a great country. Here, let ushope, the parallel ends. Whether on the banks of Newfoundland orelsewhere, it cannot be that the great republic would ever snatch a fishthat did not belong to it. 

I admired the address of the fish-hawks until I saw the gannets. Then Iperceived that the hawks, with all their practice, were no better thanlandlubbers. The gannets kept farther out at sea. Sometimes a scatteredflock remained in sight for the greater part of a forenoon. With theirlong, sharp wings and their outstretched necks, --like loons, but with adifferent flight, --they were rakish-looking customers. Sometimes from agreat height, sometimes from a lower, sometimes at an incline, andsometimes vertically, they plunged into the water, and after an absenceof some seconds, as it seemed, came up and rested upon the surface. Theywere too far away to be closely observed, and for a time I did not feelcertain what they were. The larger number were in dark plumage, and itwas not till a white one appeared that I said with assurance, "Gannets!"With the bright sun on him, he was indeed a splendid bird, snowy white, with the tips of his wings jet black. If he would have come inshore likethe ospreys, I think I should never have tired of his evolutions. 

The gannets showed themselves only now and then, but the brown pelicanswere an every-day sight. I had found them first on the beach at St. Augustine. Here at Daytona they never alighted on the sand, and seldomin the water. They were always flying up or down the beach, and, unlessturned from their course by the presence of some suspicious object, theykept straight on just above the breakers, rising and falling with thewaves; now appearing above them, and now out of sight in the trough ofthe sea. Sometimes a single bird passed, but commonly they were in smallflocks. Once I saw seventeen together, --a pretty long procession; for, whatever their number, they went always in Indian file. Evidently somedreadful thing would happen if two pelicans should ever travel abreast. It was partly this unusual order of march, I suspect, which gave such anair of preternatural gravity to their movements. It was impossible tosee even two of them go by without feeling almost as if I were inchurch. First, both birds flew a rod or two with slow and statelyflappings; then, as if at some preconcerted signal, both set their wingsand scaled for about the same distance; then they resumed their wingstrokes; and so on, till they passed out of sight. I never heard themutter a sound, or saw them make a movement of any sort (I speak of whatI saw at Daytona) except to fly straight on, one behind another. Ifchurch ceremonials are still open to amendment, I would suggest, in nospirit of irreverence, that a study of pelican processionals would becertain to yield edifying results. Nothing done in any cathedral couldbe more solemn. Indeed, their solemnity was so great that I came at lastto find it almost ridiculous; but that, of course, was only from a wantof faith on the part of the beholder. The birds, as I say, were _brown_pelicans. Had they been of the other species, in churchly white andblack, the ecclesiastical effect would perhaps have been heightened, though such a thing is hardly conceivable. 

Some beautiful little gulls, peculiarly dainty in their appearance("Bonaparte's gulls, " they are called in books, but "surf gulls" wouldbe a prettier and apter name), were also given to flying along thebreakers, but in a manner very different from the pelicans'; asdifferent, I may say, as the birds themselves. They, too, moved steadilyonward, north or south as the case might be, but fed as they went, dropping into the shallow water between the incoming waves, and risingagain to escape the next breaker. The action was characteristic andgraceful, though often somewhat nervous and hurried. I noticed that thebirds commonly went by twos, but that may have been nothing more than acoincidence. Beside these small surf gulls, never at all numerous, Iusually saw a few terns, and now and then one or two rather large gulls, which, as well as I could make out, must have been the ring-billed. Itwas a strange beach, I thought, where fish-hawks invariably outnumberedboth gulls and terns. 

Of beach birds, properly so called, I saw none but sanderlings. Theywere no novelty, but I always stopped to look at them; busy as ants, running in a body down the beach after a receding wave, and the nextmoment scampering back again with all speed before an incoming one. Theytolerated no near approach, but were at once on the wing for a longflight up or down the coast, looking like a flock of snow-white birds asthey turned their under parts to the sun in rising above the breakers. Their manner of feeding, with the head pitched forward, and a quick, eager movement, as if they had eaten nothing for days, and were fearfulthat their present bit of good fortune would not last, is stronglycharacteristic, so that they can be recognized a long way off. As I havesaid, they were the only true beach birds; but I rarely failed to seeone or two great blue herons playing that rôle. The first one filled mewith surprise. I had never thought of finding him in such a place; butthere he stood, and before I was done with Florida beaches I had come tolook upon him as one of their most constant _habitués_. In truth, thislargest of the herons is well-nigh omnipresent in Florida. Whereverthere is water, fresh or salt, he is certain to be met with sooner orlater; and even in the driest place, if you stay there long enough, youwill be likely to see him passing overhead, on his way to the water, which is nowhere far off. On the beach, as everywhere else, he is amodel of patience. To the best of my recollection, I never saw him catcha fish there; and I really came to think it pathetic, the persistencywith which he would stand, with the water half way to his knees, leaningforward expectantly toward the breakers, as if he felt that this greatand generous ocean, which had so many fish to spare, could not fail tosend him, at last, the morsel for which he was waiting. 

But indeed I was not long in perceiving that the Southern climate madepatience a comparatively easy virtue, and fishing, by a naturalconsequence, a favorite avocation. Day after day, as I crossed thebridges on my way to and from the beach, the same men stood against therail, holding their poles over the river. They had an air of having beenthere all winter. I came to recognize them, though I knew none of theirnames. One was peculiarly happy looking, almost radiant, with aneducated face, and only one hand. His disability hindered him, no doubt. I never saw so much as a sheep-head or a drum lying at his feet. Butinwardly, I felt sure, his luck was good. Another was older, fifty atleast, sleek and well dressed. He spoke pleasantly enough, if Iaddressed him; otherwise he attended strictly to business. Every day hewas there, morning and afternoon. He, I think, had better fortune thanany of the others. Once I saw him land a large and handsome "speckledtrout, " to the unmistakable envy of his brother anglers. Still a thirdwas a younger man, with a broad-brimmed straw hat and a taciturn habit;no less persevering than Number Two, perhaps, but far less successful. Imarveled a little at their enthusiasm (there were many beside these), and they, in their turn, did not altogether conceal their amusement atthe foibles of a man, still out of Bedlam, who walked and walked andwalked, always with a field-glass protruding from his side pocket, whichnow and then he pulled out suddenly and leveled at nothing. It is one ofthe merciful ameliorations of this present evil world that men are thusmutually entertaining. 

These anglers were to be congratulated. Ordered South by theirphysicians, --as most of them undoubtedly were, --compelled to spend thewinter away from friends and business, amid all the discomforts ofSouthern hotels, they were happy in having at least one thing which theyloved to do. Blessed is the invalid who has an outdoor hobby. One man, whom I met more than once in my beach rambles, seemed to devote himselfto bathing, running, and walking. He looked like an athlete; I heard himtell how far he could run without getting "winded;" and as he sprintedup and down the sand in his scanty bathing costume, I always found him apleasing spectacle. Another runner there gave me a half-hour ofamusement that turned at the last to a feeling of almost painfulsympathy. He was not in bathing costume, nor did he look particularlyathletic. He was teaching his young lady to ride a bicycle, and hispupil was at that most interesting stage of a learner's career when themachine is beginning to steady itself. With a very little assistance shewent bravely, while at the same time the young man felt it necessary notto let go his hold upon her for more than a few moments at once. At allevents, he must be with her at the turn. She plied the pedals withvigor, and he ran alongside or behind, as best he could; she excited, and he out of breath. Back and forth they went, and it was a relief tome when finally he took off his coat. I left him still panting in hisfair one's wake, and hoped it would not turn out a case of "love'slabor's lost. " Let us hope, too, that he was not an invalid. 

While speaking of these my companions in idleness, I may as well mentionan older man, --a rural philosopher, he seemed, --whom I met again andagain, always in search of shells. He was from Indiana, he told me withagreeable garrulity. His grandchildren would like the shells. He hadperhaps made a mistake in coming so far south. It was pretty warm, hethought, and he feared the change would be too great when he went homeagain. If a man's lungs were bad, he ought to go to a warm place, ofcourse. _He_ came for his stomach, which was now pretty well, --a capitalproof of the superior value of fresh air over "proper" food in dyspeptictroubles; for if there is anywhere in the world a place in which adelicate stomach would fare worse than in a Southern hotel, --of thesecond or third class, --may none but my enemies ever find it. Seashellcollecting is not a panacea. For a disease like old age, for instance, it might prove to be an alleviation rather than a cure; but taken longenough, and with a sufficient mixture of enthusiasm, --a true _sine quanon_, --it will be found efficacious, I believe, in all ordinary cases ofdyspepsia. 

My Indiana man was far from being alone in his cheerful pursuit. Ifstrangers, men or women, met me on the beach and wished to say somethingmore than good-morning, they were sure to ask, "Have you found anypretty shells?" One woman was a collector of a more businesslike turn. She had brought a camp-stool, and when I first saw her in the distancewas removing her shoes, and putting on rubber boots. Then she moved herstool into the surf, sat upon it with a tin pail beside her, and, leaning forward over the water, fell to doing something, --I could nottell what. She was so industrious that I did not venture to disturb her, as I passed; but an hour or two afterward I overtook her going homewardacross the peninsula with her invalid husband, and she showed me herpail full of the tiny coquina clams, which she said were very nice forsoup, as indeed I knew. Some days later, I found a man collecting themfor the market, with the help of a horse and a cylindrical wire roller. With his trousers rolled to his knees, he waded in the surf, andshoveled the incoming water and sand into the wire roller through anaperture left for that purpose. Then he closed the aperture, and drovethe horse back and forth through the breakers till the clams were washedclear of the sand, after which he poured them out into a shallow traylike a long bread-pan, and transferred them from that to a big bag. Icame up just in time to see them in the tray, bright with all the colorsof the rainbow. "Will you hold the bag open?" he said. I was glad tohelp (it was perhaps the only useful ten minutes that I passed inFlorida); and so, counting quart by quart, he dished them into it. Therewere thirty odd quarts, but he wanted a bushel and a quarter, and againtook up the shovel. The clams themselves were not, canned and shipped, he said, but only the "juice. "

Many rudely built cottages stood on the sand-hills just behind thebeach, especially at the points, a mile or so apart, where the twoDaytona bridge roads come out of the scrub; and one day, while walkingup the beach to Ormond, I saw before me a much more elaborate Queen Annehouse. Fancifully but rather neatly painted, and with a stable to match, it looked like an exotic. As I drew near, its venerable owner was atwork in front of it, shoveling a path through the sand, --just as, atthat moment (February 24), thousands of Yankee householders wereshoveling paths through the snow, which then was reported by thenewspapers to be seventeen inches deep in the streets of Boston. Hisreverend air and his long black coat proclaimed him a clergyman past allpossibility of doubt. He seemed to have got to heaven before death, theplace was so attractive; but being still in a body terrestrial, he mayhave found the meat market rather distant, and mosquitoes and sand-fliessometimes a plague. As I walked up the beach, he drove by me in an openwagon with a hired man. They kept on till they came to a log which hadbeen cast up by the sea, and evidently had been sighted from the house. The hired man lifted it into the wagon, and they drove back, --quite astirring adventure, I imagined; an event to date from, at the veryleast. 

The smaller cottages were nearly all empty at that season. At differenttimes I made use of many of them, when the sun was hot, or I had beenlong afoot. Once I was resting thus on a flight of front steps, when athree-seated carriage came down the beach and pulled up opposite. Thedriver wished to ask me a question, I thought; no doubt I looked verymuch at home. From the day I had entered Florida, every one I met hadseemed to know me intuitively for a New Englander, and most of them--Icould not imagine how--had divined that I came from Boston. It gratifiedme to believe that I was losing a little of my provincial manner, underthe influence of more extended travel. But my pride had a sudden fall. The carriage stopped, as I said; but instead of inquiring the way, thedriver alighted, and all the occupants of the carriage proceeded to dothe same, --eight women, with baskets and sundries. It was time for me tobe starting. I descended the steps, and pulled off my hat to the firstcomer, who turned out to be the proprietor of the establishment. With agracious smile, she hoped they were "not frightening me away. " She andher friends had come for a day's picnic at the cottage. Things being asthey were (eight women), she could hardly invite me to share thefestivities, and, with my best apology for the intrusion, I withdrew. 

Of one building on the sand-hills I have peculiarly pleasantrecollections. It was not a cottage, but had evidently been put up as apublic resort; especially, as I inferred, for Sunday-school or parishpicnics. It was furnished with a platform for speech-making (is thereany foolishness that men will not commit on sea beaches and mountaintops?), and, what was more to my purpose, was open on three sides. Ipassed a good deal of time there, first and last, and once it shelteredme from a drenching shower of an hour or two. The lightning was vivid, and the rain fell in sheets. In the midst of the blackness andcommotion, a single tern, ghostly white, flew past, and toward the closea bunch of sanderlings came down the edge of the breakers, still lookingfor something to eat. The only other living things in sight were twoyoung fellows, who had improved the opportunity to try a dip in thesurf. Their color indicated that they were not yet hardened to open-airbathing, and from their actions it was evident that they found the oceancool. They were wet enough before they were done, but it was mostly withfresh water. Probably they took no harm; but I am moved to remark, inpassing, that I sometimes wondered how generally physicians who orderpatients to Florida for the winter caution them against imprudentexposure. To me, who am no doctor, it seemed none too safe for youngwomen with consumptive tendencies to be out sailing in open boats onwinter evenings, no matter how warm the afternoon had been, while I sawone case where a surf bath taken by such an invalid was followed by aday of prostration and fever. "We who live here, " said a resident, "don't think the water is warm enough yet; but for these Northern folksit is a great thing to go into the surf in February, and you can't keepthem out. "

The rows of cottages of which I have spoken were in one sense adetriment to the beach; but on the whole, and in their present desertedcondition, I found them an advantage. It was easy enough to walk awayfrom them, if a man wanted the feeling of utter solitude (the beachextends from Matanzas Inlet to Mosquito Inlet, thirty-five miles, moreor less); while at other times they not only furnished shadow and aseat, but, with the paths and little clearings behind them, were anattraction to many birds. Here I found my first Florida jays. They saton the chimney-tops and ridgepoles, and I was rejoiced to discover thatthese unique and interesting creatures, one of the special objects of myjourney South, were not only common, but to an extraordinary degreeapproachable. Their extreme confidence in man is one of their oddestcharacteristics. I heard from more than one person how easily and "inalmost no time" they could be tamed, if indeed they needed taming. Aresident of Hawks Park told me that they used to come into his house andstand upon the corners of the dinner table waiting for their share ofthe meal. When he was hoeing in the garden, they would perch on his hat, and stay there by the hour, unless he drove them off. He never didanything to tame them except to treat them kindly. When a brood was oldenough to leave the nest, the parents brought the youngsters up to thedoorstep as a matter of course. 

The Florida jay, a bird of the scrub, is not to be confounded with theFlorida _blue_ jay (a smaller and less conspicuously crested duplicateof our common Northern bird), to which it bears little resemblanceeither in personal appearance or in voice. Seen from behind, its aspectis peculiarly striking; the head, wings, rump, and tail being dark blue, with an almost rectangular patch of gray set in the midst. Its beak isvery stout, and its tail very long; and though it would attractattention anywhere, it is hardly to be called handsome or graceful. Itsnotes--such of them as I heard, that is--are mostly guttural, withlittle or nothing of the screaming quality which distinguishes the bluejay's voice. To my ear they were often suggestive of the Northernshrike. 

On the 23d of February I was standing on the rear piazza of one of thecottages, when a jay flew into the oak and palmetto scrub close by. Asecond glance, and I saw that she was busy upon a nest. When she hadgone, I moved nearer, and waited. She did not return, and I descendedthe steps and went to the edge of the thicket to inspect her work: abulky affair, --nearly done, I thought, --loosely constructed of prettylarge twigs. I had barely returned to the veranda before the birdappeared again. This time I was in a position to look squarely in uponher. She had some difficulty in edging her way through the dense busheswith a long, branching stick in her bill; but she accomplished the feat, fitted the new material into its place, readjusted the other twigs a bithere and there, and then, as she rose to depart, she looked me suddenlyin the face and stopped, as much as to say, "Well, well! here's a prettygo! A man spying upon me!" I wondered whether she would throw up thework, but in another minute she was back again with another twig. Thenest, I should have said, was about four feet from the ground, andperhaps twenty feet from the cottage. Four days later, I found hersitting upon it. She flew off as I came up, and I pushed into the scrubfar enough to thrust my hand into the nest, which, to my disappointment, was empty. In fact, it was still far from completed; for on the 3d ofMarch, when I paid it a farewell visit, its owner was still at worklining it with fine grass. At that time it was a comfortable-looking andreally elaborate structure. Both the birds came to look at me as I stoodon the piazza. They perched together on the top of a stake so narrowthat there was scarcely room for their feet; and as they stood thus, side by side, one of them struck its beak several times against the beakof the other, as if in play. I wished them joy of their expectedprogeny, and was the more ready to believe they would have it for thislittle display of sportive sentimentality. 

It was a distinguished company that frequented that row of narrow backyards on the edge of the sand-hills. As a new-comer, I found the jays(sometimes there were ten under my eye at once) the most entertainingmembers of it, but if I had been a dweller there for the summer, Ishould perhaps have altered my opinion; for the group contained four ofthe finest of Floridian songsters, --the mocking-bird, the brownthrasher, the cardinal grosbeak, and the Carolina wren. Rare morning andevening concerts those cottagers must have. And besides these there werecatbirds, ground doves, red-eyed chewinks, white-eyed chewinks, a songsparrow (one of the few that I saw in Florida), savanna sparrows, myrtlebirds, redpoll warblers, a phoebe, and two flickers. The last-namedbirds, by the way, are never backward about displaying their tenderfeelings. A treetop flirtation is their special delight (I hope myreaders have all seen one; few things of the sort are better worthlooking at), and here, in the absence of trees, they had taken to theridgepole of a house. 

More than once I remarked white-breasted swallows straggling northwardalong the line of sand-hills. They were in loose order, but the movementwas plainly concerted, with all the look of a vernal migration. Thisswallow, the first of its family to arrive in New England, remains inFlorida throughout the winter, but is known also to go as far south asCentral America. The purple martins--which, so far as I am aware, do notwinter in Florida--had already begun to make their appearance. Whilecrossing the bridge, February 22, I was surprised to notice two of themsitting upon a bird-box over the draw, which just then stood open forthe passage of a tug-boat. The toll-gatherer told me they had come "fromsome place" eight or ten days before. His attention had been called tothem by his cat, who was trying to get up to the box to bid themwelcome. He believed that she discovered them within three minutes oftheir arrival. It seemed not unlikely. In its own way a cat is a prettysharp ornithologist. 

One or two cormorants were almost always about the river. Sometimes theysat upon stakes in a patriotic, spread-eagle (American eagle) attitude, as if drying their wings, --a curious sight till one became accustomed toit. Snakebirds and buzzards resort to the same device, but I cannotrecall ever seeing any Northern bird thus engaged. From the south bridgeI one morning saw, to my great satisfaction, a couple of white pelicans, the only ones that I found in Florida, though I was assured that withintwenty years they had been common along the Halifax and Hillsboroughrivers. My birds were flying up the river at a good height. The brownpelicans, on the other hand, made their daily pilgrimages just above thelevel of the water, as has been already described, and were never overthe river, but off the beach. 

All in all, there are few pleasanter walks in Florida, I believe, thanthe beach-round at Daytona, out by one bridge and back by the other. Anold hotel-keeper--a rural Yankee, if one could tell anything by his lookand speech--said to me in a burst of confidence, "Yes, we've got aclimate, and that's about all we have got, --climate and sand. " I couldnot entirely agree with him. For myself, I found not only fine days, butfine prospects. But there was no denying the sand. 

ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

Wherever a walker lives, he finds sooner or later one favorite road. Soit was with me at New Smyrna, where I lived for three weeks. I had gonethere for the sake of the river, and my first impulse was to take theroad that runs southerly along its bank. At the time I thought it themost beautiful road I had found in Florida, nor have I seen any greatcause since to alter that opinion. With many pleasant windings(beautiful roads are never straight, nor unnecessarily wide, which isperhaps the reason why our rural authorities devote themselves so madlyto the work of straightening and widening), --with many pleasantwindings, I say, "The grace of God made manifest in curves, "

it follows the edge of the hammock, having the river on one side, andthe forest on the other. It was afternoon when I first saw it. Then itis shaded from the sun, while the river and its opposite bank have onthem a light more beautiful than can be described or imagined; alight--with reverence for the poet of nature be it spoken--a light thatnever was _except_ on sea or land. The poet's dream was never equal toit. 

In a flat country stretches of water are doubly welcome. They take theplace of hills, and give the eye what it craves, --distance; whichsoftens angles, conceals details, and heightens colors, --in short, transfigures the world with its romancer's touch, and blesses us withillusion. So, as I loitered along the south road, I never tired oflooking across the river to the long, wooded island, and over that tothe line of sand-hills that marked the eastern rim of the EastPeninsula, beyond which was the Atlantic. The white crests of the hillsmade the sharper points of the horizon line. Elsewhere clumps of nearerpine-trees intervened, while here and there a tall palmetto stood, orseemed to stand, on the highest and farthest ridge looking seaward. Butparticulars mattered little. The blue water, the pale, changeablegrayish-green of the low island woods, the deeper green of the pines, the unnamable hues of the sky, the sunshine that flooded it all, thesewere beauty enough;--beauty all the more keenly enjoyed because for muchof the way it was seen only by glimpses, through vistas of palmetto andlive-oak. Sometimes the road came quite out of the woods, as it roundeda turn of the hammock. Then I stopped to gaze long at the scene. Elsewhere I pushed through the hedge at favorable points, and sat, orstood, looking up and down the river. A favorite seat was the prow of anold row-boat, which lay, falling to pieces, high and dry upon the sand. It had made its last cruise, but I found it still useful. 

The river is shallow. At low tide sandbars and oyster-beds occupy muchof its breadth; and even when it looked full, a great blue heron wouldvery likely be wading in the middle of it. That was a sight to which Ihad grown accustomed in Florida, where this bird, familiarly known as"the major, " is apparently ubiquitous. Too big to be easily hidden, itis also, as a general thing, too wary to be approached within gunshot. Iam not sure that I ever came within sight of one, no matter how suddenlyor how far away, that it did not give evidence of having seen me first. Long legs, long wings, a long bill--and long sight and long patience:such is the tall bird's dowry. Good and useful qualities, all of them. Long may they avail to put off the day of their owner's extermination. 

The major is scarcely a bird of which you can make a pet in your mind, as you may of the chickadee, for instance, or the bluebird, or thehermit thrush. He does not lend himself naturally to such imaginaryendearments. But it is pleasant to have him on one's daily beat. Ishould count it one compensation for having to live in Florida insteadof in Massachusetts (but I might require a good many others) that Ishould see him a hundred times as often. In walking down the river roadI seldom saw less than half a dozen; not together (the major, likefishermen in general, is of an unsocial turn), but here one and thereone, --on a sand-bar far out in the river, or in some shallow bay, or onthe submerged edge of an oyster-flat. Wherever he was, he always lookedas if he might be going to do something presently; even now, perhaps, the matter was on his mind; but at this moment--well, there are timeswhen a heron's strength is to stand still. Certainly he seemed in nodanger of overeating. A cracker told me that the major made an excellentdish if killed on the full of the moon. I wondered at thatqualification, but my informant explained himself. The bird, he said, feeds mostly at night, and fares best with the moon to help him. If thereader would dine off roast blue heron, therefore, as I hope I nevershall, let him mind the lunar phases. But think of the gastronomic upsand downs of a bird that is fat and lean by turns twelve times a year!Possibly my informant overstated the case; but in any event I wouldtrust the major to bear himself like a philosopher. If there is any oneof God's creatures that can wait for what he wants, it must be the greatblue heron. 

I have spoken of his caution. If he was patrolling a shallow on one sideof an oyster-bar, --at the rate, let us say, of two steps a minute, --andtook it into his head (an inappropriate phrase, as conveying an idea ofsomething like suddenness) to try the water on the other side, he didnot spread his wings, as a matter of course, and fly over. First he putup his head--an operation that makes another bird of him--and looked inall directions. How could he tell what enemy might be lying in wait? Andhaving alighted on the other side (his manner of alighting is one of hisprettiest characteristics), he did not at once draw in his neck till hisbill protruded on a level with his body, and resume his labors, butfirst he looked once more all about him. It was a good _habit_ to dothat, anyhow, and he meant to run no risks. If "the race of birds wascreated out of innocent, light-minded men, whose thoughts were directedtoward heaven, " according to the word of Plato, then _Ardea herodias_must long ago have fallen from grace. I imagine his state of mind to bealways like that of our pilgrim fathers in times of Indian massacres. When they went after the cows or to hoe the corn, they took their gunswith them, and turned no corner without a sharp lookout against ambush. No doubt such a condition of affairs has this advantage, that it makesennui impossible. There is always something to live for, if it be onlyto avoid getting killed. 

After this manner did the Hillsborough River majors all behavethemselves until my very last walk beside it. Then I found theexception, --the exception that is as good as inevitable in the case ofany bird, if the observation be carried far enough. He (or she; therewas no telling which it was) stood on the sandy beach, a splendidcreature in full nuptial garb, two black plumes nodding jauntily fromits crown, and masses of soft elongated feathers draping its back andlower neck. Nearer and nearer I approached, till I must have been withina hundred feet; but it stood as if on dress parade, exulting to belooked at. Let us hope it never carried itself thus gayly when the wrongman came along. 

Near the major--not keeping him company, but feeding in the sameshallows and along the same oyster-bars--were constantly to be seen twosmaller relatives of his, the little blue heron and the Louisiana. Theformer is what is called a dichromatic species; some of the birds areblue, and others white. On the Hillsborough, it seemed to me that whitespecimens predominated; but possibly that was because they were so muchmore conspicuous. Sunlight favors the white feather; no other colorshows so quickly or so far. If you are on the beach and catch sight of abird far out at sea, --a gull or a tern, a gannet or a loon, --it isinvariably the white parts that are seen first. And so the little whiteheron might stand never so closely against the grass or the bushes onthe further shore of the river, and the eye could not miss him. If hehad been a blue one, at that distance, ten to one he would have escapedme. Besides, I was more on the alert for white ones, because I wasalways hoping to find one of them with black legs. In other words, I waslooking for the little white egret, a bird concerning which, thanks tothe murderous work of plume-hunters, --thanks, also, to those good womenwho pay for having the work done, --I must confess that I went to Floridaand came home again without certainly seeing it. 

The heron with which I found myself especially taken was the Louisiana;a bird of about the same size as the little blue, but with an air ofdaintiness and lightness that is quite its own, and quite indescribable. When it rose upon the wing, indeed, it seemed almost _too_ light, almostunsteady, as if it lacked ballast, like a butterfly. It was the mostnumerous bird of its tribe along the river, I think, and, with oneexception, the most approachable. That exception was the green heron, which frequented the flats along the village front, and might well havebeen mistaken for a domesticated bird; letting you walk across a plankdirectly over its head while it squatted upon the mud, and whendisturbed flying into a fig-tree before the hotel piazza, just as thedear little ground doves were in the habit of doing. To me, who hadhitherto seen the green heron in the wildest of places, this tamenesswas an astonishing sight. It would be hard to say which surprised memore, the New Smyrna green herons or the St. Augustine sparrow-hawks, --which latter treated me very much as I am accustomed to being treatedby village-bred robins in Massachusetts. 

The Louisiana heron was my favorite, as I say, but incomparably thehandsomest member of the family (I speak of such as I saw) was the greatwhite egret. In truth, the epithet "handsome" seems almost a vulgarismas applied to a creature so superb, so utterly and transcendentlysplendid. I saw it--in a way to be sure of it--only once. Then, on anisland in the Hillsborough, two birds stood in the dead tops of lowshrubby trees, fully exposed in the most favorable of lights, their longdorsal trains drooping behind them and swaying gently in the wind. I hadnever seen anything so magnificent. And when I returned, two or threehours afterward, from a jaunt up the beach to Mosquito Inlet, there theystill were, as if they had not stirred in all that time. The readershould understand that this egret is between four and five feet inlength, and measures nearly five feet from wing tip to wing tip, andthat its plumage throughout is of spotless white. It is pitiful to thinkhow constantly a bird of that size and color must be in danger of itslife. 

Happily, the lawmakers of the State have done something of recent yearsfor the protection of such defenseless beauties. Happily, too, shootingfrom the river boats is no longer permitted, --on the regular lines, thatis. I myself saw a young gentleman stand on the deck of an excursionsteamer, with a rifle, and do his worst to kill or maim every livingthing that came in sight, from a spotted sandpiper to a turkey buzzard!I call him a "gentleman;" he was in gentle company, and the fact that hechewed gum industriously would, I fear, hardly invalidate his claim tothat title. The narrow river wound in and out between low, denselywooded banks, and the beauty of the shifting scene was enough almost totake one's breath away; but the crack of the rifle was not the lessfrequent on that account. Perhaps the sportsman was a Southerner, towhom river scenery of that enchanting kind was an old story. More likelyhe was a Northerner, one of the men who thank Heaven they are "notsentimental. "

In my rambles up and down the river road I saw few water birds besidethe herons. Two or three solitary cormorants would be shooting back andforth at a furious rate, or swimming in midstream; and sometimes a fewspotted sandpipers and killdeer plovers were feeding along the shore. Once in a great while a single gull or tern made its appearance, --justoften enough to keep me wondering why they were not there oftener, --andone day a water turkey went suddenly over my head and dropped into theriver on the farther side of the island. I was glad to see thisinteresting creature for once in salt water; for the Hillsborough, likethe Halifax and the Indian rivers, is a river in name only, --a river bybrevet, --being, in fact, a salt-water lagoon or sound between themainland and the eastern peninsula. 

Fish-hawks were always in sight, and bald eagles were seldom absentaltogether. Sometimes an eagle stood perched on a dead tree on anisland. Oftener I heard a scream, and looked up to see one sailing faroverhead, or chasing an osprey. On one such occasion, when the hawkseemed to be making a losing fight, a third bird suddenly intervened, and the eagle, as I thought, was driven away. "Good for the brotherhoodof fish-hawks!" I exclaimed. But at that moment I put my glass on thenew-comer; and behold, he was not a hawk, but another eagle. Meanwhilethe hawk had disappeared with his fish, and I was left to ponder themystery. 

As for the wood, the edge of the hammock, through which the road passes, there were no birds in it. It was one of those places (I fancy everybird-gazer must have had experience of such) where it is a waste of timeto seek them. I could walk down the road for two miles and back again, and then sit in my room at the hotel for fifteen minutes, and see morewood birds, and more kinds of them, in one small live-oak before thewindow than I had seen in the whole four miles; and that not once and byaccident, but again and again. In affairs of this kind it is useless tocontend. The spot looks favorable, you say, and nobody can deny it;there must be birds there, plenty of them; your missing them to-day wasa matter of chance; you will try again. And you try again--andagain--and yet again. But in the end you have to acknowledge that, forsome reason unknown to you, the birds have agreed to give that place thego-by. 

One bird, it is true, I found in this hammock, and not elsewhere: asingle oven-bird, which, with one Northern water thrush and oneLouisiana water thrush, completed my set of Florida _Seiuri_. Besideshim I recall one hermit thrush, a few cedar-birds, a house wren, chattering at a great rate among the "bootjacks" (leaf-stalks) of anoverturned palmetto-tree, with an occasional mocking-bird, cardinalgrosbeak, prairie warbler, yellow redpoll, myrtle bird, ruby-crownedkinglet, phoebe, and flicker. In short, there were no birds at all, except now and then an accidental straggler of a kind that could befound almost anywhere else in indefinite numbers. 

And as it was not the presence of birds that made the river roadattractive, so neither was it any unwonted display of blossoms. Beside asimilar road along the bank of the Halifax, in Daytona, grew multitudesof violets, and goodly patches of purple verbena (garden plants gonewild, perhaps), and a fine profusion of spiderwort, --a pretty flower, the bluest of the blue, thrice welcome to me as having been one of thetreasures of the very first garden of which I have any remembrance. "Indigo plant, " we called it then. Here, however, on the way from NewSmyrna to Hawks Park, I recall no violets, nor any verbena orspiderwort. Yellow wood-sorrel (oxalis) was here, of course, as it waseverywhere. It dotted the grass in Florida very much as five-fingers doin Massachusetts, I sometimes thought. And the creeping, round-leavedhoustonia was here, with a superfluity of a weedy blue sage (_Salvialyrata_). Here, also, as in Daytona, I found a strikingly handsometufted plant, a highly varnished evergreen, which I persisted in takingfor a fern--the sterile fronds--in spite of repeated failures to find itdescribed by Dr. Chapman under that head, until at last an excellentwoman came to my help with the information that it was "coontie" (_Zamiaintegrifolia_), famous as a plant out of which the Southern people madebread in war time. This confession of botanical amateurishness andincompetency will be taken, I hope, as rather to my credit thanotherwise; but it would be morally worthless if I did not add the storyof another plant, which, in this same New Smyrna hammock, I frequentlynoticed hanging in loose bunches, like blades of flaccid deep greengrass, from the trunks of cabbage palmettos. The tufts were always outof reach, and I gave them no particular thought; and it was not until Igot home to Massachusetts, and then almost by accident, that I learnedwhat they were. They, it turned out, _were_ ferns (_Vittarialineata_--grass fern), and my discomfiture was complete. 

This comparative dearth of birds and flowers was not in all respects adisadvantage. On the contrary, to a naturalist blessed now and then witha supernaturalistic mood, it made the place, on occasion, a welcomeretreat. Thus, one afternoon, as I remember, I had been reading Keats, the only book I had brought with me, --not counting manuals, of course, which come under another head, --and by and by started once more for thepine lands by the way of the cotton-shed hammock, "to see what I couldsee. " But poetry had spoiled me just then for anything like scientificresearch, and as I waded through the ankle-deep sand I said to myselfall at once, "No, no! What do I care for another new bird? I want to seethe beauty of the world. " With that I faced about, and, taking a sidetrack, made as directly as possible for the river road. There I shouldhave a mind at ease, with no unfamiliar, tantalizing bird note to set mycuriosity on edge, nor any sand through which to be picking my steps. 

The river road is paved with oyster-shells. If any reader thinks thatstatement prosaic or unimportant, then he has never lived in southernFlorida. In that part of the world all new-comers have to takewalking-lessons; unless, indeed, they have already served anapprenticeship on Cape Cod, or in some other place equally arenarious. My own lesson I got at second hand, and on a Sunday. It was at NewSmyrna, in the village. Two women were behind me, on their way home fromchurch, and one of them was complaining of the sand, to which she wasnot yet used. "Yes, " said the other, "I found it pretty hard walking atfirst, but I learned after a while that the best way is to set the heeldown hard, as hard as you can; then the sand doesn't give under you somuch, and you get along more comfortably. " I wonder whether she noticed, just in front of her, a man who began forthwith to bury his boot heel atevery step?

In such a country (the soil is said to be good for orange-trees, butthey do not have to walk) roads of powdered shell are veritableluxuries, and land agents are quite right in laying all stress upon themas inducements to possible settlers. If the author of the Apocalypse hadbeen raised in Florida, we should never have had the streets of the NewJerusalem paved with gold. His idea of heaven, would have been differentfrom that; more personal and home-felt, we may be certain. 

The river road, then, as I have said, and am glad to say again, wasshell-paved. And well it might be; for the hammock, along the edge ofwhich it meandered, seemed, in some places at least, to be little morethan a pile of oyster-shells, on which soil had somehow been deposited, and over which a forest was growing. Florida Indians have left an evilmemory. I heard a philanthropic visitor lamenting that she had talkedwith many of the people about them, and had yet to hear a single wordsaid in their favor. Somebody might have been good enough to say that, with all their faults, they had given to eastern Florida a few hills, such as they are, and at present are supplying it, indirectly, withcomfortable highways. How they must have feasted, to leave such heaps ofshells behind them! They came to the coast on purpose, we may suppose. Well, the red-men are gone, but the oyster-beds remain; and if winterrefugees continue to pour in this direction, as doubtless they will, they too will eat a "heap" of oysters (it is easy to see how the vulgarSouthern use of that word may have originated), and in the course oftime, probably, the shores of the Halifax and the Hillsborough will be afine mountainous country! And then, if this ancient, nineteenth-centuryprediction is remembered, the highest peak of the range will perhaps benamed in a way which the innate modesty of the prophet restrains himfrom specifying with greater particularity. 

Meanwhile it is long to wait, and tourists and residents alike must findwhat comfort they can in the lesser hills which, thanks to the goodappetite of their predecessors, are already theirs. For my own part, there is one such eminence of which I cherish the most gratefulrecollections. It stands (or stood; the road-makers had begun carting itaway) at a bend in the road just south of one of the Turnbull canals. Iclimbed it often (it can hardly be less than fifteen or twenty feetabove the level of the sea), and spent more than one pleasant hour uponits grassy summit. Northward was New Smyrna, a village in the woods, andfarther away towered the lighthouse of Mosquito Inlet. Along the easternsky stretched the long line of the peninsula sand-hills, between thewhite crests of which could be seen the rude cottages of Coronado beach. To the south and west was the forest, and in front, at my feet, lay theriver with its woody islands. Many times have I climbed a mountain andfelt myself abundantly repaid by an off-look less beautiful. This wasthe spot to which I turned when I had been reading Keats, and wanted tosee the beauty of the world. Here were a grassy seat, the shadow oforange-trees, and a wide prospect. In Florida, I found no better placein which a man who wished to be both a naturalist and a nature-lover, who felt himself heir to a double inheritance, "The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part, "

could for the time sit still and be happy. 

The orange-trees yielded other things beside shadow, though perhapsnothing better than that. They were resplendent with fruit, and on myearlier visits were also in bloom. One did not need to climb the hill tolearn the fact. For an out-of-door sweetness it would be hard, I think, to improve upon the scent of orange blossoms. As for the orangesthemselves, they seemed to be in little demand, large and handsome asthey were. Southern people in general, I fancy, look upon wild fruit ofthis kind as not exactly edible. I remember asking two colored men inTallahassee whether the oranges still hanging conspicuously from a treejust over the wall (a sight not so very common in that part of theState) were sweet or sour. I have forgotten just what they said, but Iremember how they _looked_. I meant the inquiry as a mild bit of humor, but to them it was a thousandfold better than that: it was witineffable. What Shakespeare said about the prosperity of a jest wasnever more strikingly exemplified. In New Smyrna, with orange groves onevery hand, the wild fruit went begging with natives and tourists alike;so that I feel a little hesitancy about confessing my own relish for it, lest I should be accused of affectation. Not that I devoured wildoranges by the dozen, or in place of sweet ones; one sour orange goes agood way, as the common saying is; but I ate them, nevertheless, orrather drank them, and found them, in a thirsty hour, decidedlyrefreshing. 

The unusual coldness of the past season (Florida winters, from what Iheard about them, must have fallen of late into a queer habit of beingregularly exceptional) had made it difficult to buy sweet oranges thatwere not dry and "punky"[1] toward the stem; but the hardier wild fruithad weathered the frost, and was so juicy that, as I say, you did not somuch eat one as drink it. As for the taste, it was a wholesomebitter-sour, as if a lemon had been flavored with quinine; not quite sosour as a lemon, perhaps, nor _quite_ so bitter as Peruvian bark, but, as it were, an agreeable compromise between the two. When I drank one, Inot only quenched my thirst, but felt that I had taken an infallibleprophylactic against the malarial fever. Better still, I had surprisedmyself. For one who had felt a lifelong distaste, unsocial and almostunmanly, for the bitter drinks which humanity in general esteems soessential to its health and comfort, I was developing new and unexpectedcapabilities; than which few things can be more encouraging as yearsincrease upon a man's head, and the world seems to be closing in abouthim. 

[Footnote 1: I have heard this useful word all my life, and now amsurprised to find it wanting in the dictionaries. ]

Later in the season, on this same shell mound, I might have regaledmyself with fresh figs. Here, at any rate, was a thrifty-lookingfig-tree, though its crop, if it bore one, would perhaps not have waitedmy coming so patiently as the oranges had done. Here, too, was a redcedar; and to me, who, in my ignorance, had always thought of this toughlittle evergreen as especially at home on my own bleak and stonyhillsides, it seemed an incongruous trio, --fig-tree, orange-tree, andsavin. In truth, the cedars of Florida were one of my liveliestsurprises. At first I refused to believe that they were red cedars, sostrangely exuberant were they, so disdainful of the set, cone-shaped, toy-tree pattern on which I had been used to seeing red cedars built. And when at last a study of the flora compelled me to admit theiridentity, [1] I turned about and protested that I had never seen redcedars before. One, in St. Augustine, near San Marco Avenue, I had thecuriosity to measure. The girth of the trunk at the smallest place wassix feet five inches, and the spread of the branches was not less thanfifty feet. 

[Footnote 1: I speak as if I had accepted my own study of the manual asconclusive. I did for the time being, but while writing this paragraph Ibethought myself that I might be in error, after all. I referred thequestion, therefore, to a friend, a botanist of authority. "No wonderthe red cedars of Florida puzzled you, " he replied. "No one wouldsuppose at first that they were of the same species as our New Englandsavins. The habit is entirely different; but botanists have found nocharacters by which to separate them, and you are safe in consideringthem as _Juniperus Virginiana_. "]

The stroller in this road suffered few distractions. The houses, two orthree to the mile, stood well back in the woods, with little or nocleared land about them. Picnic establishments they seemed to a Northerneye, rather than permanent dwellings. At one point, in the hammock, arude camp was occupied by a group of rough-looking men and several smallchildren, who seemed to be getting on as best they could--none too well, to judge from appearances--without feminine ministrations. What theywere there for I never made out. They fished, I think, but whether byway of amusement or as a serious occupation I did not learn. Perhaps, like the Indians of old, they had come to the river for the oysterseason. They might have done worse. They never paid the slightestattention to me, nor once gave me any decent excuse for engaging them intalk. The best thing I remember about them was a tableau caught inpassing. A "norther" had descended upon us unexpectedly (Florida is nota whit behind the rest of the world in sudden changes of temperature), and while hastening homeward, toward nightfall, hugging myself to keepwarm, I saw, in the woods, this group of campers disposed about a livelyblaze. 

Let us be thankful, say I, that memory is so little the servant of thewill. Chance impressions of this kind, unforeseen, involuntary, andinexplicable, make one of the chief delights of traveling, or rather ofhaving traveled. In the present case, indeed, the permanence of theimpression is perhaps not altogether beyond the reach of a plausibleconjecture. We have not always lived in houses; and if we love the sightof a fire out-of-doors, --a camp-fire, that is to say, --as we all do, sothat the, burning of a brush-heap in a neighbor's yard will draw us tothe window, the feeling is but part of an ancestral inheritance. We havecome by it honestly, as the phrase is. And so I need not scruple to setdown another reminiscence of the same kind, --an early morning streetscene, of no importance in itself, in the village of New Smyrna. It mayhave been on the morning next after the "norther" just mentioned. Icannot say. We had two or three such touches of winter in early March;none of them at all distressing, be it understood, to persons inordinary health. One night water froze, --"as thick as a silverdollar, "--and orange growers were alarmed for the next season's crop, the trees being just ready to blossom. Some men kept fires burning intheir orchards overnight; a pretty spectacle, I should think, especiallywhere the fruit was still ungathered. On one of these frosty mornings, then, I saw a solitary horseman, not "wending his way, " but warming hishands over a fire that he had built for that purpose in the villagestreet. One might live and die in a New England village without seeingsuch a sight. A Yankee would have betaken himself to the corner grocery. But here, though that "adjunct of civilization" was directly across theway, most likely it had never had a stove in it. The sun would givewarmth enough in an hour, --by nine o'clock one would probably be glad ofa sunshade; but the man was chilly after his ride; it was still a bitearly to go about the business that had brought him into town: what morenatural than to hitch his horse, get together a few sticks, and kindle ablaze? What an insane idea it would have seemed to him that a passingstranger might remember him and his fire three months afterward, andthink them worth talking about in print! But then, as was long ago said, it is the fate of some men to have greatness thrust upon them. 

This main street of the village, by the way, with its hotels and shops, was no other than my river road itself, in its more civilized estate, asI now remember with a sense of surprise. In my mind the two had neverany connection. It was in this thoroughfare that one saw now and then agroup of cavaliers strolling about under broad-brimmed hats, with bigspurs at their heels, accosting passers-by with hearty familiarity, first names and hand-shakes, while their horses stood hitched to thebranches of roadside trees, --a typical Southern picture. Here, on aSunday afternoon, were two young fellows who had brought to town amother coon and three young ones, hoping to find a purchaser. The guestsat the hotels manifested no eagerness for such pets, but the coloredbell-boys and waiters gathered about, and after a little good-humoreddickering bought the entire lot, box and all, for a dollar and a half;first having pulled the little ones out between the slats--not withoutsome risk to both parties--to look at them and pass them round. Thevenders walked off with grins of ill-concealed triumph. The Fates hadbeen kind to them, and they had three silver half-dollars in theirpockets. I heard one of them say something about giving part of themoney to a third man who had told them where the nest was; but hiscompanion would listen to no such folly. "He wouldn't come with us, " hesaid, "and we won't tell him a damned thing. " I fear there was nothingdistinctively Southern about _that_. 

Here, too, in the heart of the town, was a magnificent cluster oflive-oaks, worth coming to Florida to see; far-spreading, full of fernsand air plants, and heavy with hanging moss. Day after day I went out toadmire them. Under them was a neglected orange grove, and in one of theorange-trees, amid the glossy foliage, appeared my first summer tanager. It was a royal setting, and the splendid vermilion-red bird was worthyof it. Among the oaks I walked in the evening, listening to the strangelow chant of the chuck-will's-widow, --a name which the owner himselfpronounces with a rest after the first syllable. Once, for two or threedays, the trees were amazingly full of blue yellow-backed warblers. Numbers of them, a dozen at least, could be heard singing at oncedirectly over one's head, running up the scale not one after another, but literally in unison. Here the tufted titmouse, the very soul ofmonotony, piped and piped and piped, as if his diapason stop were pulledout and stuck, and could not be pushed in again. He is an odd genius. With plenty of notes, he wearies you almost to distraction, harping onone string for half an hour together. He is the one Southern bird that Ishould perhaps be sorry to see common in Massachusetts; but that"perhaps" is a large word. Many yellow-throated warblers, silent as yet, were commonly in the live-oaks, and innumerable myrtle birds, alsosilent, with prairie warblers, black-and-white creepers, solitaryvireos, an occasional chickadee, and many more. It was a birdy spot; andjust across the way, on the shrubby island, were red-winged blackbirds, who piqued my curiosity by adding to the familiar _conkaree_ a finalsyllable, --the Florida termination, I called it, --which made me wonderwhether, as has been the case with so many other Florida birds, theymight not turn out to be a distinct race, worthy of a name (_Agelaiusphoeniceus something-or-other_), as well as of a local habitation. Isuggest the question to those whose business it is to be learned in suchmatters. [1]

[Footnote 1: My suggestion, I now discover, --since this paper was firstprinted, --was some years too late. Mr. Ridgway, in his _Manual of NorthAmerican Birds_ (1887), had already described a subspecies of Floridaredwings under the name of _Agelaius phoeniceus bryanti_. Whether my NewSmyrna birds should come under that title cannot be told, of course, inthe absence of specimens; but on the strength of the song I venture tothink it highly probable. ]

The tall grass about the borders of the island was alive with clapperrails. Before I rose in the morning I heard them crying in full chorus;and now and then during the day something would happen, and all at oncethey would break out with one sharp volley, and then instantly all wouldbe silent again. Theirs is an apt name, --_Rallus crepitans. _ Once Iwatched two of them in the act of crepitating, and ever after that, whenthe sudden uproar burst forth, I seemed to see the reeds full of birds, each with his bill pointing skyward, bearing his part in the salvo. So, far as I could perceive, they had nothing to fear from human enemies. They ran about the mud on the edge of the grass, especially in themorning, looking like half-grown pullets. Their specialty wascrab-fishing, at which they were highly expert, plunging into the waterup to the depth of their legs, and handling and swallowing pretty largespecimens with surprising dexterity. I was greatly pleased with them, aswell as with their local name, "everybody's chickens. "

Once I feared we had heard the last of them. On a day following a suddenfall of the mercury, a gale from the north set in at noon, with thunderand lightning, hail, and torrents of rain. The river was quickly lashedinto foam, and the gale drove the ocean into it through the inlet, tillthe shrubbery of the rails' island barely showed above the breakers. Thestreet was deep under water, and fears were entertained for the newbridge and the road to the beach. All night the gale continued, and allthe next day till late in the afternoon; and when the river should havebeen at low tide, the island was still flooded. Gravitation wasovermatched for the time being. And where were the rails, I askedmyself. They could swim, no doubt, when put to it, but it seemedimpossible that they could survive so fierce an inundation. Well, thewind ceased, the tide went out at last; and behold, the rails were infull cry, not a voice missing! How they had managed it was beyond myken. 

Another island, farther out than that of the rails (but the rails, likethe long-billed marsh wrens, appeared to be present in force all up anddown the river, in suitable places), was occupied nightly as acrow-roost. Judged by the morning clamor, which, like that of the rails, I heard from my bed, its population must have been enormous. One eveningI happened to come up the street just in time to see the hinder part ofthe procession--some hundreds of birds--flying across the river. Theycame from the direction of the pine lands in larger and smaller squads, and with but a moderate amount of noise moved straight to theirdestination. All but one of them so moved, that is to say. Theperformance of that one exception was a mystery. He rose high in theair, over the river, and remained soaring all by himself, actingsometimes as if he were catching insects, till the flight had passed, even to the last scattering detachments. What could be the meaning ofhis eccentric behavior? Some momentary caprice had taken him, perhaps. Or was he, as I could not help asking, some duly appointed officer ofthe day, --grand marshal, if you please, --with a commission to see allhands in before retiring himself? He waited, at any rate, till the finalstragglers had passed; then he came down out of the air and followedthem. I meant to watch the ingathering a second time, to see whetherthis feature of it would be repeated, but I was never there at the rightmoment. One cannot do everything. 

Now, alas, Florida seems very far off. I am never likely to walk againunder those New Smyrna live-oaks, nor to see again all that beauty ofthe Hillsborough. And yet, in a truer and better sense of the word, I dosee it, and shall. What a heavenly light falls at this moment on theriver and the island woods! Perhaps we must come back to Wordsworth, after all, --

 "The light that never was, on sea or land. "

A MORNING AT THE OLD SUGAR MILL. [1]

[Footnote 1: I have called the ruin here spoken of a "sugar mill" for nobetter reason than because that is the name commonly applied to it bythe residents of the town. When this sketch was written, I had neverheard of a theory since broached in some of our Northern newspapers, --Iknow not by whom, --that the edifice in question was built as a chapel, perhaps by Columbus himself! I should be glad to believe it, and canonly add my hope that he will be shown to have built also the so-calledsugar mill a few miles north of New Smyrna, in the Dunlawton hammockbehind Port Orange. In that, to be sure, there is still much oldmachinery, but perhaps its presence would prove no insuperable objectionto a theory so pleasing. In matters of this kind, much depends uponsubjective considerations; in one sense, at least, "all things arepossible to him that believeth. " For my own part, I profess no opinion. I am neither an archaeologist nor an ecclesiastic, and speak simply as achance observer. ]

On the third or fourth day of my sojourn at the Live Oak Inn, the ladyof the house, noticing my peripatetic habits, I suppose, asked whether Ihad been to the old sugar mill. The ruin is mentioned in the guide-booksas one of the historic features of the ancient settlement of New Smyrna, but I had forgotten the fact, and was thankful to receive a descriptionof the place, as well as of the road thither, --a rather blind road, myinformant said, with no houses at which to inquire the way. 

Two or three mornings afterward, I set out in the direction indicated. If the route proved to be half as vague as my good lady's account of ithad sounded, I should probably never find the mill; but the walk wouldbe pleasant, and that, after all, was the principal consideration, especially to a man who just then cared more, or thought he did, for anew bird or a new song than for an indefinite number ofeighteenth-century relics. 

For the first half-mile the road follows one of the old Turnbull canalsdug through the coquina stone which underlies the soil hereabout; then, after crossing the railway, it strikes to the left through a piece oftruly magnificent wood, known as the cotton-shed hammock, because, during the war, cotton was stored here in readiness for the blockaderunners of Mosquito Inlet. Better than anything I had yet seen, thiswood answered to my idea of a semi-tropical forest: live-oaks, magnolias, palmettos, sweet gums, maples, and hickories, with here andthere a long-leaved pine overtopping all the rest. The palmettos, mostdistinctively Southern of them all, had been badly used by their hardierneighbors; they looked stunted, and almost without exception had beenforced out of their normal perpendicular attitude. The live-oaks, on theother hand, were noble specimens; lofty and wide-spreading, elm-like inhabit, it seemed to me, though not without the sturdiness which belongsas by right to all oaks, and seldom or never to the American elm. 

What gave its peculiar tropical character to the wood, however, was notso much the trees as the profusion of plants that covered them anddepended from them: air-plants (_Tillandsia_), large and small, --likepineapples, with which they claim a family relationship, --the exuberanthanging moss, itself another air-plant, ferns, and vines. The ferns, aspecies of polypody ("resurrection ferns, " I heard them called), completely covered the upper surface of many of the larger branches, while the huge vines twisted about the trunks, or, quite as often, dropped straight from the treetops to the ground. 

In the very heart of this dense, dark forest (a forest primeval, Ishould have said, but I was assured that the ground had been undercultivation so recently that, to a practiced eye, the cotton-rows werestill visible) stood a grove of wild orange-trees, the handsome fruitglowing like lamps amid the deep green foliage. There was little otherbrightness. Here and there in the undergrowth were yellow jessaminevines, but already--March 11--they were past flowering. Almost or quitethe only blossom just now in sight was the faithful round-leavedhoustonia, growing in small flat patches in the sand on the edge of theroad, with budding partridge-berry--a Yankee in Florida--to keep itcompany. Warblers and titmice twittered in the leafy treetops, andbutterflies of several kinds, notably one gorgeous creature in yellowand black, like a larger and more resplendent Turnus, went flutteringthrough the underwoods. I could have believed myself in the heart of alimitless forest; but Florida hammocks, so far as I have seen, areseldom of great extent, and the road presently crossed another railwaytrack, and then, in a few rods more, came out into the sunny pine-woods, as one might emerge from a cathedral into the open day. Two men wereapproaching in a wagon (except on Sunday, I am not certain that I evermet a foot passenger in the flat-woods), and I improved the opportunityto make sure of my course. "Go about fifty yards, " said one of them, "and turn to the right; then about fifty yards more, and turn to theleft. _That_ road will take you to the mill. " Here was a man who hadtraveled in the pine lands, --where, of all places, it is easy to getlost and hard to find yourself, --and not only appreciated the value ofexplicit instructions, but, being a Southerner, had leisure enough andpoliteness enough to give them. I thanked him, and sauntered on. The daywas before me, and the place was lively with birds. Pine-wood sparrows, pine warblers, and red-winged blackbirds were in song; twored-shouldered hawks were screaming, a flicker was shouting, ared-bellied woodpecker cried _kur-r-r-r_, brown-headed nuthatches weregossiping in the distance, and suddenly I heard, what I never thought tohear in a pinery, the croak of a green heron. I turned quickly and sawhim. It was indeed he. What a friend is ignorance, mother of all thosehappy surprises which brighten existence as they pass, like thebutterflies of the wood. The heron was at home, and I was the stranger. For there was water near, as there is everywhere in Florida; andsubsequently, in this very place, I met not only the green heron, butthree of his relatives, --the great blue, the little blue, and the daintyLouisiana, more poetically known (and worthy to wear the name) as the"Lady of the Waters. "

On this first occasion, however, the green heron was speedily forgotten;for just then I heard another note, unlike anything I had ever heardbefore, --as if a great Northern shrike had been struck withpreternatural hoarseness, and, like so many other victims of theNorthern winter, had betaken himself to a sunnier clime. I looked up. Inthe leafy top of a pine sat a boat-tailed grackle, splendidlyiridescent, engaged in a musical performance which afterward becamealmost too familiar to me, but which now, as a novelty, was asinteresting as it was grotesque. This, as well as I can describe it, iswhat the bird was doing. He opened his bill, --_set_ it, as it were, wideapart, --and holding it thus, emitted four or five rather long and veryloud grating, shrikish notes; then instantly shook his wings with anextraordinary flapping noise, and followed that with several highlycurious and startling cries, the concluding one of which sometimessuggested the cackle of a robin. All this he repeated again and againwith the utmost fervor. He could not have been more enthusiastic if hehad been making the sweetest music in the world. And I confess that Ithought he had reason to be proud of his work. The introduction ofwing-made sounds in the middle of a vocal performance was of itself astroke of something like genius. It put me in mind of the firing ofcannons as an accompaniment to the Anvil Chorus. Why should a creatureof such gifts be named for his bodily dimensions, or the shape of histail? Why not _Quiscalus gilmorius_, Gilmore's grackle?

That the sounds _were_ wing-made I had no thought of questioning. I hadseen the thing done, --seen it and heard it; and what shall a man trust, if not his own eyes and ears, especially when each confirms the other?Two days afterward, nevertheless, I began to doubt. I heard a grackle"sing" in the manner just described, wing-beats and all, while flyingfrom one tree to another; and later still, in a country whereboat-tailed grackles were an every-day sight near the heart of thevillage, I more than once saw them produce the sounds in questionwithout any perceptible movement of the wings, and furthermore, theirmandibles could be seen moving in time with the beats. So hard is it tobe sure of a thing, even when you see it and hear it. 

"Oh yes, " some sharp-witted reader will say, "you saw the wingsflapping, --beating time, --and so you imagined that the sounds were likewing-beats. " But for once the sharp-witted reader is in the wrong. Theresemblance is not imaginary. Mr. F. M. Chapman, in A List of BirdsObserved at Gainesville, Florida, [1] says of the boat-tailed grackle(_Quiscalus major_): "A singular note of this species greatly resemblesthe flapping of wings, as of a coot tripping over the water; this soundwas very familiar to me, but so excellent is the imitation that for along time I attributed it to one of the numerous coots which abound inmost places favored by _Q. Major_. "

[Footnote 1: _The Auk_, vol. V. P. 273. ]

If the sounds are not produced by the wings, the question returns, ofcourse, why the wings are shaken just at the right instant. To that Imust respond with the time-honored formula, "Not prepared. " The readermay believe, if he will, that the bird is aware of the imitative qualityof the notes, and amuses itself by heightening the delusion of thelooker-on. My own more commonplace conjecture is that the sounds areproduced by snappings and gratings of the big mandibles ("He is grittinghis teeth, " said a shrewd unornithological Yankee, whose opinion I hadsolicited), and that the wing movements may be nothing but involuntaryaccompaniments of this almost convulsive action of the beak. But perhapsthe sounds _are_ wing-made, after all. 

On the day of which I am writing, at any rate, I was troubled by nomisgivings. I had seen something new, and was only desirous to see moreof it. Who does not love an original character? For at least half anhour the old mill was forgotten, while I chased the grackle about, as heflew hither and thither, sometimes with a loggerhead shrike in furiouspursuit. Once I had gone a few rods into the palmetto scrub, partly tobe nearer the bird, but still more to enjoy the shadow of a pine, andwas standing under the tree, motionless, when a man came along the roadin a gig. "Surveying?" he asked, reining in his horse. "No, sir; I amlooking at a bird in the tree yonder. " I wished him to go on, andthought it best to gratify his curiosity at once. He was silent amoment; then he said, "Looking at the old sugar house from there?" Thatwas too preposterous, and I answered with more voice, and perhaps with atouch of impatience, "No, no; I am trying to see a bird in thatpine-tree. " He was silent again. Then he gathered up the reins. "I'm sodeaf I can't hear you, " he said, and drove on. "Good-by, " I remarked, ina needless undertone; "you're a good man, I've no doubt, but deaf peopleshouldn't be inquisitive at long range. "

The advice was sound enough, in itself considered; properly understood, it might be held to contain, or at least to suggest, one of theprofoundest, and at the same time one of the most practical, truths ofall devout philosophy; but the testiness of its tone was little to mycredit. He _was_ a good man, --and the village doctor, --and more thanonce afterward put me under obligation. One of his best appreciatedfavors was unintended and indirect. I was driving with him through thehammock, and we passed a bit of swamp. "There are some pretty flowers, "he exclaimed; "I think I must get them. " At the word he jumped out ofthe gig, bade me do the same, hitched his horse, a half-broken stallion, to a sapling, and plunged into the thicket. I strolled elsewhere; and byand by he came back, a bunch of common blue iris in one hand, and hisshoes and stockings in the other. "They are very pretty, " he explained(he spoke of the flowers), "and it is early for them. " After that I hadno doubt of his goodness, and in case of need would certainly havecalled him rather than his younger rival at the opposite end of thevillage. 

When I tired of chasing the grackle, or the shrike had driven him away(I do not remember now how the matter ended), I started again toward theold sugar mill. Presently a lone cabin came into sight. The grass-grownroad led straight to it, and stopped at the gate. Two women and a broodof children stood in the door, and in answer to my inquiry one of thewomen (the children had already scampered out of sight) invited me toenter the yard. "Go round the house, " she said, "and you will find aroad that runs right down to the mill. "

The mill, as it stands, is not much to look at: some fragments of wallbuilt of coquina stone, with two or three arched windows and an archeddoor, the whole surrounded by a modern plantation of orange-trees, nowalmost as much a ruin as the mill itself. But the mill was built morethan a hundred years ago, and serves well enough the principal use ofabandoned and decaying things, --to touch the imagination. For myself, Iam bound to say, it was a precious two hours that I passed beside it, seated on a crumbling stone in the shade of a dying orange-tree. 

Behind me a redbird was whistling (cardinal grosbeak, I have beenaccustomed to call him, but I like the Southern name better, in spite ofits ambiguity), now in eager, rapid tones, now slowly and with a dyingfall. Now his voice fell almost to a whisper, now it rang out again; butalways it was sweet and golden, and always the bird was out of sight inthe shrubbery. The orange-trees were in bloom; the air was full of theirfragrance, full also of the murmur of bees. All at once a deeper notestruck in, and I turned to look. A humming-bird was hovering amid thewhite blossoms and glossy leaves. I saw his flaming throat, and the nextinstant he was gone, like a flash of light, --the first hummer of theyear. I was far from home, and expectant of new things. That, I daresay, was the reason why I took the sound at first for the boom of abumble-bee; some strange Floridian bee, with a deeper and more melodiousbass than any Northern insect is master of. 

It is good to be here, I say to myself, and we need no tabernacle. Allthings are in harmony. A crow in the distance says _caw, caw_ in ameditative voice, as if he, too, were thinking of days past; and noteven the scream of a hen-hawk, off in the pine-woods, breaks the spellthat is upon us. A quail whistles, --a true Yankee Bob White, to judgehim by his voice, --and the white-eyed chewink (he is _not_ a Yankee)whistles and sings by turns. The bluebird's warble and the pinewarbler's trill could never be disturbing to the quietest mood. Only onevoice seems out of tune: the white-eyed vireo, even to-day, cannotforget his saucy accent. But he soon falls silent. Perhaps, after all, he feels himself an intruder. 

The morning is cloudless and warm, till suddenly, as if a door had beenopened eastward, the sea breeze strikes me. Henceforth the temperatureis perfect as I sit in the shadow. I think neither of heat nor of cold. I catch a glimpse of a beautiful leaf-green lizard on the gray trunk ofan orange-tree, but it is gone (I wonder where) almost before I can sayI saw it. Presently a brown one, with light-colored stripes and a bluishtail, is seen traveling over the crumbling wall, running into cranniesand out again. Now it stops to look at me with its jewel of an eye. Andthere, on the rustic arbor, is a third one, matching the unpainted woodin hue. Its throat is white, but when it is inflated, as happens everyfew seconds, it turns to the loveliest rose color. This inflatedmembrane should be a vocal sac, I think, but I hear no sound. Perhapsthe chameleon's voice is too fine for dull human sense. 

On two sides of me, beyond the orange-trees, is a thicket of small oaksand cabbage palmettos, --hammock, I suppose it is called. In all otherdirections are the pine-woods, with their undergrowth of saw palmetto. The cardinal sings from the hammock, and so does the Carolina wren. Thechewinks, the blackbirds (a grackle just now flies over, and afish-hawk, also), with the bluebirds and the pine warblers, are in thepinery. From the same place comes the song of a Maryland yellow-throat. There, too, the hen-hawks are screaming. 

At my feet are blue violets and white houstonia. Vines, thinly coveredwith fresh leaves, straggle over the walls, --Virginia creeper, poisonivy, grapevine, and at least one other, the name of which I do not know. A clump of tall blackberry vines is full of white blossoms, "brambleroses faint and pale, " and in one corner is a tuft of scarletblooms, --sage, perhaps, or something akin to it. For the moment I feelno curiosity. But withal the place is unkempt, as becomes a ruin. "Winter's ragged hand" has been rather heavy upon it. Withered palmettoleaves and leaf-stalks litter the ground, and of course, being inFlorida, there is no lack of orange-peel lying about. Ever since Ientered the State a new Scrip-ture text has been running in my head: Inthe place where the orange-peel falleth, there shall it lie. 

The mill, as I said, is now the centre of an orange grove. There must behundreds of trees. All of them are small, but the greater part arealready dead, and the rest are dying. Those nearest the walls arefullest of leaves, as if the walls somehow gave them protection. Theforest is creeping into the inclosure. Here and there the gracefulpalm-like tassel of a young long-leaved pine rises above the tallwinter-killed grass. It is not the worst thing about the world that ittends to run wild. 

Now the quail sings again, this time in two notes, and now the hummer isagain in the orange-tree. And all the while the redbird whistles in theshrubbery. He feels the beauty of the day. If I were a bird, I wouldsing with him. From far away comes the chant of a pine-wood sparrow. Ican just hear it. 

This is a place for dreams and quietness. Nothing else seems worth thehaving. Let us feel no more the fever of life. Surely they are the wisewho seek Nirvana; who insist not upon themselves, but wait absorption--reabsorption--into the infinite. The dead have the better part. Ithink of the stirring, adventurous man who built these walls and dugthese canals. His life was full of action, full of journeyings andfightings. Now he is at peace, and his works do follow him--into theland of forgetfulness. Blessed are the dead. Blessed, too, are the bees, the birds, the butterflies, and the lizards. Next to the dead, perhaps, they are happy. And I also am happy, for I too am under the spell. To mealso the sun and the air are sweet, and I too, for to-day at least, amcareless of the world and all its doings. 

So I sat dreaming, when suddenly there was a stir in the grass at myfeet. A snake was coming straight toward me. Only the evening before acracker had filled my ears with stories of "rattlers" and "moccasins. "He seemed to have seen them everywhere, and to have killed them as onekills mosquitoes. I looked a second time at the moving thing in thegrass. It was clothed in innocent black; but, being a son of Adam, Irose with involuntary politeness to let it pass. An instant more, and itslipped into the masonry at my side, and I sat down again. It had beenout taking the sun, and had come back to its hole in the wall. How likethe story of my own day, --of my whole winter vacation! Nay, if we chooseto view it so, how like the story of human life itself!

As I started homeward, leaving the mill and the cabin behind me, somecattle were feeding in the grassy road. At sight of my umbrella (thereare few places where a sunshade is more welcome than in a Floridapine-wood) they scampered away into the scrub. Poor, wild-eyed, hungry-looking things! I thought of Pharaoh's lean kine. They were likethe country itself, I was ready to say. But perhaps I misjudged both, seeing both, as I did, in the winter season. With the mercury at 80°, orthereabout, it is hard for the Northern tourist to remember that he islooking at a winter landscape. He compares a Florida winter with a NewEngland summer, and can hardly find words to tell you how barren andpoverty-stricken the country looks. 

After this I went more than once to the sugar mill. Morning andafternoon I visited it, but somehow I could never renew the joy of myfirst visit. Moods are not to be had for the asking, nor earned by awalk. The place was still interesting, the birds were there, thesunshine was pleasant, and the sea breeze fanned me. The orange blossomswere still sweet, and the bees still hummed about them; but it wasanother day, or I was another man. In memory, none the less, all myvisits blend in one, and the ruined mill in the dying orchard remainsone of the bright spots in that strange Southern world which, almostfrom the moment I left it behind me, began to fade into indistinctness, like the landscape of a dream. 

ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

The city of Sanford is a beautiful and interesting place, I hope, tothose who live in it. To the Florida tourist it is important as lying atthe head of steamboat navigation on the St. John's River, which hereexpands into a lake--Lake Monroe--some five miles in width, with Sanfordon one side, and Enterprise on the other; or, as a waggish traveler onceexpressed it, with Enterprise on the north, and Sanford and enterpriseon the south. 

Walking naturalists and lovers of things natural have their own point ofview, individual, unconventional, whimsical, if you please, --verydifferent, at all events, from that of clearer-witted and moreserious-minded men; and the inhabitants of Sanford will doubtless takeit as a compliment, and be amused rather than annoyed, when I confessthat I found their city a discouragement, a widespread desolation ofhouses and shops. If there is a pleasant country road leading out of itin any direction, I was unlucky enough to miss it. My melancholycondition was hit off before my eyes in a parable, as it were, by acrowd of young fellows, black and white, whom I found one afternoon in asand-lot just outside the city, engaged in what was intended for a gameof baseball. They were doing their best, --certainly they made noiseenough; but circumstances were against them. When the ball came to theground, from no matter what height or with what impetus, it fell dead inthe sand; if it had been made of solid rubber, it could not haverebounded. "Base-running" was little better than base-walking. "Sliding"was safe, but, by the same token, impossible. Worse yet, at every "foulstrike" or "wild throw" the ball was lost, and the barefooted fieldershad to pick their way painfully about in the outlying saw-palmetto scrubtill they found it. I had never seen our "national game" played underconditions so untoward. None but true patriots would have the heart totry it, I thought, and I meditated writing to Washington, where thequadrennial purification of the civil service was just then inprogress, --under a new broom, --to secure, if possible, a few bits ofrecognition ("plums" is the technical term, I believe) for men sodeserving. The first baseman certainly, who had oftenest to wade intothe scrub, should have received a consulate, at the very least. Yet theywere a merry crew, those national gamesters. Their patriotism was of thenoblest type, --the unconscious. They had no thought of being heroes, nordreamed of bounties or pensions. They quarreled with the umpire, ofcourse, but not with Fate; and I hope I profited by their example. Myerrand in Sanford was to see something of the river in its narrower andbetter part; and having done that, I did not regret what otherwise mighthave seemed a profitless week. 

First, however, I walked about the city. Here, as already at St. Augustine, and afterward at Tallahassee, I found the mocking-birds infree song. They are birds of the town. And the same is true of theloggerhead shrikes, a pair of which had built a nest in a smallwater-oak at the edge of the sidewalk, on a street corner, just beyondthe reach of passers-by. In the roadside trees--all freshly planted, like the city--were myrtle warblers, prairie warblers, and blueyellowbacks, the two latter in song. Once, after a shower, I watched amyrtle bird bathing on a branch among the wet leaves. The street gutterswere running with sulphur water, but he had waited for rain. I commendedhis taste, being myself one of those to whom water and brimstone is acombination as malodorous as it seems unscriptural. Noisy boat-tailedgrackles, or "jackdaws, " were plentiful about the lakeside, monstrouslylong in the tail, and almost as large as the fish crows, which wereoften there with them. Over the broad lake swept purple martins andwhite-breasted swallows, and nearer the shore fed peacefully a fewpied-billed grebes, or dabchicks, birds that I had seen only two orthree times before, and at which I looked more than once before I madeout what they were. They had every appearance of passing a winter ofcontent. At the tops of three or four stakes, which stood above thewater at wide intervals, --and at long distances from the shore, --satcommonly as many cormorants, here, as everywhere, with plenty of idletime upon their hands. On the other side of the city were orange groves, large, well kept, thrifty looking; the fruit still on the trees (March20, or thereabouts), or lying in heaps underneath, ready for the boxes. One man's house, I remember, was surrounded by a fence overrun withCherokee rosebushes, a full quarter of a mile of white blossoms. 

My best botanical stroll was along one of the railroads (Sanford is a"railway centre, " so called), through a dreary sand waste. Here I pickeda goodly number of novelties, including what looked like a beautifulpink chicory, only the plant itself was much prettier (_Lygodesmia_); avery curious sensitive-leaved plant (_Schrankia_), densely besetthroughout with curved prickles, and bearing globes of tiny pink-purpleflowers; a calopogon, quite as pretty as our Northern _pulchellus_; aclematis (_Baldwinii_), which looked more like a bluebell than aclematis till I commenced pulling it to pieces; and a great profusion ofone of the smaller papaws, or custard-apples, a low shrub, just thenfull of large, odd-shaped, creamy-white, heavy-scented blossoms. I wascarrying a sprig of it in my hand when I met a negro. "What is this?" Iasked. "I dunno, sir. " "Isn't it papaw?" "No, sir, that ain't papaw;"and then, as if he had just remembered something, he added, "That's dogbanana. "

Oftener than anywhere else I resorted to the shore of the lake, --to theone small part of it, that is to say, which was at the same time easilyreached and comparatively unfrequented. There--going one day fartherthan usual--I found myself in the borderland of a cypress swamp. On oneside was the lake, but between me and it were cypress-trees; and on theother side was the swamp itself, a dense wood growing in stagnant blackwater covered here and there with duckweed or some similar growth: afrightful place it seemed, the very abode of snakes and everything evil. Stories of slaves hiding in cypress swamps came into my mind. It musthave been cruel treatment that drove them to it! Buzzards flew about myhead, and looked at me. "He has come here to die, " I imagined themsaying among themselves. "No one comes here for anything else. Wait alittle, and we will pick his bones. " They perched near by, and, not tolose time, employed the interval in drying their wings, for the nighthad been showery. Once in a while one of them shifted his perch with anominous rustle. They were waiting for me, and were becoming impatient. "He is long about it, " one said to another; and I did not wonder. Theplace seemed one from which none who entered it could ever go out; andthere was no going farther in without plunging into that horrible mire. I stood still, and looked and listened. Some strange noise, "bird ordevil, " came from the depths of the wood. A flock of grackles settled ina tall cypress, and for a time made the place loud. How still it wasafter they were gone! I could hardly withdraw my gaze from the greenwater full of slimy black roots and branches, any one of which mightsuddenly lift its head and open its deadly white mouth! Once a fish-hawkfell to screaming farther down the lake. I had seen him the day before, standing on the rim of his huge nest in the top of a tree, and utteringthe same cries. All about me gigantic cypresses, every one swollenenormously at the base, rose straight and branchless into the air. Deadtrees, one might have said, --light-colored, apparently with no bark tocover them; but if I glanced up, I saw that each bore at the top ascanty head of branches just now putting forth fresh green leaves, whilelong funereal streamers of dark Spanish moss hung thickly from everybough. 

I am not sure how long I could have stayed in such a spot, if I had notbeen able to look now and then through the branches of the under-woodsout upon the sunny lake. Swallows innumerable were playing over thewater, many of them soaring so high as to be all but invisible. Wise andhappy birds, lovers of sunlight and air. _They_ would never be found ina cypress swamp. Along the shore, in a weedy shallow, the peacefuldabchicks were feeding. Far off on a post toward the middle of the lakestood a cormorant. But I could not keep my eyes long at once in thatdirection. The dismal swamp had me under its spell, and meanwhile thepatient buzzards looked at me. "It is almost time, " they said; "thefever will do its work, "--and I began to believe it. It was too bad tocome away; the stupid town offered no attraction; but it seemed perilousto remain. Perhaps I _could_ not come away. I would try it and see. Itwas amazing that I could; and no sooner was I out in the sunshine than Iwished I had stayed where I was; for having once left the place, I wasnever likely to find it again. The way was plain enough, to be sure, andmy feet would no doubt serve me. But the feet cannot do the mind's part, and it is a sad fact, one of the saddest in life, that sensations cannotbe repeated. 

With the fascination of the swamp still upon me, I heard somewhere inthe distance a musical voice, and soon came in sight of a garden where amiddle-aged negro was hoeing, --hoeing and singing: a wild, minor, endless kind of tune; a hymn, as seemed likely from a word caught hereand there; a true piece of natural melody, as artless as any bird's. Iwalked slowly to get more of it, and the happy-sad singer minded me not, but kept on with his hoe and his song. Potatoes or corn, whatever hiscrop may have been, --I did not notice, or, if I did, I haveforgotten, --it should have prospered under his hand. 

Farther along, in the highway, --a sandy track, with wastes of scrub oneither side, --boy of eight or nine, armed with a double-barreled gun, was lingering about a patch of dwarf oaks and palmettos. "Haven't gotthat rabbit yet, eh?" said I. (I had passed him there on my way out, andhe had told me what he was after. )

"No, sir, " he answered. 

"I don't believe there's any rabbit there. "

"Yes, there is, sir; I saw one a little while ago, but he got awaybefore I could get pretty near. "

"Good!" I thought. "Here is a grammarian. Not one boy in ten in thiscountry but would have said 'I seen. '" A scholar like this was worthtalking with. "Are there many rabbits here?" I asked. 

"Yes, sir, there's a good deal. "

And so, by easy mental stages, I was clear of the swamp and back in thetown, --saved from the horrible, and delivered to the commonplace andthe dreary. 

My best days in Sanford were two that I spent on the river above thelake. A youthful boatman, expert alike with the oar and the gun, servedme faithfully and well, impossible as it was for him to enter fully intothe spirit of a man who wanted to look at birds, but not to kill them. Ithink he had never before seen a customer of that breed. First he rowedme up the "creek, " under promise to show me alligators, moccasins, andno lack of birds, including the especially desired purple gallinule. Thesnakes were somehow missing (a loss not irreparable), and so were thepurple gallinules; for them, the boy thought, it was still rather earlyin the season, although he had killed one a few days before, and forproof had brought me a wing. But as we were skirting along the shore Isuddenly called "Hist!" An alligator lay on the bank just before us. Theboy turned his head, and instantly was all excitement. It was a bigfellow, he said, --one of three big ones that inhabited the creek. Hewould get him this time. "Are you sure?" I asked. "Oh yes, I'll blow thetop of his head off. " He was loaded for gallinules, and I, being nosportsman, and never having seen an alligator before, was some shadesless confident. But it was his game, and I left him to his way. Hepulled the boat noiselessly against the bank in the shelter of tallreeds, put down the oars, with which he could almost have touched thealligator, and took up his gun. At that moment the creature got wind ofus, and slipped incontinently into the water, not a little to my relief. One live alligator is worth a dozen dead ones, to my thinking. He showedhis back above the surface of the stream for a moment shortly afterward, and then disappeared for good. 

Ornithologically, the creek was a disappointment. We pushed into one bayafter another, among the dense "bonnets, "--huge leaves of the commonyellow pond lily, --but found nothing that I had not seen before. Hereand there a Florida gallinule put up its head among the leaves, or tookflight as we pressed too closely upon it; but I saw them to noadvantage, and with a single exception they were dumb. One bird, as itdashed into the rushes, uttered two or three cries that soundedfamiliar. The Florida gallinule is in general pretty silent, I think;but he has a noisy season; then he is indeed noisy enough. A swampcontaining a single pair might be supposed to be populous with barn-yardfowls, the fellow keeps up such a clatter: now loud and terror-stricken, "like a hen whose head is just going to be cut off, " as a friend onceexpressed it; then soft and full of content, as if the aforesaid hen hadlaid an egg ten minutes before, and were still felicitating herself uponthe achievement. It was vexatious that here, in the very home of Floridagallinules, I should see and hear less of them than I had more than oncedone in Massachusetts, where they are esteemed a pretty choice rarity, and where, in spite of what I suppose must be called exceptional goodluck, my acquaintance with them had been limited to perhaps half a dozenbirds. But in affairs of this kind a direct chase is seldom the bestrewarded. At one point the boatman pulled up to a thicket of smallwillows, bidding me be prepared to see birds in enormous numbers; but wefound only a small company of night herons--evidently breedingthere--and a green heron. The latter my boy shot before I knew what hewas doing. He took my reproof in good part, protesting that he had hadonly a glimpse of the bird, and had taken it for a possible gallinule. In the course of the trip we saw, besides the species already named, great blue and little blue herons, pied-billed grebes, coots, cormorants, a flock of small sandpipers (on the wing), buzzards, vultures, fish-hawks, and innumerable red-winged blackbirds. 

Three days afterward we went up the river. At the upper end of the lakewere many white-billed coots (_Fulica americana_); so many that we didour best to count them as they rose, flock after flock, dragging theirfeet over the water behind them with a multitudinous splashing noise. There were a thousand, at least. They had an air of being not so veryshy, but they were nobody's fools. "See there!" my boy would exclaim, asa hundred or two of them dashed past the boat; "see how they keep justout of range!"

We were hardly on the river itself before he fell into a state ofsomething like frenzy at the sight of an otter swimming before us, showing its head, and then diving. He made after it in hot haste, andfired I know not how many times, but all for nothing. He had killedseveral before now, he said, but had never been obliged to chase one inthis fashion. Perhaps there was a Jonah in the ship; for though Isympathized with the boy, I sympathized also, and still more warmly, with the otter. It acted as if life were dear to it, and for aught Iknew it had as good a right to live as either the boy or I. No suchqualms disturbed me a few minutes later, when, as the boat was grazingthe reeds, I espied just ahead a snake lying in wait among them. I gavethe alarm, and the boy looked round. "Yes, " he said, "a big one, amoccasin, --a cotton-mouth; but I'll fix him. " He pulled a stroke or twonearer, then lifted his oar and brought it down splash; but the reedsbroke the blow, and the moccasin slipped into the water, apparentlyunharmed. That was a case for powder and shot. Florida people have apoor opinion of a man who meets a venomous snake, no matter where, without doing his best to kill it. How strong the feeling is my boatmangave me proof within ten minutes after his failure with thecotton-mouth. He had pulled out into the middle of the river, when Inoticed a beautiful snake, short and rather stout, lying coiled on thewater. Whether it was an optical illusion I cannot say, but it seemed tome that the creature lay entirely above the surface, --as if it had beenan inflated skin rather than a live snake. We passed close by it, but itmade no offer to move, only darting out its tongue as the boat slippedpast. I spoke to the boy, who at once ceased rowing. 

"I think I must go back and kill that fellow, " he said. 

"Why so?" I asked, with surprise, for I had looked upon it simply as acuriosity. 

"Oh, I don't like to see it live. It's the poisonousest snake there is. "

As he spoke he turned the boat: but the snake saved him further trouble, for just then it uncoiled and swam directly toward us, as if it meant tocome aboard. "Oh, you're coming this way, are you?" said the boysarcastically. "Well, come on!" The snake came on, and when it got wellwithin range he took up his fishing-rod (with hooks at the end fordrawing game out of the reeds and bonnets), and the next moment thesnake lay dead upon the water. He slipped the end of the pole under itand slung it ashore. "There! how do you like that?" said he, and heheaded the boat upstream again. It was a "copper-bellied moccasin, " hedeclared, whatever that may be, and was worse than a rattlesnake. 

On the river, as in the creek, we were continually exploring bays andinlets, each with its promising patch of bonnets. Nearly every suchplace contained at least one Florida gallinule; but where were the"purples, " about which we kept talking, --the "royal purples, " concerningwhose beauty my boy was so eloquent?

"They are not common yet, " he would say. "By and by they will be asthick as Floridas are now. "

"But don't they stay here all winter?"

"No, sir; not the purples. "

"Are you certain about that?"

"Oh yes, sir. I have hunted this river too much. They couldn't be herein the winter without my knowing it. "

I wondered whether he could be right, or partly right, notwithstandingthe book statements to the contrary. I notice that Mr. Chapman, writingof his experiences with this bird at Gainesville, says, "None were seenuntil May 25, when, in a part of the lake before unvisited, --a mass offloating islands and 'bonnets, '--I found them not uncommon. " The boy'sassertions may be worth recording, at any rate. 

In one place he fired suddenly, and as he put down the gun he exclaimed, "There! I'll bet I've shot a bird you never saw before. It had a bill aslong as that, " with one finger laid crosswise upon another. He hauledthe prize into the boat, and sure enough, it was a novelty, --a kingrail, new to both of us. We had gone a little farther, and were passinga prairie, on which were pools of water where the boy said he had oftenseen large flocks of white ibises feeding (there were none there now, alas, though we crept up with all cautiousness to peep over the bank), when all at once I descried some sharp-winged, strange-looking bird overour heads. It showed sidewise at the moment, but an instant later itturned, and I saw its long forked tail, and almost in the same breathits white head. A fork-tailed kite! and purple gallinules were for thetime forgotten. It was performing the most graceful evolutions, swoopinghalf-way to the earth from a great height, and then sweeping upwardagain. Another minute, and I saw a second bird, farther away. I watchedthe nearer one till it faded from sight, soaring and swooping byturns, --its long, scissors-shaped tail all the while fully spread, --butnever coming down, as its habit is said to be, to skim over the surfaceof the water. There is nothing more beautiful on wings, I believe: alarge hawk, with a swallow's grace of form, color, and motion. I saw itonce more (four birds) over the St. Mark's River, and counted the sightone of the chief rewards of my Southern winter. 

At noon we rested and ate our luncheon in the shade of three or fourtall palmetto-trees standing by themselves on a broad prairie, a placebrightened by beds of blue iris and stretches of goldensenecio, --homelike as well as pretty, both of them. Then we set outagain. The day was intensely hot (March 24), and my oarsman was morethan half sick with a sudden cold. I begged him to take things easily, but he soon experienced an almost miraculous renewal of his forces. Inone of the first of our after-dinner bonnet patches, he seized his gun, fired, and began to shout, "A purple! a purple!" He drew the bird in, asproud as a prince. "There, sir!" he said; "didn't I tell you it washandsome? It has every color there is. " And indeed it was handsome, worthy to be called the "Sultana;" with the most exquisite iridescentbluish-purple plumage, the legs yellow, or greenish-yellow (a point bywhich it may be distinguished from the Florida gallinule, as the birdflies from you), the bill red tipped with pale green, and the shield (onthe forehead, like a continuation of the upper mandible) light blue, ofa peculiar shade, "just as if it had been painted. " From that moment theboy was a new creature. Again and again he spoke of his alteredfeelings. He could pull the boat now anywhere I wanted to go. He wasperfectly fresh, he declared, although I thought he had already done apretty good day's work under that scorching sun. I had not imagined howdeeply his heart was set upon showing me the bird I was after. It mademe twice as glad to see it, dead though it was. 

Within an hour, on our way homeward, we came upon another. It sprang outof the lily pads, and sped toward the tall grass of the shore. "Look!look! a purple!" the boy cried. "See his yellow legs!" Instinctively heraised his gun, but I said No. It would be inexcusable to shoot a secondone; and besides, we were at that moment approaching a bird about whichI felt a stronger curiosity, --a snake-bird, or water-turkey, sitting ina willow shrub at the further end of the bay. "Pull me as near it as itwill let us come, " I said. "I want to see as much of it as possible. " Atevery rod or two I stopped the boat and put up my glasses, till we werewithin perhaps sixty feet of the bird. Then it took wing, but instead offlying away went sweeping about us. On getting round to the willowsagain it made as if it would alight, uttering at the same time somefaint ejaculations, like "ah! ah! ah!" but it kept on for a second sweepof the circle. Then it perched in its old place, but faced us a littleless directly, so that I could see the beautiful silver tracery of itswings, like the finest of embroidery, as I thought. After we had eyed itfor some minutes we suddenly perceived a second bird, ten feet or sofrom it, in full sight. Where it came from, or how

[Transcriber's note: missing page 142]

too, shaped like a narrow wedge, was unconscionably long; and as thebird showed against the sky, I could think of nothing but an animatedsign of addition. A better man--the Emperor Constantine, shall wesay?--might have seen in it a nobler symbol. 

While we were loitering down the river, later in the afternoon, an eaglemade its appearance far overhead, the first one of the day. The boy, forsome reason, refused to believe that it was an eagle. Nothing but asight of its white head and tail through the glass could convince him. (The perfectly square _set_ of the wings as the bird sails is a prettystrong mark, at no matter what distance. ) Presently an osprey, not farfrom us, with a fish in his claws, set up a violent screaming. "It isbecause he has caught a fish, " said the boy; "he is calling his mate. ""No, " said I, "it is because the eagle is after him. Wait a bit. " Infact, the eagle was already in pursuit, and the hawk, as he always does, had begun struggling upward with all his might. That is the fish-hawk'sway of appealing to Heaven against his oppressor. He was safe for thattime. Three negroes, shad-fishers, were just beyond us (we had seen themthere in the morning, wading about the river setting their nets), and atthe sight of them and of us, I have no doubt, the eagle turned away. Theboy was not peculiar in his notion about the osprey's scream. Some oneelse had told me that the bird always screamed after catching a fish. But I knew better, having seen him catch a hundred, more or less, without uttering a sound. The safe rule, in such cases, is to listen toall you hear, and believe it--after you have verified it for yourself. 

It was while we were discussing this question, I think, that the boyopened his heart to me about my methods of study. He had looked throughthe glass now and then, and of course had been astonished at its power. "Why, " he said finally, "I never had any idea it could be so much funjust to look at birds in the way you do!" I liked the turn of hisphrase. It seemed to say, "Yes, I begin to see through it. We are in thesame boat. This that you call study is only another kind of sport. " Icould have shaken hands with him but that he had the oars. Who does notlove to be flattered by an ingenuous boy?

All in all, the day had been one to be remembered. In addition to thebirds already named--three of them new to me--we had seen great blueherons, little blue herons, Louisiana herons, night herons, cormorants, pied-billed grebes, kingfishers, red-winged blackbirds, boat-tailedgrackles, redpoll and myrtle warblers, savanna sparrows, tree swallows, purple martins, a few meadow larks, and the ubiquitous turkey buzzard. The boat-tails abounded along the river banks, and, with their tamenessand their ridiculous outcries, kept us amused whenever there was nothingelse to absorb our attention. The prairie lands through which the rivermeanders proved to be surprisingly dry and passable (the water beingunusually low, the boy said), with many cattle pastured upon them. Herewe found the savanna sparrows; here, too, the meadow larks were singing. 

It was a hard pull across the rough lake against the wind (a dangeroussheet of water for flat-bottomed rowboats, I was told afterward), butthe boy was equal to it, protesting that he didn't feel tired a bit, nowwe had got the "purples;" and if he did not catch the fever fromdrinking some quarts of river water (a big bottle of coffee havingproved to be only a drop in the bucket), against my urgent remonstrancesand his own judgment, I am sure he looks back upon the labor as on thewhole well spent. He was going North in the spring, he told me. May joybe with him wherever he is!

The next morning I took the steamer down the river to Blue Spring, adistance of some thirty miles, on my way back to New Smyrna, to a placewhere there were accessible woods, a beach, and, not least, a daily seabreeze. The river in that part of its course is comfortably narrow, --agreat advantage, --winding through cypress swamps, hammock woods, stretches of prairie, and in one place a pine barren; an interesting andin many ways beautiful country, but so unwholesome looking as to losemuch of its attractiveness. Three or four large alligators lay sunningthemselves in the most obliging manner upon the banks, here one andthere one, to the vociferous delight of the passengers, who ran from oneside of the deck to the other, as the captain shouted and pointed. One, he told us, was thirteen feet long, the largest in the river. Eachappeared to have its own well-worn sunning-spot, and all, I believe, kept their places, as if the passing of the big steamer--almost too bigfor the river at some of the sharper turns--had come to seem acommonplace event. Herons in the usual variety were present, withospreys, an eagle, kingfishers, ground doves, Carolina doves, blackbirds(red-wings and boat-tails), tree swallows, purple martins, and a singlewild turkey, the first one I had ever seen. It was near the bank of theriver, on a bushy prairie, fully exposed, and crouched as the steamerpassed. For a Massachusetts ornithologist the mere sight of such a birdwas enough to make a pretty good Thanksgiving Day. Blue yellow-backedwarblers were singing here and there, and I retain a particularremembrance of one bluebird that warbled to us from the pine-woods. Thecaptain told me, somewhat to my surprise, that he had seen two flocks ofparoquets during the winter (they had been very abundant along the riverwithin his time, he said), but for me there was no such fortune. Onebird, soaring in company with a buzzard at a most extraordinary heightstraight over the river, greatly excited my curiosity. The captaindeclared that it must be a great blue heron; but he had never seen onethus engaged, nor, so far as I can learn, has any one else ever done so. Its upper parts seemed to be mostly white, and I can only surmise thatit may have been a sandhill crane, a bird which is said to have such ahabit. 

As I left the boat I had a little experience of the seamy side ofSouthern travel; nothing to be angry about, perhaps, but annoying, nevertheless, on a hot day. I surrendered my check to the purser of theboat, and the deck hands put my trunk upon the landing at Blue Spring. But there was no one there to receive it, and the station was locked. Wehad missed the noon train, with which we were advertised to connect, byso many hours that I had ceased to think about it. Finally, a negro, oneof several who were fishing thereabouts, advised me to go "up to thehouse, " which he pointed out behind some woods, and see the agent. ThisI did, and the agent, in turn, advised me to walk up the track to the"Junction, " and be sure to tell the conductor, when the evening trainarrived, as it probably would do some hours later, that I had a trunk atthe landing. Otherwise the train would not run down to the river, and mybaggage would lie there till Monday. He would go down presently and putit under cover. Happily, he fulfilled his promise, for it was alreadybeginning to thunder, and soon it rained in torrents, with a cold windthat made the hot weather all at once a thing of the past. 

It was a long wait in the dreary little station; or rather it would havebeen, had not the tedium of it been relieved by the presence of a newlymarried couple, whose honeymoon was just then at the full. Their delightin each other was exuberant, effervescent, beatific, --what shall Isay?--quite beyond veiling or restraint. At first I bestowed upon themsidewise and cornerwise glances only, hiding bashfully behind myspectacles, as it were, and pretending to see nothing; but I soonperceived that I was to them of no more consequence than a fly on thewall. If they saw me, which sometimes seemed doubtful, --for love isblind, --they evidently thought me too sensible, or too old, to mind alittle billing and cooing. And they were right in their opinion. Whatwas I in Florida for, if not for the study of natural history? Andtruly, I have seldom seen, even among birds, a pair less sophisticated, less cabined and confined by that disastrous knowledge of good and evilwhich is commonly understood to have resulted from the eating offorbidden fruit, and which among prudish people goes by the name ofmodesty. It was refreshing. Charles Lamb himself would have enjoyed it, and, I should hope, would have added some qualifying footnotes to acertain unamiable essay of his concerning the behavior of marriedpeople. 

ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

One of my first inquiries at Tallahassee was for the easiest way to thewoods. The city is built on a hill, with other hills about it. These aremostly under cultivation, and such woods as lay within sight seemed tobe pretty far off; and with the mercury at ninety in the shade, longtramps were almost out of the question. "Take the St. Augustine road, "said the man to whom I had spoken; and he pointed out its beginningnearly opposite the state capitol. After breakfast I followed hisadvice, with results so pleasing that I found myself turning that corneragain and again as long as I remained in Tallahassee. 

The road goes abruptly downhill to the railway track, first between deepred gulches, and then between rows of negro cabins, each with its gardenof rosebushes, now (early April) in full bloom. The deep sides of thegulches were draped with pendent lantana branches full of purpleflowers, or, more beautiful still, with a profusion of fragrant whitehoneysuckle. On the roadside, between the wheel-track and the gulch, grew brilliant Mexican poppies, with Venus's looking-glass, yellowoxalis, and beds of blackberry vines. The woods of which my informanthad spoken lay a little beyond the railway, on the right hand of theroad, just as it began another ascent. I entered them at once, and aftera semicircular turn through the pleasant paths, amid live-oaks, water-oaks, red oaks, chestnut oaks, magnolias, beeches, hickories, hornbeams, sweet gums, sweet bays, and long-leaved and short-leavedpines, came out into the road again a quarter of a mile farther up thehill. They were the fairest of woods to stroll in, it seemed to me, withpaths enough, and not too many, and good enough, but not too good; thatis to say, they were footpaths, not roads, though afterwards, on aSunday afternoon, I met two young fellows riding through them onbicycles. The wood was delightful, also, after my two months in easternFlorida, for lying on a slope, and for having an undergrowth of looseshrubbery instead of a jungle of scrub oak and saw palmetto. Blue jaysand crested flycatchers were doing their best to outscream oneanother, --with the odds in favor of the flycatchers, --and a few smallerbirds were singing, especially two or three summer tanagers, as manyyellow-throated warblers, and a ruby-crowned kinglet. In one part of thewood, near what I took to be an old city reservoir, I came upon a singlewhite-throated sparrow and a humming-bird, --the latter a strangelyuncommon sight in Tallahassee, where, of all the places I have everseen, it ought to find itself in clover. Here, too, were a pair ofCarolina wrens, just now in search of a building-site, and conductingthemselves exactly in the manner of bluebirds intent on such business;peeping into every hole that offered itself, and then, after thebriefest interchange of opinion, --unfavorable on the female's part, ifwe may guess, --concluding to look a little farther. 

As I struck the road again, a man came along on horseback, and we fellinto conversation about the country. "A lovely country, " he called it, and I agreed with him. He inquired where I was from, and I mentionedthat I had lately been in southern Florida, and found this region astrong contrast. "Yes, " he returned; and, pointing to the grass, heremarked upon the richness of the soil. "This yere land would fertilizethat, " he said, speaking of southern Florida. "I shouldn't wonder, " saidI. I meant to be understood as concurring in his opinion, but such aqualified, Yankeefied assent seemed to him no assent at all. "Oh, itwill, it will!" he responded, as if the point were one about which Imust on no account be left unconvinced. He told me that the fine houseat which I had looked, a little distance back, through a long vista oftrees, was the residence of Captain H. , who owned all the land along theroad for a good distance. I inquired how far the road was pretty, likethis. "For forty miles, " he said. That was farther than I was ready towalk, and coming soon to the top of the hill, or, more exactly, of theplateau, I stopped in the shade of a china-tree, and looked at thepleasing prospect. Behind me was a plantation of young pear-trees, andbefore me, among the hills northward, lay broad, cultivated slopes, dotted here and there with cabins and tall, solitary trees. On thenearer slope, perhaps a sixteenth of a mile away, a negro was ploughing, with a single ox harnessed in some primitive manner, --with pieces ofwood, for the most part, as well as I could make out through anopera-glass. The soil offered the least possible hindrance, and both heand the ox seemed to be having a literal "walk-over. " Beyond him--a fullhalf-mile away, perhaps--another man was ploughing with a mule; and inanother direction a third was doing likewise, with a woman following inhis wake. A colored boy of seventeen--I guessed his age attwenty-three--came up the road in a cart, and I stopped him to inquireabout the crops and other matters. The land in front of me was plantedwith cotton, he said; and the men ploughing in the distance were gettingready to plant the same. They hired the land and the cabins of CaptainH. , paying him so much cotton (not so much an acre, but so much a mule, if I understood him rightly) by way of rent. We talked a long time aboutone thing and another. He had been south as far as the Indian Rivercountry, but was glad to be back again in Tallahassee, where he wasborn. I asked him about the road, how far it went. "They tell me it goessmack to St. Augustine, " he replied; "I ain't tried it. " It was anunlikely story, it seemed to me, but I was assured afterward that he wasright; that the road actually runs across the country from Tallahasseeto St. Augustine, a distance of about two hundred miles. With company ofmy own choosing, and in cooler weather, I thought I should like to walkits whole length. [1] My young man was in no haste. With the reins (madeof rope, after a fashion much followed in Florida) lying on the forwardaxle of his cart, he seemed to have put himself entirely at my service. He had to the full that peculiar urbanity which I began after a while tolook upon as characteristic of Tallahassee negroes, --a gentleness ofspeech, and a kindly, deferential air, neither forward nor servile, suchas sits well on any man, whatever the color of his skin. 

[Footnote 1: But let no enthusiast set out to walk from one city to theother on the strength of what is here written. After this sketch wasfirst printed--in _The Atlantic Monthly_--a gentleman who ought to knowwhereof he speaks sent me word that my informants were all of themwrong--that the road does not run to St. Augustine. For myself, I assertnothing. As my colored boy said, "I ain't tried it. "]

In that respect he was like another boy of about his own age, who livedin the cabin directly before us, but whom I did not see till I had beenseveral times over the road. Then he happened to be at work near theedge of the field, and I beckoned him to me. He, too, was serious andmanly in his bearing, and showed no disposition to go back to his hoetill I broke off the interview, --as if it were a point of good mannerswith him to await my pleasure. Yes, the plantation was a good one andeasily cultivated, he said, in response to some remark of my own. Therewere five in the family, and they all worked. "We are all big enough toeat, " he added, quite simply. He had never been North, but had latelydeclined the offer of a gentleman who wished to take him there, --him and"another fellow. " He once went to Jacksonville, but couldn't stay. "Youcan get along without your father pretty well, but it's another thing todo without your mother. " He never meant to leave home again as long ashis mother lived; which was likely to be for some years, I thought, ifshe were still able to do her part in the cotton-field. As a generalthing, the colored tenants of the cabins made out pretty well, hebelieved, unless something happened to the crops. As for the oldservants of the H. Family, they didn't have to work, --they wereprovided for; Captain H. 's father "left it so in his testimonial. " Ispoke of the purple martins which were flying back and forth over thefield with many cheerful noises, and of the calabashes that hung from atall pole in one corner of the cabin yard, for their accommodation. Onmy way South, I told him, I had noticed these dangling long-neckedsquashes everywhere, and had wondered what they were for. I had foundout since that they were the colored man's martin-boxes, and was glad tosee the people so fond of the birds. "Yes, " he said, "there's no dangerof hawks carrying off the chickens as long as the martins are round. "

Twice afterward, as I went up the road, I found him ploughing betweenthe cotton rows; but he was too far away to be accosted withoutshouting, and I did not feel justified in interrupting him at his work. Back and forth he went through the long furrow after the patient ox, thehens and chickens following. No doubt they thought the work was all fortheir benefit. Farther away, a man and two women were hoeing. The familydeserved to prosper, I said to myself, as I lay under a bigmagnolia-tree (just beginning to open its large white flowers) and idlyenjoyed the scene. And it was just here, by the bye, that I solved aninteresting etymological puzzle, to wit, the origin and precise meaningof the word "baygall, "--a word which the visitor often hears upon thelips of Florida people. An old hunter in Smyrna, when I questioned himabout it, told me that it meant a swampy piece of wood, and took itsorigin, he had always supposed, from the fact that bay-trees andgall-bushes commonly grew in such places. A Tallahassee gentleman agreedwith this explanation, and promised to bring home some gall-berries thenext time he came across any, that I might see what they were; but theberries were never forthcoming, and I was none the wiser, till, on oneof my last trips up the St. Augustine road, as I stood under the largemagnolia just mentioned, a colored man came along, hat in hand, and abag of grain balanced on his head. 

"That's a large magnolia, " said I. 

He assented. 

"That's about as large as magnolias ever grow, isn't it?"

"No, sir; down in the gall there's magnolias a heap bigger 'n that. "

"A gall? What's that?"

"A baygall, sir. "

"And what's a baygall?"

"A big wood. "

"And why do you call it a baygall?"

He was stumped, it was plain to see. No doubt he would have scratchedhis head, if that useful organ had been accessible. He hesitated; but itisn't like an uneducated man to confess ignorance. "'Cause it's adesert, " he said, "a thick _place_. "

"Yes, yes, " I answered, and he resumed his march. 

The road was traveled mostly by negroes. On Sunday afternoons it lookedquite like a flower garden, it was so full of bright dresses coming homefrom church. "Now'-days folks git religion so easy!" one young womansaid to another, as they passed me. She was a conservative. I did notjoin the procession, but on other days I talked, first and last, with agood many of the people; from the preacher, who carried a handsome caneand made me a still handsomer bow, down to a serious little fellow ofsix or seven years, whom I found standing at the foot of the hill, beside a bundle of dead wood. He was carrying it home for the familystove, and had set it down for a minute's rest. I said something abouthis burden, and as I went on he called after me: "What kind of birds areyou hunting for? Ricebirds?" I answered that I was looking for birds ofall sorts. Had he seen any ricebirds lately? Yes, he said; he started aflock the other day up on[1] the hill. "How did they look?" said I. "They is red blackbirds, " he returned. This was not the first time I hadheard the redwing called the ricebird. But how did the boy know me for abird-gazer? That was a mystery. It came over me all at once thatpossibly I had become better known in the community than I had in theleast suspected; and then I remembered my field-glass. That, as I couldnot help being aware, was an object of continual attention. Every day Isaw people, old and young, black and white, looking at it withundisguised curiosity. Often they passed audible comments upon it amongthemselves. "How far can you see through the spyglass?" a bolder spiritwould now and then venture to ask; and once, on the railway track out inthe pine lands, a barefooted, happy-faced urchin made a guess that wasreally admirable for its ingenuity. "Looks like you're goin' overinspectin' the wire, " he remarked. On rare occasions, as an act ofspecial grace, I offered such an inquirer a peep through the magiclenses, --an experiment that never failed to elicit exclamations ofwonder. Things were so near! And the observer looked comicallyincredulous, on putting down the glass, to find how suddenly thelandscape had slipped away again. More than one colored man wanted toknow its price, and expressed a fervent desire to possess one like it;and probably, if I had ever been assaulted and robbed in all my solitarywanderings through the flat-woods and other lonesome places, my"spyglass" rather than my purse--the "lust of the eye" rather than the"pride of life"--would have been to thank. 

[Footnote 1: He did not say "upon" any more than Northern white boysdo. ]

Here, however, there could be no thought of such a contingency. Herewere no vagabonds (one inoffensive Yankee specimen excepted), buthard-working people going into the city or out again, each on his ownlawful business. Scarcely one of them, man or woman, but greeted mekindly. One, a white man on horseback, invited, and even urged me, tomount his horse, and let him walk a piece. I must be fatigued, he wassure, --how could I help it?--and he would as soon walk as not. Findingme obstinate, he walked his horse at my side, chatting about thecountry, the trees, and the crops. He it was who called my particularattention to the abundance of blackberry vines. "Are the berries sweet?"I asked. He smacked his lips. "Sweet as honey, and big as that, "measuring off a liberal portion of his thumb. I spoke of them half anhour later to a middle-aged colored man. Yes, he said, the blackberrieswere plenty enough and sweet enough; but, for his part, he didn'ttrouble them a great deal. The vines (and he pointed at them, fringingthe roadside indefinitely) were great places for rattlesnakes. He likedthe berries, but he liked somebody else to pick them. He was awfullyafraid of snakes; they were so dangerous. "Yes, sir" (this in answer toan inquiry), "there are plenty of rattlesnakes here clean up toChristmas. " I liked him for his frank avowal of cowardice, and stillmore for his quiet bearing. He remembered the days of slavery, --"beforethe surrender, " as the current Southern phrase is, --and his face beamedwhen I spoke of my joy in thinking that his people were free, no matterwhat might befall them. He, too, raised cotton on hired land, and wasbringing up his children--there were eight of them, he said--to habitsof industry. 

My second stroll toward St. Augustine carried me perhaps threemiles, --say one sixty-sixth of the entire distance, --and none of mysubsequent excursions took me any farther; and having just now commendeda negro for his candor, I am moved to acknowledge that, between the sandunderfoot and the sun overhead, I found the six miles, which I spent atleast four hours in accomplishing, more fatiguing than twice thatdistance would have been over New Hampshire hills. If I were to settlein that country, I should probably fall into the way of riding more, andwalking less. I remember thinking how comfortable a certain ponderousblack mammy looked, whom I met on one of these same sunny and sandytramps. She sat in the very middle of a tipcart, with an old and trulypicturesque man's hat on her head (quite in the fashion, femininereaders will notice), driving a one-horned ox with a pair ofclothes-line reins. She was traveling slowly, just as I like to travel;and, as I say, I was impressed by her comfortable appearance. Why wouldnot an equipage like that be just the thing for a naturalistic idler?

Not far beyond my halting-place of two days before I came to a Cherokeerosebush, one of the most beautiful of plants, --white, fragrant, singleroses (_real_ roses) set in the midst of the handsomest of glossy greenleaves. I was delighted to find it still in flower. A hundred milesfarther south I had seen it finishing its season a full month earlier. Istopped, of course, to pluck a blossom. At that moment a female redbirdflew out of the bush. Her mate was beside her instantly, and a namelesssomething in their manner told me they were trying to keep a secret. Thenest, built mainly of pine needles and other leaves, was in the middleof the bush, a foot or two from the grass, and contained two bluish orgreenish eggs thickly spattered with dark brown. I meant to look into itagain (the owners seemed to have no great objection), but somehow missedit every time I passed. From that point, as far as I went, the road waslined with Cherokee roses, --not continuously, but with shortintermissions; and from the number of redbirds seen, almost invariablyin pairs, I feel safe in saying that the nest I had found was probablyone of fifteen or twenty scattered along the wayside. How gloriously thebirds sang! It was their day for singing. I was ready to christen theroad anew, --Redbird Road. 

But the redbirds, many and conspicuous as they were, had no monopoly ofthe road or of the day. House wrens were equally numerous and equally athome, though they sang more out of sight. Red-eyed chewinks, still farfrom their native berry pastures, hopped into a bush to cry, "Who's he?"at the passing of a stranger, in whom, for aught I know, they may havehalf recognized an old acquaintance. A bunch of quails ran across theroad a little in front of me, and in another place fifteen or twentyred-winged blackbirds (not a red wing among them) sat gossiping in atreetop. Elsewhere, even later than this (it was now April 7), I sawflocks, every bird of which wore shoulder-straps, --like the traditionalmilitia company, all officers. _They_ did not gossip, of course (it isthe male that sports the red), but they made a lively noise. 

As for the mocking-birds, they were at the front here, as they wereeverywhere. During my fortnight in Tallahassee there were never manyconsecutive five minutes of daylight in which, if I stopped to listen, Icould not hear at least one mocker. Oftener two or three were singing atonce in as many different directions. And, speaking of them, I mustspeak also of their more northern cousin. From the day I entered FloridaI had been saying that the mocking-bird, save for his occasional mimicryof other birds, sang so exactly like the thrasher that I did not believeI could tell one from the other. Now, however, on this St. Augustineroad, I suddenly became aware of a bird singing somewhere in advance, and as I listened again I said aloud, with full persuasion, "There!that's a thrasher!" There was a something of difference: a shade ofcoarseness in the voice, perhaps; a tendency to force the tone, as wesay of human singers, --a _something_, at all events, and the longer Ihearkened, the more confident I felt that the bird was a thrasher. Andso it was, --the first one I had heard in Florida, although I had seenmany. Probably the two birds have peculiarities of voice and methodthat, with longer familiarity on the listener's part, would render themeasily distinguishable. On general principles, I must believe that to betrue of all birds. But the experience just described is not to be takenas proving that _I_ have any such familiarity. Within a week afterward, while walking along the railway, I came upon a thrasher and amocking-bird singing side by side; the mocker upon a telegraph pole, andthe thrasher on the wire, halfway between the mocker and the next pole. They sang and sang, while I stood between them in the cut below andlistened; and if my life had depended on my seeing how one song differedfrom the other, I could not have done it. With my eyes shut, the birdsmight have changed places, --if they could have done it quicklyenough, --and I should have been none the wiser. 

As I have said, I followed the road over the nearly level plateau forwhat I guessed to be about three miles. Then I found myself in a bit ofhollow that seemed made for a stopping-place, with a plantation roadrunning off to the right, and a hillside cornfield of many acres on theleft. In the field were a few tall dead trees. At the tip of one sat asparrow-hawk, and to the trunk of another clung a red-belliedwoodpecker, who, with characteristic foolishness, sat beside his holecalling persistently, and then, as if determined to publish what otherbirds so carefully conceal, went inside, thrust out his head, andresumed his clatter. Here, too, were a pair of bluebirds, noticeable fortheir rarity, and for the wonderful color--a shade deeper than is everseen at the North, I think--of the male's blue coat. In a small thicketin the hollow beside the road were noisy white-eyed vireos, aruby-crowned kinglet, --a tiny thing that within a month would be singingin Canada, or beyond, --an unseen wood pewee, and (also unseen) a hermitthrush, one of perhaps twenty solitary individuals that I foundscattered about the woods in the course of my journeyings. Not one ofthem sang a note. Probably they did not know that there was a Yankee inFlorida who--in some moods, at least--would have given more for a dozenbars of hermit thrush music than for a day and a night of themocking-bird's medley. Not that I mean to disparage the great Southernperformer; as a vocalist he is so far beyond the hermit thrush as torender a comparison absurd; but what I love is a _singer_, a voice toreach the soul. An old Tallahassee negro, near the "white Normanschool, "--so he called it, --hit off the mocking-bird pretty well. I hadcalled his attention to one singing in an adjacent dooryard. "Yes, " hesaid, "I love to hear 'em. They's very amusin', very amusin'. " My ownfeeling can hardly be a prejudice, conscious or unconscious, in favor ofwhat has grown dear to me through early and long-continued association. The difference between the music of birds like the mocker, the thrasher, and the catbird and that of birds like the hermit, the veery, and thewood thrush is one of kind, not of degree; and I have heard music of themocking-bird's kind (the thrasher's, that is to say) as long as I haveheard music at all. The question is one of taste, it is true; but it isnot a question of familiarity or favoritism. All praise to the mockerand the thrasher! May their tribe increase! But if we are to indulge incomparisons, give me the wood thrush, the hermit, and the veery; withtones that the mocking-bird can never imitate, and a simplicity whichthe Fates--the wise Fates, who will have variety--have put foreverbeyond his appreciation and his reach. 

Florida as I saw it (let the qualification be noted) is no more a landof flowers than New England. In some respects, indeed, it is less so. Flowering shrubs and climbers there are in abundance. I rode in the carsthrough miles on miles of flowering dogwood and pink azalea. Here, onthis Tallahassee road, were miles of Cherokee roses, with plenty of theclimbing scarlet honeysuckle (beloved of humming-birds, although I sawnone here), and nearer the city, as already described, masses of lantanaand white honeysuckle. In more than one place pink double roses(vagrants from cultivated grounds, no doubt) offered buds and blooms toall who would have them. The cross-vine (_Bignonia_), less freehanded, hung its showy bells out of reach in the treetops. Thorn-bushes ofseveral kinds were in flower (a puzzling lot), and the treelikeblueberry (_Vaccinium arboreum_), loaded with its large, flaring whitecorollas, was a real spectacle of beauty. Here, likewise, I found onetiny crab-apple shrub, with a few blossoms, exquisitely tinted withrose-color, and most exquisitely fragrant. But the New Englander, whenhe talks of wild flowers, has in his eye something different from these. He is not thinking of any bush, no matter how beautiful, but of trailingarbutus, hepaticas, bloodroot, anemones, saxifrage, violets, dogtoothviolets, spring beauties, "cowslips, " buttercups, corydalis, columbine, Dutchman's breeches, clintonia, five-finger, and all the rest of thatbright and fragrant host which, ever since he can remember, he has seencovering his native hills and valleys with the return of May. 

It is not meant, of course, that plants like these are wholly wanting inFlorida. I remember an abundance of violets, blue and white, especiallyin the flat-woods, where also I often found pretty butterworts of two orthree sorts. The smaller blue ones took very acceptably the place ofhepaticas, and indeed I heard them called by that name. But, as comparedwith what one sees in New England, such "ground flowers, " flowers whichit seems perfectly natural to pluck for a nosegay, were very little inevidence. I heard Northern visitors remark the fact again and again. Onthis pretty road out of Tallahassee--itself a city of flower gardens--Ican recall nothing of the kind except half a dozen strawberry blossoms, and the oxalis and specularia before mentioned. Probably theround-leaved houstonia grew here, as it did everywhere, in smallscattered patches. If there were violets as well, I can only say I haveforgotten them. 

Be it added, however, that at the time I did not miss them. In a gardenof roses one does not begin by sighing for mignonette and lilies of thevalley. Violets or no violets, there was no lack of beauty. The Southernhighway surveyor, if such a personage exists, is evidently not consumedby that distressing puritanical passion for "slicking up things" whichtoo often makes of his Northern brother something scarcely better than apublic nuisance. At the South you will not find a woman cultivating withpain a few exotics beside the front door, while her husband is mowingand burning the far more attractive wild garden that nature has plantedjust outside the fence. The St. Augustine road, at any rate, afterclimbing the hill and getting beyond the wood, runs between naturalhedges, --trees, vines, and shrubs carelessly intermingled, --not denseenough to conceal the prospect or shut out the breeze ("straight fromthe Gulf, " as the Tallahassean is careful to inform you), but sufficientto afford much welcome protection from the sun. Here it was good to findthe sassafras growing side by side with the persimmon, although when, for old acquaintance' sake, I put a leaf into my mouth I was half gladto fancy it a thought less savory than some I had tasted in Yankeeland. I took a kind of foolish satisfaction, too, in the obvious fact thatcertain plants--the sumach and the Virginia creeper, to mention noothers--were less at home here than a thousand miles farther north. Withthe wild-cherry trees, I was obliged to confess, the case was reversed. I had seen larger ones in Massachusetts, perhaps, but none that lookedhalf so clean and thrifty. In truth, their appearance was a puzzle, rum-cherry trees as by all tokens they undoubtedly were, till of asudden it flashed upon me that there were no caterpillars' nests inthem! Then I ceased to wonder at their odd look. It spoke well for mybotanical acumen that I had recognized them at all. 

Before I had been a week in Tallahassee I found that, withoutforethought or plan, I had dropped into the habit (and how pleasant itis to think that some good habits _can_ be dropped into!) of making theSt. Augustine road my after-dinner sauntering-place. The morning was fora walk: to Lake Bradford, perhaps, in search of a mythical ivory-billedwoodpecker, or westward on the railway for a few miles, with a view torare migratory warblers. But in the afternoon I did not walk, --Iloitered; and though I still minded the birds and flowers, I for themost part forgot my botany and ornithology. In the cool of the day, then(the phrase is an innocent euphemism), I climbed the hill, and after anhour or two on the plateau strolled back again, facing the sunsetthrough a vista of moss-covered live-oaks and sweet gums. Those quiet, incurious hours are among the pleasantest of all my Florida memories. Acuckoo would be cooing, perhaps; or a quail, with cheerful ambiguity, --such as belongs to weather predictions in general, --would be prophesying"more wet" and "no more wet" in alternate breaths; or two or threenight-hawks would be sweeping back and forth high above the valley; or amarsh hawk would be quartering over the big oatfield. The martins wouldbe cackling, in any event, and the kingbirds practicing their aerialmock somersaults; and the mocking-bird would be singing, and the redbirdwhistling. On the western slope, just below the oatfield, the Northernwoman who owned the pretty cottage there (the only one on the road) wassure to be at work among her flowers. A laughing colored boy who didchores for her (without injury to his health, I could warrant) told methat she was a Northerner. But I knew it already; I needed no witnessbut her beds of petunias. In the valley, as I crossed the railroadtrack, a loggerhead shrike sat, almost of course, on the telegraph wirein dignified silence; and just beyond, among the cabins, I had my choiceof mocking-birds and orchard orioles. And so, admiring the roses and thepomegranates, the lantanas and the honeysuckles, or chatting with somedusky fellow-pilgrim, I mounted the hill to the city, and likely as notsaw before me a red-headed woodpecker sitting on the roof of the StateHouse, calling attention to his patriotic self--in his tri-coloreddress--by occasional vigorous tattoos on the tinned ridgepole. I neversaw him there without gladness. The legislature had begun its session inan economical mood, --as is more or less the habit of legislatures, Ibelieve, --and was even considering a proposition to reduce the salaryand mileage of its members. Under such circumstances, it ought not tohave been a matter of surprise, perhaps, that no flag floated from thecupola of the capitol. The people's money should not be wasted. Andpossibly I should never have remarked the omission but for a certaincuriosity, natural, if not inevitable, on the part of a Northernvisitor, as to the real feeling of the South toward the nationalgovernment. Day after day I had seen a portly gentleman--with an air, orwith airs, as the spectator might choose to express it--going in and outof the State House gate, dressed ostentatiously in a suit of Confederategray. He had worn nothing else since the war, I was told. But of coursethe State of Florida was not to be judged by the freak of one man, andhe only a member of the "third house. " And even when I went into thegovernor's office, and saw the original "ordinance of secession" hangingin a conspicuous place on the wall, as if it were an heirloom to beproud of, I felt no stirring of sectional animosity, thorough-bredMassachusetts Yankee and old-fashioned abolitionist as I am. A bravepeople can hardly be expected or desired to forget its history, especially when that history has to do with sacrifices and heroic deeds. But these things, taken together, did no doubt prepare me to look uponit as a happy coincidence when, one morning, I heard the familiar cry ofthe red-headed woodpecker, for the first time in Florida, and looked upto see him flying the national colors from the ridgepole of the StateHouse. I did not break out with "Three cheers for the red, white, andblue!" I am naturally undemonstrative; but I said to myself that_Melanerpes erythrocephalus_ was a very handsome bird. 

ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLANTATION. 

On one of my first jaunts into the suburbs of Tallahassee I noticed notfar from the road a bit of swamp, --shallow pools with muddy borders andflats. It was a likely spot for "waders, " and would be worth a visit. Toreach it, indeed, I must cross a planted field surrounded by a loftybarbed-wire fence and placarded against trespassers; but there was noone in sight, or no one who looked at all like a land-owner; and, besides, it could hardly be accounted a trespass--defined by Blackstoneas an "_unwarranted_ entry on another's soil"--to step carefully overthe cotton rows on so legitimate an errand. Ordinarily I call myself asimple bird-gazer, an amateur, a field naturalist, if you will; but onoccasions like the present I assume--with myself, that is--all therights and titles of an ornithologist proper, a man of science strictlyso called. In the interest of science, then, I climbed the fence andpicked my way across the field. True enough, about the edges of thewater were two or three solitary sandpipers, and at least half a dozenof the smaller yellowlegs, --two additions to my Florida list, --not tospeak of a little blue heron and a green heron, the latter in mostuncommonly green plumage. It was well I had interpreted the placard alittle generously. "The letter killeth" is a pretty good text inemergencies of this kind. So I said to myself. The herons, meanwhile, had taken French leave, but the smaller birds were less suspicious; Iwatched them at my leisure, and left them still feeding. 

Two days later I was there again, but it must be acknowledged that thistime I tarried in the road till a man on horseback had disappeared roundthe next turn. It would have been manlier, without doubt, to pay noattention to him; but something told me that he was the cotton-planterhimself, and, for better or worse, prudence carried the day with me. Finding nothing new, though the sandpipers and yellowlegs were stillpresent, with a very handsome little blue heron and plenty ofblackbirds, I took the road again and went further, and an hour or twoafterward, on getting back to the same place, was overtaken again by thehorseman. He pulled up his horse and bade me good-afternoon. Would Ilend him my opera-glass, which happened to be in my hand at the moment?"I should like to see how my house looks from here, " he said; and hepointed across the field to a house on the hill some distance beyond. "Ah, " said I, glad to set myself right by a piece of frankness thatunder the circumstances could hardly work to my disadvantage; "then itis your land on which I have been trespassing. " "How so?" he asked, witha smile; and I explained that I had been across his cotton-field alittle while before. "That is no trespass, " he answered (so the readerwill perceive that I had been quite correct in my understanding of thelaw); and when I went on to explain my object in visiting his cane-swamp(for such it was, he said, but an unexpected freshet had ruined the cropwhen it was barely out of the ground), he assured me that I was welcometo visit it as often as I wished. He himself was very fond of naturalhistory, and often regretted that he had not given time to it in hisyouth. As it was, he protected the birds on his plantation, and theplace was full of them. I should find his woods interesting, he feltsure. Florida was extremely rich in birds; he believed there were somethat had never been classified. "We have orioles here, " he added; and sofar, at any rate, he was right; I had seen perhaps twenty that day(orchard orioles, that is), and one sat in a tree before us at themoment. His whole manner was most kindly and hospitable, --as was that ofevery Tallahassean with whom I had occasion to speak, --and I told himwith sincere gratitude that I should certainly avail myself of hiscourtesy and stroll through his woods. 

I approached them, two mornings afterward, from the opposite side, where, finding no other place of entrance, I climbed a six-barred, tightly locked gate--feeling all the while like "a thief and arobber"--in front of a deserted cabin. Then I had only to cross a grassyfield, in which meadow larks were singing, and I was in the woods. Iwandered through them without finding anything more unusual orinteresting than summer tanagers and yellow-throated warblers, whichwere in song there, as they were in every such place, and after a whilecame out into a pleasant glade, from which different parts of theplantation could be seen, and through which ran a plantation road. Herewas a wooden fence, --a most unusual thing, --and I lost no time inmounting it, to rest and look about me. It is one of the marks of a trueYankee, I suspect, to like such a perch. My own weakness in thatdirection is a frequent subject of mirth with chance fellow travelers. The attitude is comfortable and conducive to meditation; and now that Iwas seated and at my ease, I felt that this was one of the New Englandluxuries which, almost without knowing it, I had missed ever since Ileft home. 

Of my meditations on this particular occasion I remember nothing; butthat is no sign they were valueless; as it is no sign that yesterday'sdinner did me no good because I have forgotten what it was. In thelatter case, indeed, and perhaps in the former as well, it would seemmore reasonable to draw an exactly opposite inference. But, quibblesapart, one thing I do remember: I sat for some time on the fence, in theshade of a tree, with an eye upon the cane-swamp and an ear open forbird-voices. Yes, and it comes to me at this moment that here I heardthe first and only bull-frog that I heard anywhere in Florida. It waslike a voice from home, and belonged with the fence. Other frogs I hadheard in other places. One chorus brought me out of bed in Daytona--inthe evening--after a succession of February dog-day showers. "What isthat noise outside?" I inquired of the landlady as I hasteneddownstairs. "That?" said she, with a look of amusement; "that's frogs. ""It _may_ be, " I thought, but I followed the sounds till they led me inthe darkness to the edge of a swamp. No doubt the creatures were frogs, but of some kind new to me, with voices more lugubrious and homesickthan I should have supposed could possibly belong to any batrachian. Aweek or two later, in the New Smyrna flat-woods, I heard in the distancea sound which I took for the grunting of pigs. I made a note of it, mentally, as a cheerful token, indicative of a probable scarcity ofrattlesnakes; but by and by, as I drew nearer, the truth of the matterbegan to break upon me. A man was approaching, and when we met I askedhim what was making that noise yonder. "Frogs, " he said. At anothertime, in the flat-woods of Port Orange (I hope I am not taxing myreader's credulity too far, or making myself out a man of tooimaginative an ear), I heard the bleating of sheep. Busy with otherthings, I did not stop to reflect that it was impossible there should besheep in that quarter, and the occurrence had quite passed out of mymind when, one day, a cracker, talking about frogs, happened to say, "Yes, and we have one kind that makes a noise exactly like the bleatingof sheep. " That, without question, was what I had heard in theflat-woods. But this frog in the sugar-cane swamp was the same fellowthat on summer evenings, ever and ever so many years ago, in sonorousbass that could be heard a quarter of a mile away, used to call fromReuben Loud's pond, "Pull him in! Pull him in!" or sometimes (theinconsistent amphibian), "Jug o' rum! Jug o' rum!"

I dismounted from my perch at last, and was sauntering idly along thepath (idleness like this is often the best of ornithological industry), when suddenly I had a vision! Before me, in the leafy top of an oaksapling, sat a blue grosbeak. I knew him on the instant. But I could seeonly his head and neck, the rest of his body being hidden by the leaves. It was a moment of feverish excitement. Here was a new bird, a birdabout which I had felt fifteen years of curiosity; and, more than that, a bird which here and now was quite unexpected, since it was notincluded in either of the two Florida lists that I had brought with mefrom home. For perhaps five seconds I had my opera-glass on the bluehead and the thick-set, dark bill, with its lighter-colored undermandible. Then I heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs, and lifted myeyes. My friend the owner of the plantation was coming down the road ata gallop, straight upon me. If I was to see the grosbeak and make sureof him, it must be done at once. I moved to bring him fully into view, and he flew into the thick of a pine-tree out of sight. But the tree wasnot far off, and if Mr. ---- would pass me with a nod, the case wasstill far from hopeless. A bright thought came to me. I ran from thepath with a great show of eager absorption, leveled my glass upon thepine-tree, and stood fixed. Perhaps Mr. ---- would take the hint. Alas!he had too much courtesy to pass his own guest without speaking. "Stillafter the birds?" he said, as he checked his horse. I responded, as Ihope, without any symptom of annoyance. Then, of course, he wished toknow what I was looking at, and I told him that a blue grosbeak had justflown into that pine-tree, and that I was most distressingly anxious tosee more of him. He looked at the pine-tree. "I can't see him, " he said. No more could I. "It wasn't a blue jay, was it?" he asked. And then wetalked of one thing and another, I have no idea what, till he rode awayto another part of the plantation where a gang of women were at work. Bythis time the grosbeak had disappeared utterly. Possibly he had gone toa bit of wood on the opposite side of the cane-swamp. I scaled abarbed-wire fence and made in that direction, but to no purpose. Thegrosbeak was gone for good. Probably I should never see another. Couldthe planter have read my thoughts just then he would perhaps have beenangry with himself, and pretty certainly he would have been angry withme. That a Yankee should accept his hospitality, and then load him withcurses and call him all manner of names! How should he know that I wasso insane a hobbyist as to care more for the sight of a new bird thanfor all the laws and customs of ordinary politeness? As my feelingscooled, I saw that I was stepping over hills or rows of somestrange-looking plants just out of the ground. Peanuts, I guessed; butto make sure I called to a colored woman who was hoeing not far off. "What are these?" "Pinders, " she answered. I knew she meantpeanuts, --otherwise "ground-peas" and "goobers, "--and now that I oncemore have a dictionary at my elbow I learn that the word, like "goober, "is, or is supposed to be, of African origin. 

I was preparing to surmount the barbed-wire fence again, when theplanter returned and halted for another chat. It was evident that hetook a genuine and amiable interest in my researches. There were a greatmany kinds of sparrows in that country, he said, and also ofwoodpeckers. He knew the ivory-bill, but, like other Tallahasseans, hethought I should have to go into Lafayette County (all Florida peoplesay La_fay_ette) to find it. "That bird calling now is a bee-bird, " hesaid, referring to a kingbird; "and we have a bird that is called theFrench mocking-bird; he catches other birds. " The last remark was ofinterest for its bearing upon a point about which I had felt somecuriosity, and, I may say, some skepticism, as I had seen manyloggerhead shrikes, but had observed no indication that other birdsfeared them or held any grudge against them. As he rode off he called myattention to a great blue heron just then flying over the swamp. "Theyare very shy, " he said. Then, from further away, he shouted once more toask if I heard the mocking-bird singing yonder, pointing with his whipin the direction of the singer. 

For some time longer I hung about the glade, vainly hoping that thegrosbeak would again favor my eyes. Then I crossed more plantedfields, --climbing more barbed-wire fences, and stopping on the way toenjoy the sweetly quaint music of a little chorus of white-crownedsparrows, --and skirted once more the muddy shore of the cane-swamp, where the yellowlegs and sandpipers were still feeding. That brought meto the road from which I had made my entry to the place some daysbefore; but, being still unable to forego a splendid possibility, Irecrossed the plantation, tarried again in the glade, sat again on thewooden fence (if that grosbeak only _would_ show himself!), and thencewent on, picking a few heads of handsome buffalo clover, the first I hadever seen, and some sprays of penstemon, till I came again to thesix-barred gate and the Quincy road. At that point, as I now remember, the air was full of vultures (carrion crows), a hundred or more, soaringover the fields in some fit of gregariousness. Along the road werewhite-crowned and white-throated sparrows (it was the 12th of April), orchard orioles, thrashers, summer tanagers, myrtle and paim warblers, cardinal grosbeaks, mocking-birds, kingbirds, logger-heads, yellow--throated vireos, and sundry others, but not the blue grosbeak, which would have been worth them all. 

Once back at the hotel, I opened my Coues's Key to refresh my memory asto the exact appearance of that bird. "Feathers around base of billblack, " said the book. I had not noticed that. But no matter; the birdwas a blue grosbeak, for the sufficient reason that it could not beanything else. A black line between the almost black beak and thedark-blue head would be inconspicuous at the best, and quite naturallywould escape a glimpse so hasty as mine had been. And yet, while Ireasoned in this way, I foresaw plainly enough that, as time passed, doubt would get the better of assurance, as it always does, and I shouldnever be certain that I had not been the victim of some illusion. Atbest, the evidence was worth nothing for others. If only that excellentMr. ----, for whose kindness I was unfeignedly thankful (and whosepardon I most sincerely beg if I seem to have been a bit too free inthis rehearsal of the story), --if only Mr. ---- could have left me alonefor ten minutes longer!

The worry and the imprecations were wasted, after all, as, Heaven bethanked, they so often are; for within two or three days I saw otherblue grosbeaks and heard them sing. But that was not on a cottonplantation, and is part of another story. 

A FLORIDA SHRINE. 

All pilgrims to Tallahassee visit the Murat place. It is one of the mostconveniently accessible of those "points of interest" with whichguide-books so anxiously, and with so much propriety, concernthemselves. What a tourist prays for is something to see. If I had everbeen a tourist in Boston, no doubt I should before now have surveyed theworld from the top of the Bunker Hill monument. In Tallahassee, at allevents, I went to the Murat estate. In fact, I went more than once; butI remember especially my first visit, which had a livelier sentimentalinterest than the others because I was then under the agreeable delusionthat the Prince himself had lived there. The guide-book told me so, vouchsafing also the information that after building the house he"interested himself actively in local affairs, became a naturalizedcitizen, and served successively as postmaster, alderman, and mayor"--amodel immigrant, surely, though it is rather the way of immigrants, perhaps, not to refuse political responsibilities. 

Naturally, I remembered these things as I stood in front of "the bighouse"--a story-and-a-half cottage--amid the flowering shrubs. Herelived once the son of the King of Naples; himself a Prince, and--worthyson of a worthy sire--alderman and then mayor of the city ofTallahassee. Thus did an uncompromising democrat pay court to the shadesof Royalty, while a mocking-bird sang from a fringe-bush by the gate, and an oriole flew madly from tree to tree in pursuit of a fair creatureof the reluctant sex. 

The inconsistency, if such it was, was quickly punished. For, alas! whenI spoke of my morning's pilgrimage to an old resident of the town, hetold me that Murat never lived in the house, nor anywhere else inTallahassee, and of course was never its postmaster, alderman, or mayor. The Princess, he said, built the house after her husband's death, andlived there, a widow. I appealed to the guide-book. My informantsneered, --politely, --and brought me a still older Tallahassean, Judge----, whose venerable name I am sorry to have forgotten, and thatindisputable citizen confirmed all that his neighbor had said. For once, the guide-book compiler must have been misinformed. 

The question, happily, was one of no great consequence. If the Princehad never lived in the house, the Princess had; and she, by all accounts(and I make certain her husband would have said the same), was theworthier person of the two. And even if neither of them had lived there, if my sentiment had been _all_ wasted (but there was no question oftears), the place itself was sightly, the house was old, and the waythither a pleasant one--first down the hill in a zigzag course to thevicinity of the railway station, then by a winding country road throughthe valley past a few negro cabins, and up the slope on the fartherside. Prince Murat, or no Prince Murat, I should love to travel thatroad to-day, instead of sitting before a Massachusetts fire, with theground deep under snow, and the air full of thirty or forty degrees offrost. 

In the front yard of one of the cabins opposite the car-wheel foundry, and near the station, as I now remember, a middle-aged negress wascutting up an oak log. She swung the axe with vigor and precision, andthe chips flew; but I could not help saying, "You ought to make the mando that. "

She answered on the instant. "I would, " she said, "if I had a man to_make_. "

"I'm sure you would, " I thought. Her tongue was as sharp as her axe. 

Ought I to have ventured a word in her behalf, I wonder, when a man ofher own color, and a pretty near neighbor, told me with admirable_naïveté_ the story of his bereavement and his hopes? His wife had dieda year before, he said, and so far, though he had not let the grass growunder his feet, he had found no one to take her place. He still meant todo so, if he could. He was only seventy-four years old, and it was notgood for a man to be alone. He seemed a gentle spirit, and I withheldall mention of the stalwart and manless wood-cutter. I hope he wentfarther, and fared better. So youthful as he was, surely there was nooccasion for haste. 

When I had skirted a cotton-field--the crop just out of the ground--anda bit of wood on the right, and a swamp with a splendid display of whitewater-lilies on the left, and had begun to ascend the gentle slope, Imet a man of considerably more than seventy-four years. 

"Can you tell me just where the Murat place is?" I inquired. 

He grinned broadly, and thought he could. He was one of the old Muratservants, as his father had been before him. "I was borned on to him, "he said, speaking of the Prince. Murat was "a gentleman, sah. " That wasa statement which it seemed impossible for him to repeat often enough. He spoke from a slave's point of view. Murat was a good master. The oldman had heard him say that he kept servants "for the like of the thing. "He didn't abuse them. He "never was for barbarizing a poor coloredperson at all. " Whipping? Oh, yes. "He didn't miss your fault. No, sah, he didn't miss your fault. " But his servants never were "ironed. " He"didn't believe in barbarousment. "

The old man was thankful to be free; but to his mind emancipation hadnot made everything heavenly. The younger set of negroes ("my people"was his word) were on the wrong road. They had "sold their birthright, "though exactly what he meant by that remark I did not gather. "Theyain't got no sense, " he declared, "and what sense they has got don't do'em no good. "

I told him finally that I was from the North. "Oh, I knows it, " heexclaimed, "I knows it;" and he beamed with delight. How did he know, Iinquired. "Oh, I knows it. I can see it _in_ you. Anybody would know itthat had any jedgment at all. You's a perfect gentleman, sah. " He wastoo old to be quarreled with, and I swallowed the compliment. 

I tore myself away, or he might have run on till night--about his oldmaster and mistress, the division of the estate, an abusive overseer("he was a perfect dog, sah!"), and sundry other things. He had lived along time, and had nothing to do now but to recall the past and tell itover. So it will be with us, if we live so long. May we find once in awhile a patient listener. 

This patriarch's unfavorable opinion as to the prospects of the coloredpeople was shared by my hopeful young widower before mentioned, whoexpressed himself quite as emphatically. He was brought up among whitepeople ("I's been taughted a heap, " he said), and believed that thesalvation of the blacks lay in their recognition of white supremacy. Buthe was less perspicacious than the older man. He was one of the very fewpersons whom I met at the South who did not recognize me at sight as aYankee. "Are you a legislator-man?" he asked, at the end of our talk. The legislature was in session on the hill. But perhaps, after all, heonly meant to flatter me. 

If I am long on the way, it is because, as I love always to have it, thegoing and coming were the better part of the pilgrimage. The estateitself is beautifully situated, with far-away horizons; but it hasfallen into great neglect, while the house, almost in ruins, andoccupied by colored people, is to Northern eyes hardly more than alarger cabin. It put me in mind of the question of a Western gentlemanwhom I met at St. Augustine. He had come to Florida against his will, the weather and the doctor having combined against him, and was lookingat everything through very blue spectacles. "Have you seen any of thosefine old country mansions, " he asked, "about which we read so often indescriptions of Southern, life?" He had been on the lookout for them, heaverred, ever since he left home, and had yet to find the first one; andfrom his tone it was evident that he thought the Southern idea of a"fine old mansion" must be different from his. 

The Murat house, certainly, was never a palace, except as love may havemade it so. But it was old; people had lived in it, and died in it;those who once owned it, whose name and memory still clung to it, werenow in narrower houses; and it was easy for the visitor--for onevisitor, at least--to fall into pensive meditation. I strolled about thegrounds; stood between the last year's cotton-rows, while a Carolinawren poured out his soul from an oleander bush near by; admired theconfidence of a pair of shrikes, who had made a nest in a honeysucklevine in the front yard; listened to the sweet music of mocking-birds, cardinals, and orchard orioles; watched the martins circling above thetrees; thought of the Princess, and smiled at the black children whothrust their heads out of the windows of her "big house;" and then, witha sprig of honeysuckle for a keepsake, I started slowly homeward. 

The sun by this time was straight overhead, but my umbrella saved mefrom absolute discomfort, while birds furnished here and there anagreeable diversion. I recall in particular some white-crowned sparrows, the first ones I had seen in Florida. At a bend in the road opposite thewater-lily swamp, while I was cooling myself in the shade of a friendlypine-tree, --enjoying at the same time a fence overrun with Cherokeeroses, --a man and his little boy came along in a wagon. The man seemedreally disappointed when I told him that I was going into town, insteadof coming from it. It was pretty warm weather for walking, and he hadmeant to offer me a lift. He was a Scandinavian, who had been for someyears in Florida. He owned a good farm not far from the Murat estate, which latter he had been urged to buy; but he thought a man wasn't anybetter off for owning too much land. He talked of his crops, hischildren, the climate, and so on, all in a cheerful strain, pleasant tohear. If the pessimists are right, --which may I be kept frombelieving, --the optimists are certainly more comfortable to live with, though it be only for ten minutes under a roadside shade-tree. 

When I reached the street-car track at the foot of the hill, the one carwhich plies back and forth through the city was in its place, with thedriver beside it, but no mules. 

"Are you going to start directly?" I asked. 

"Yes, sah, " he answered; and then, looking toward the stable, he shoutedin a peremptory voice, "Do about, there! Do about!"

"What does that mean?" said I. "Hurry up?"

"Yes, sah, that's it. 'Tain't everybody that wants to be hurried up; sowe tells 'em, 'Do about!'"

Half a minute afterwards two very neatly dressed little colored boysstepped upon the rear platform. 

"Where you goin'?" said the driver. "Uptown?"

They said they were. 

"Well, come inside. Stay out there, and you'll git hurt and cost thisdried-up company more money than you's wuth. "

They dropped into seats by the rear door. He motioned them to the frontcorner. "Sit down there, " he said, "right there. " They obeyed, and as heturned away he added, what I found more and more to be true, as I sawmore of him, "I ain't de boss, but I's got right smart to say. "

Then, he whistled to the mules, flourished his whip, and to a persistentaccompaniment of whacks and whistles we went crawling up the hill. 

WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

I arrived at Tallahassee, from Jacksonville, late in the afternoon, after a hot and dusty ride of more than eight hours. The distance isonly a hundred and sixty odd miles, I believe; but with some brightexceptions, Southern railroads, like Southern men, seem to be under theclimate, and schedule time is more or less a formality. 

For the first two thirds of the way the country is flat and barren. Happily, I sat within earshot of an amateur political economist, who, like myself, was journeying to the State capital. By birth and educationhe was a New York State man, I heard him say; an old abolitionist, whohad voted for Birney, Fremont, and all their successors down toHayes--the only vote he was ever ashamed of. Now he was a "greenbacker. "The country was going to the dogs, and all because the government didnot furnish money enough. The people would find it out some time, heguessed. He talked as a bird sings--for his own pleasure. But I waspleased, too. His was an amiable enthusiasm, quite exempt, as it seemed, from all that bitterness, which an exclusive possession of the truth socommonly engenders. He was greatly in earnest; he knew he was right; buthe could still see the comical side of things; he still had a sense ofthe ludicrous; and in that lay his salvation. For a sense of theludicrous is the best of mental antiseptics; it, if anything, will keepour perishable human nature sweet, and save it from the madhouse. Hisdiscourse was punctuated throughout with quiet laughter. Thus, when hesaid, "_I_ call it the _late_ Republican party, " it was with a chuckleso good-natured, so free from acidity and self-conceit, that only apretty stiff partisan could have taken offense. Even his predictions ofimpending national ruin were delivered with numberless merry quips andtwinkles. Many good Republicans and good Democrats (the adjective isused in its political sense) might have envied him his sunny temper, joined, as it was, to a good stock of native shrewdness. For somethingin his eye made it plain that, with all his other qualities, our merrygreenbacker was a reasonably competent hand at a bargain; so that I wasnot in the least surprised when his seat-mate told me afterward, in atone of much respect, that the "Colonel" owned a very comfortableproperty at St. Augustine. But his best possession, I still thought, washis humor and his own generous appreciation of it. To enjoy one's ownjokes is to have a pretty safe insurance against inward adversity. 

Happily, I say, this good-humored talker sat within hearing. Happily, too, it was now--April 4--the height of the season for floweringdogwood, pink azalea, fringe-bushes, Cherokee roses, and water lilies. All these had blossomed abundantly, and mile after mile the wildernessand the solitary place were glad for them. Here and there, also, Icaught flying glimpses of some unknown plant bearing a long uprightraceme of creamy-white flowers. It might be a white lupine, I thought, till at one of our stops between stations it happened to be growingwithin reach. Then I guessed it to be a _Baptisia_, which guess wasafterward confirmed--to my regret; for the flowers lost at once alltheir attractiveness. So ineffaceable (oftenest for good, but this timefor ill) is an early impression upon the least honorably esteemed of thefive senses! As a boy, it was one of my tasks to keep down with a scythethe weeds and bushes in a rocky, thin-soiled cattle pasture. In thattask, --which, at the best, was a little too much like work--my mosttroublesome enemy was the common wild indigo (_Baptisia tinctoria_), partly from the wicked pertinacity with which it sprang up again afterevery mowing, but especially from the fact that the cut or bruised stalkexhaled what in my nostrils was a most abominable odor. Other people donot find it so offensive, I suspect, but to me it was, and is, ten timesworse than the more pungent but comparatively salubrious perfume which acertain handsome little black-and-white quadruped--handsome, butimpolite--is given to scattering upon the nocturnal breeze in moments ofextreme perturbation. 

Somewhere beyond the Suwanee River (at which I looked as long as itremained in sight--and thought of Christine Nilsson) there came a suddenchange in the aspect of the country, coincident with a change in thenature of the soil, from white sand to red clay; a change indescribablyexhilarating to a New Englander who had been living, if only for twomonths, in a country without hills. How good it was to see the landrising, though never so gently, as it stretched away toward the horizon!My spirits rose with it. By and by we passed extensive hillsideplantations, on which little groups of negroes, men and women, were atwork. I seemed to see the old South of which I had read and dreamed, aSouth not in the least like anything to be found in the wilds ofsouthern and eastern Florida; a land of cotton, and, better still, aland of Southern people, instead of Northern tourists and settlers. Andwhen we stopped at a thrifty-looking village, with neat, homelikehouses, open grounds, and lordly shade-trees, I found myself sayingunder my breath, "Now, then, we are getting back into God's country. "

As for Tallahassee itself, it was exactly what I had hoped to find it: atypical Southern town; not a camp in the woods, nor an old citymetamorphosed into a fashionable winter resort; a place untainted by"Northern enterprise, " whose inhabitants were unmistakably at home, andwhose houses, many of them, at least, had no appearance of being forsale. It is compactly built on a hill, --the state capitol crowning thetop, --down the pretty steep sides of which run roads into the opencountry all about. The roads, too, are not so sandy but that it iscomparatively comfortable to walk in them--a blessing which thepedestrian sorely misses in the towns of lower Florida: at St. Augustine, for example, where, as soon as one leaves the streets of thecity itself, walking and carriage-riding alike become burdensome and, for any considerable distance, all but impossible. Here at Tallahassee, it was plain, I should not be kept indoors for want of invitations fromwithout. 

I arrived, as I have said, rather late in the afternoon; so late that Idid nothing more than ramble a little about the city, noting by the waythe advent of the chimney swifts, which I had not found elsewhere, andreturning to my lodgings with a handful of "banana-shrub"blossoms, --smelling wonderfully like their name, --which a good woman hadinsisted upon giving me when I stopped beside the fence to ask her thename of the bush. It was my first, but by no means my last, experienceof the floral generosity of Tallahassee people. 

The next morning I woke betimes, and to my astonishment found the cityenveloped in a dense fog. The hotel clerk, an old resident, to whom Iwent in my perplexity, was as much surprised as his questioner. He didnot know what it could mean, he was sure; it was very unusual; but hethought it did not indicate foul weather. For a man so slightlyacquainted with such phenomena, he proved to be a remarkably goodprophet; for though, during my fortnight's stay, there must have been atleast eight foggy mornings, every day was sunny, and not a drop of rainfell. 

That first bright forenoon is still a bright memory. For one thing, themocking-birds outsang themselves till I felt, and wrote, that I hadnever heard mocking-birds before. That they really did surpass theirbrethren of St. Augustine and Sanford would perhaps be too much toassert, but so it seemed; and I was pleased, some months afterward, tocome upon a confirmatory judgment by Mr. Maurice Thompson, who, if anyone, must be competent to speak. 

"If I were going to risk the reputation of our country on the singing ofa mocking-bird against a European nightingale, " says Mr. Thompson, [1] "Ishould choose my champion from the hill-country in the neighborhood ofTallahassee, or from the environs of Mobile. .. . I have found no birdselsewhere to compare with those in that belt of country about thirtymiles wide, stretching from Live Oak in Florida, by way of Tallahassee, to some miles west of Mobile. "

[Footnote 1: _By-Ways and Bird-Notes_, p. 20. ]

I had gone down the hill past some negro cabins, into a small, straggling wood, and through the wood to a gate which let me into aplantation lane. It was the fairest of summer forenoons (to me, I mean;by the almanac it was only the 5th of April), and one of the fairest ofquiet landscapes: broad fields rising gently to the horizon, and beforeme, winding upward, a grassy lane open on one side, and bordered on theother by a deep red gulch and a zigzag fence, along which grew vines, shrubs, and tall trees. The tender and varied tints of the new leaves, the lively green of the young grain, the dark ploughed fields, the redearth of the wayside--I can see them yet, with all that Florida sunshineon them. In the bushes by the fence-row were a pair of cardinalgrosbeaks, the male whistling divinely, quite unabashed by thevolubility of a mocking-bird who balanced himself on the treetopoverhead, "Superb and sole, upon a pluméd spray, "

and seemed determined to show a Yankee stranger what mocking-birds couldreally do when they set out. He did his work well; the love notes of theflicker could not have been improved by the flicker himself; but, rightor wrong, I could not help feeling that the cardinal struck a truer anddeeper note; while both together did not hinder me from hearing thefaint songs of grasshopper sparrows rising from the ground on eitherside of the lane. It was a fine contrast: the mocker flooding the airfrom the topmost bough, and the sparrows whispering their few almostinaudible notes out of the grass. Yes, and at the self-same moment theeye also had its contrast; for a marsh hawk was skimming over the field, while up in the sky soared a pair of hen-hawks. 

In the wood, composed of large trees, both hard wood and pine, I hadfound a group of three summer tanagers, two males and one female, --theusual proportion with birds generally, one may almost say, in thepairing season. The female was the first of her sex that I had seen, andI remarked with pleasure the comparative brightness of her dress. Amongtanagers, as among negroes, red and yellow are esteemed a pretty goodmatch. At this point, too, in a cluster of pines, I caught a newsong--faint and listless, like the indigo-bird's, I thought; and at theword I started forward eagerly. Here, doubtless, was the indigo-bird'ssouthern congener, the nonpareil, or painted bunting, a beauty which Ihad begun to fear I was to miss. I had recognized my first tanager fromafar, ten days before, his voice and theme were so like his Northernrelative's; but this time I was too hasty. My listless singer was notthe nonpareil, nor even a finch of any kind, but a yellow-throatedwarbler. For a month I had seen birds of his species almost daily, butalways in hard wood trees, and silent. Henceforth, as long as I remainedin Florida, they were invariably in pines, --their summer quarters, --andin free song. Their plumage is of the neatest and most exquisite; few, even among warblers, surpass them in that regard: black and white(reminding one of the black-and-white creeper, which they resemble alsoin their feeding habits), with a splendid yellow gorget. Myrtle warblers(yellow-rumps) were still here (the peninsula is alive with them in thewinter), and a ruby-crowned kinglet mingled its lovely voice with thesimple trills of pine warblers, while out of a dense low treetop someinvisible singer was pouring a stream of fine-spun melody. It shouldhave been a house wren, I thought (another was singing close by), onlyits tune was several times too long. 

At least four of my longer excursions into the surrounding country(long, not intrinsically, but by reason of the heat) were made with aview to possible ivory-billed woodpeckers. Just out of the townnorthward, beyond what appeared to be the court end of Marion Street, the principal business street of the city, I had accosted a gentleman ina dooryard in front of a long, low, vine-covered, romantic-lookinghouse. He was evidently at home, and not so busy as to make aninterruption probably intrusive. I inquired the name of a tree, Ibelieve. At all events, I engaged him in conversation, and found himmost agreeable--an Ohio gentleman, a man of science, who had been in theSouth long enough to have acquired large measures of Southern_insouciance_ (there are times when a French word has a politer soundthan any English equivalent), which takes life as made for somethingbetter than worry and pleasanter than hard work. He had seenivory-bills, he said, and thought I might be equally fortunate if Iwould visit a certain swamp, about which he would tell me, or, betterstill, if I would go out to Lake Bradford. 

First, because it was nearer, I went to the swamp, taking an earlybreakfast and setting forth in a fog that was almost a mist, to make asmuch of the distance as possible before the sun came out. My course laywestward, some four miles, along the railway track, which, thanks tosomebody, is provided with a comfortable footpath of hard clay coveringthe sleepers midway between the rails. If all railroads were thusfurnished they might be recommended as among the best of routes forwalking naturalists, since they go straight through the wild country. This one carried me by turns through woodland and cultivated field, upland and swamp, pine land and hammock; and, happily, my expectationsof the ivory-bill were not lively enough to quicken my steps or renderme heedless of things along the way. 

Here I was equally surprised and delighted by the sight of yellowjessamine still in flower more than a month after I had seen the end ofits brief season, only a hundred miles further south. So great, apparently, is the difference between the peninsula and this Tallahasseehill-country, which by its physical geography seems rather to be a partof Georgia than of Florida. Here, too, the pink azalea was at itsprettiest, and the flowering dogwood, also, true queen of the woods inFlorida as in Massachusetts. The fringe-bush, likewise, stood here andthere in solitary state, and thorn-bushes flourished in bewilderingvariety. 

Nearer the track were the omnipresent blackberry vines, some patches ofwhich are especially remembered for their bright rosy flowers. 

Out of the dense vegetation of a swamp came the cries of Floridagallinules, and then, of a sudden, I caught, or seemed to catch, thesweet _kurwee_ whistle of a Carolina rail. Instinctively I turned my earfor its repetition, and by so doing admitted to myself that I was notcertain of what I had heard, although the sora's call is familiar, andthe bird was reasonably near. I had been taken unawares, and everyornithologist knows how hard it is to be sure of one's self in such acase. He knows, too, how uncertain he feels of any brother observer whoin a similar case seems troubled by no distrust of his own senses. Thewhistle, whatever it had been, was not repeated, and I lost my onlyopportunity of adding the sora's name to my Florida catalogue--a loss, fortunately, of no consequence to any but myself, since the bird is wellknown as a winter visitor to the State. 

Further along, a great blue heron was stalking about the edge of amarshy pool, and further still, in a woody swamp, stood three littleblue herons, one of them in white plumage. In the drier and more openparts of the way cardinals, mocking-birds, and thrashers were singing, ground doves were cooing, quails were prophesying, and loggerheadshrikes sat, trim and silent, on the telegraph wire. In the pine landswere plenty of brown-headed nuthatches, full, as always, of friendlygossip; two red-shouldered hawks, for whom life seemed to wear a moreserious aspect; three Maryland yellow throats; a pair of bluebirds, rareenough now to be twice welcome; a black-and-white creeper, and a yellowredpoll warbler. In the same pine woods, too, there was much good music:house wrens, Carolina wrens, red-eyed and white-eyed vireos, pinewarblers, yellow-throated warblers, blue yellowbacks, red-eyed chewinks, and, twice welcome, like the bluebirds, a Carolina chickadee. 

A little beyond this point, in a cut through a low sand bank, I foundtwo pairs of rough-winged swallows, and stopped for some time to stareat them, being myself, meanwhile, a gazing-stock for two or threenegroes lounging about the door of a cabin not far away. It is a happychance when a man's time is _doubly_ improved. Two of the birds--thefirst ones I had ever seen, to be sure of them--perched directly beforeme on the wire, one facing me, the other with his back turned. It waskindly done; and then, as if still further to gratify my curiosity, theyvisited a hole in the bank. A second hole was doubtless the property ofthe other pair. Living alternately in heaven and in a hole in theground, they wore the livery of the earth. 

 "They are not fair to outward view As many swallows be, "

I said to myself. But I was not the less glad to see them. 

I should have been gladder for a sight of the big woodpecker, whosereputed dwelling-place lay not far ahead. But, though I waited andlistened, and went through the swamp, and beyond it, I heard no strangeshout, nor saw any strange bird; and toward noon, just as the sunbrushed away the fog, I left the railway track for a carriage by-waywhich, I felt sure, must somehow bring me back to the city. And so itdid, past here and there a house, till I came to the main road, and thento the Murat estate, and was again on familiar ground. 

Two mornings afterward I made another early and foggy start, this timefor Lake Bradford. My instructions were to follow the railway for a mileor so beyond the station, and then take a road bearing away sharply tothe left. This I did, making sure I was on the right road by inquiringof the first man I saw--a negro at work before his cabin. I had goneperhaps half a mile further when a white man, on his way after a load ofwood, as I judged, drove up behind me. "Won't you ride?" he asked. "Youare going to Lake Bradford, I believe, and I am going a piece in thesame direction. " I jumped up behind (the wagon consisting of two longplanks fastened to the two axles), thankful, but not without a littlebewilderment. The good-hearted negro, it appeared, had asked the man tolook out for me; and he, on his part, seemed glad to do a kindness aswell as to find company. We jolted along, chatting at arm's length, asit were, about this and that. He knew nothing of the ivory-bill; butwild turkeys--oh, yes, he had seen a flock of eight, as well as he couldcount, not long before, crossing the road in the very woods throughwhich I was going. As for snakes, they were plenty enough, he guessed. One of his horses was bitten while ploughing, and died in half an hour. (A Florida man who cannot tell at least one snake story may be set downas having land to sell. ) He thought it a pretty good jaunt to the lake, and the road wasn't any too plain, though no doubt I should get there;but I began to perceive that a white man who traveled such distances onfoot in that country was more of a _rara avis_ than any woodpecker. 

Our roads diverged after a while, and my own soon ran into a wood withan undergrowth of saw palmetto. This was the place for the ivory-bill, and as at the swamp two days before, so now I stopped and listened, andthen stopped and listened again. The Fates were still against me. Therewas neither woodpecker nor turkey, and I pushed on, mostly through pinewoods--full of birds, but nothing new--till I came out at the lake. Here, beside an idle sawmill and heaps of sawdust, I was greeted by asolitary negro, well along in years, who demanded, in a tone of almostcomical astonishment, where in the world I had come from. I told himfrom Tallahassee, and he seemed so taken aback that I began to think Imust look uncommonly like an invalid, a "Northern consumptive, " perhaps. Otherwise, why should a walk of six miles, or something less, be treatedas such a marvel? However, the negro and I were soon on the friendliestof terms, talking of the old times, the war, the prospects of thecolored people (the younger ones were fast going to the bad, hethought), while I stood looking out over the lake, a pretty sheet ofwater, surrounded mostly by cypress woods, but disfigured for thepresent by the doings of lumbermen. What interested me most (such is thefate of the devotee) was a single barn swallow, the first and only onethat I saw on my Southern trip. 

On my way back to the city, after much fatherly advice about the road onthe part of the negro, who seemed to feel that I ran the greatest riskof getting lost, I made two more additions to my Florida catalogue--thewood duck and the yellow-billed cuckoo, the latter unexpectedly early(April 11), since Mr. Chapman had recorded it as arriving at Gainesvilleat a date sixteen days later than this. 

I did not repeat my visit to Lake Bradford; but, not to give up theivory-bill too easily, --and because I must walk somewhere, --I wentagain as far as the palmetto scrub. This time, though I still missed thewoodpecker, I was fortunate enough to come upon a turkey. In thethickest part of the wood, as I turned a corner, there she stood beforeme in the middle of the road. She ran along the horse-track for perhapsa rod, and then disappeared among the palmetto leaves. 

Meanwhile, two or three days before, while returning from St. Mark's, whither I had gone for a day on the river, I had noticed from the carwindow a swamp, or baygall, which looked so promising that I went thevery next morning to see what it would yield. I had taken it for acypress swamp, but it proved to be composed mainly of oaks; very tallbut rather slender trees, heavily draped with hanging moss and standingin black water. Among them were the swollen stumps, three or four feethigh, of larger trees which had been felled. I pushed in through thesurrounding shrubbery and bay-trees, and waited for some time, leaningagainst one of the larger trunks and listening to the noises, of whichthe air of the swamp was full. Great-crested flycatchers, two Acadianflycatchers, a multitude of blue yellow-backed warblers, and what Isupposed to be some loud-voiced frogs were especially conspicuous in theconcert; but a Carolina wren, a cardinal, a red-eyed vireo, and ablue-gray gnatcatcher, the last with the merest thread of a voice, contributed their share to the medley, and once a chickadee struck uphis sweet and gentle strain in the very depths of the swamp--like anangel singing in hell. 

My walk on the railway, that wonderful St. Mark's branch (I could neverhave imagined the possibility of running trains over so crazy a track), took me through the choicest of bird country. The bushes were alive, andthe air rang with music. In the midst of the chorus I suddenly caughtsomewhere before me what I had no doubt was the song of a purple finch, a bird that I had not yet seen in Florida. I quickened my steps, and tomy delight the singer proved to be a blue grosbeak. I had caught aglimpse of one two days before, as I have described in another chapter, but with no opportunity for a final identification. Here, as it soonturned out, there were at least four birds, all males, and all singing;chasing each other about after the most persistent fashion, in a pieceof close shrubbery with tall trees interspersed, and acting--the fourof them--just as two birds are often seen to do when contending for thepossession of a building site. At a first hearing the song seems not solong sustained as the purple finch's commonly is, but exceedingly likeit in voice and manner, though not equal to it, I should be inclined tosay, in either respect. The birds made frequent use of a monosyllabiccall, corresponding to the calls of the purple finch and therose-breasted grosbeak, but readily distinguishable from both. I wasgreatly pleased to see them, and thought them extremely handsome, withtheir dark blue plumage set off by wing patches of rich chestnut. 

A little farther, and I was saluted by the saucy cry of my first Floridachat. The fellow had chosen just such a tangled thicket as he favors inMassachusetts, and whistled and kept out of sight after the mostapproved manner of his kind. On the other side of the track a white-eyedvireo was asserting himself, as he had been doing since the day Ireached St. Augustine; but though he seems a pretty clever substitutefor the chat in the chat's absence, his light is quickly put out whenthe clown himself steps into the ring. Ground doves cooed, cardinalswhistled, and mocking-birds sang and mocked by turns. Orchard orioles, no unworthy companions of mocking-birds and cardinals, sang here andthere from a low treetop, especially in the vicinity of houses. To judgefrom what I saw, they are among the most characteristic of Tallahasseebirds, --as numerous as Baltimore orioles are in Massachusetts towns, and frequenting much the same kind of places. In one day's walk Icounted twenty-five. Elegantly dressed as they are, --and elegance isbetter than brilliancy, perhaps, even in a bird, --they seem to bethoroughly democratic. It was a pleasure to see them so fond of cabindoor-yards. 

Of the other birds along the St. Mark's railway, let it be enough tomention white-throated and white-crowned sparrows, red-eyed chewinks(the white-eye was not found in the Tallahassee region), a red-belliedwoodpecker, two red-shouldered hawks, shrikes, kingbirds, yellow-throated warblers, Maryland yellow-throats, pine warblers, palmwarblers, --which in spite of their name seek their summer homes north ofthe United States, --myrtle warblers, now grown scarce, house wrens, summer tanagers, and quails. The last-named birds, by the way, I hadexpected to find known as "partridges" at the South, but as a matter offact I heard that name applied to them only once. On the St. Augustineroad, before breakfast, I met an old negro setting out for his day'swork behind a pair of oxen. "Taking some good exercise?" he asked, byway of a neighborly greeting; and, not to be less neighborly than he, Iresponded with some remark about a big shot-gun which occupied aconspicuous place in his cart. "Oh, " he said, "game is plenty out wherewe are going, about eight miles, and I take the gun along. " "What kindof game?" "Well, sir, we may sometimes find a partridge. " I smiled atthe anti-climax, but was glad to hear Bob White honored for once withhis Southern title. 

A good many of my jaunts took me past the gallinule swamp beforementioned, and almost always I stopped and went near. It was worth whileto hear the poultry cries of the gallinules if nothing more; and oftenseveral of the birds would be seen swimming about among the big whitelilies and the green tussocks. Once I discovered one of them sittingupright on a stake, --a precarious seat, off which he soon tumbledawkwardly into the water. At another time, on the same stake, sat somedark, strange-looking object. The opera-glass showed it at once to be alarge bird sitting with its back toward me, and holding its wingsuplifted in the familiar heraldic, _e-pluribus-unum_ attitude of ourAmerican spread-eagle; but even then it was some seconds before Irecognized it as an anhinga, --water turkey, --though it was a male infull nuptial garb. I drew nearer and nearer, and meanwhile it turnedsquarely about, --a slow and ticklish operation, --so that its back waspresented to the sun; as if it had dried one side of its wings andtail, --for the latter, too, was fully spread, --and now would dry theother. There for some time it sat preening its feathers, with monstroustwistings and untwistings of its snaky neck. If the chat is a clown, thewater turkey would make its fortune as a contortionist. Finally it rose, circled about till it got well aloft, and then, setting its wings, sailed away southward and vanished, leaving me in a state of wonder asto where it had come from, and whether it was often to be seen in such aplace--perfectly open, close beside the highway, and not far fromhouses. I did not expect ever to see another, but the next morning, onmy way up the railroad to pay a second visit to the ivory-bill's swamp, I looked up by chance, --a brown thrush was singing on the telegraphwire, --and saw two anhingas soaring overhead, their silvery wingsglistening in the sun as they wheeled. I kept my glass on them till thedistance swallowed them up. 

Of one long forenoon's ramble I retain particular remembrance, not onaccount of any birds, but for a half hour of pleasant human intercourse. I went out of the city by an untried road, hoping to find some trace ofmigrating birds, especially of certain warblers, the prospect of whoseacquaintance was one of the lesser considerations which had brought meso far from home. No such trace appeared, however, nor, in myfortnight's stay in Tallahassee, in almost the height of the migratoryseason, did I, so far as I could tell, see a single passenger bird ofany sort. Some species arrived from the South--cuckoos and orioles, forexample; others, no doubt, took their departure for the North; but tothe best of my knowledge not one passed through. It was a strangecontrast to what is witnessed everywhere in New England. By some otherroute swarms of birds must at that moment have been entering the UnitedStates from Mexico and beyond; but unless my observation was at fault, --and I am assured that sharper eyes than mine have had a similarexperience, --their line of march did not bring them into the Floridahill-country. My morning's road not only showed me no birds, but led menowhere, and, growing discouraged, I turned back till I came to a laneleading off to the left at right angles. This I followed so far that itseemed wise, if possible, to make my way back to the city withoutretracing my steps. Not to spend my strength for naught, however (thenoonday sun having always to be treated with respect), I made for asolitary house in the distance. Another lane ran past it. That, perhaps, would answer my purpose. I entered the yard, all ablaze with roses, andin response to my knock a gentleman appeared upon the doorstep. Yes, hesaid, the lane would carry me straight to the Meridian road (so I thinkhe called it), and thence into the city. "Past Dr. H. 's?" I asked. "Yes. " And then I knew where I was. 

First, however, I must let my new acquaintance show me his garden. Hisname was G. , he said. Most likely I had heard of him, for thelegislature was just then having a good deal to say about his sheep, inconnection with some proposed dog-law. Did I like roses? As he talked hecut one after another, naming each as he put it into my hand. Then Imust look at his Japanese persimmon trees, and many other things. Herewas a pretty shrub. Perhaps I could tell what it was by crushing andsmelling a leaf? No; it was something familiar; I sniffed, and lookedfoolish, and after all he had to tell me its name--camphor. So we wentthe rounds of the garden, --frightening a mocking-bird off her nest in anorange-tree, --till my hands were full. It is too bad I have forgottenhow many pecan-trees he had planted, and how many sheep he kept. Awell-regulated memory would have held fast to such figures: mine iscertain only that there were four eggs in the mocking-bird's nest. Mr. G. Was a man of enterprise, at any rate; a match for any Yankee, although he had come to Florida not from Yankeeland, but from northernGeorgia. I hope all his crops are still thriving, especially his whiteroses and his Marshal Niels. 

In the lane, after skirting some pleasant woods, which I meant to visitagain, but found no opportunity, I was suddenly assaulted by a pair ofbrown thrashers, half beside themselves after their manner because of myapproach to their nest. How close my approach was I cannot say; but itmust be confessed that I played upon their fears to the utmost of myability, wishing to see as many of their neighbors as the disturbancewould bring together. Several other thrashers, a catbird, and two housewrens appeared (all these, since "blood is thicker than water, " may havefelt some special cousinly solicitude, for aught I know), with aruby-crowned kinglet and a field sparrow. 

In the valley, near a little pond, as I came out into the Meridian road, a solitary vireo was singing, in the very spot where one had been heardsix days before. Was it the same bird? I asked myself. And was itsettled for the summer? Such an explanation seemed the more likelybecause I had found no solitary vireo anywhere else about the city, though the species had been common earlier in the season in eastern andsouthern Florida, where I had seen my last one--at New Smyrna--March 26. 

At this same dip in the Meridian road, on a previous visit, I hadexperienced one of the pleasantest of my Tallahassee sensations. Themorning was one of those when every bird is in tune. By the road side Ihad just passed Carolina wrens, house wrens, a chipper, a field sparrow, two thrashers, an abundance of chewinks, two orchard orioles, severaltanagers, a flock of quail, and mocking-birds and cardinals uncounted. In a pine wood near by, a wood pewee, a pine warbler, a yellow-throatedwarbler, and a pine-wood sparrow were singing--a most peculiarly selectand modest chorus. Just at the lowest point in the valley I stopped tolisten to a song which I did not recognize, but which, by and by, Isettled upon as probably the work of a freakish prairie warbler. At thatmoment, as if to confirm my conjecture, --which in the retrospect becomesalmost ridiculous, --a prairie warbler hopped into sight on an outer twigof the water-oak out of which the music had proceeded. Still somethingsaid, "Are you sure?" and I stepped inside the fence. There on theground were two or three white-crowned sparrows, and in an instant thetruth of the case flashed upon me. I remembered the saying of a friend, that the song of the white-crown had reminded him of the vesper sparrowand the black-throated green warbler. That was my bird; and I listenedagain, though I could no longer be said to feel in doubt. A long time Iwaited. Again and again the birds sang, and at last I discovered one ofthem perched at the top of the oak, tossing back his head and warbling--a white-crowned sparrow: the one regular Massachusetts migrant which Ihad often seen, but had never heard utter a sound. 

The strain opens with smooth, sweet notes almost exactly like theintroductory syllables of the vesper sparrow. Then the tone changes, andthe remainder of the song is in something like the pleasingly hoarsevoice of a prairie warbler, or a black-throated green. It is soft andvery pretty; not so perfect a piece of art as the vesper sparrow'stune, --few bird-songs are, --but taking for its very oddity, and at thesame time tender and sweet. More than one writer has described it asresembling the song of the white-throat. Even Minot, who in general wasthe most painstaking and accurate of observers, as he is one of the mostinteresting of our systematic writers, says that the two songs are"almost exactly" alike. There could be no better example of thefallibility which attaches, and in the nature of the case must attach, to all writing upon such subjects. The two songs have about as much incommon as those of the hermit thrush and the brown thrasher, or those ofthe song sparrow and the chipper. In other words, they have nothing incommon. Probably in Minot's case, as in so many others of a similarnature, the simple explanation is that when he thought he was listeningto one bird he was really listening to another. 

The Tallahassee road to which I had oftenest resorted, to which, now, from far Massachusetts, I oftenest look back, the St. Augustine road, socalled, I have spoken of elsewhere. Thither, after packing my trunk onthe morning of the 18th, I betook myself for a farewell stroll. Myholiday was done. For the last time, perhaps, I listened to themocking-bird and the cardinal, as by and by, when the grand holiday isover, I shall listen to my last wood thrush and my last bluebird. Butwhat then? Florida fields are still bright, and neither mocking-bird norcardinal knows aught of my absence. And so it _will_ be. 

 "When you and I behind the Veil are past, Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last. "

None the less, it is good to have lived our day and taken our peep atthe mighty show. Ten thousand things we may have fretted ourselvesabout, uselessly or worse. But to have lived in the sun, to have lovednatural beauty, to have felt the majesty of trees, to have enjoyed thesweetness of flowers and the music of birds, --so much, at least, is notvanity nor vexation of spirit. 

INDEX. 

Air-plants, Alligator, Azalea, Baptisia, Beggar's-ticks, Blackberry, Blackbird, red--wing, Bladderwort, Bluebird, Blue-eyed Grass, Butterworts, Buzzard, turkey, Calopogon, Carrion Crow (Black Vulture), Catbird, Cedar-bird, Cedar, red, Chat, yellow-breasted, Cherokee Rose, Cherry, wild, Chewink (Towhee):-- red-eyed, white--eyed, Chickadee, Carolina, Chimney Swift, Chuck-will's-widow, Clematis Baldwinii, Clover, buffalo, Cloudberry, Coot (Fulica americana), Coquina Clam, Coreopsis, Cormorant, Crab-apple, Creeper, black-and-white, Cross-vine, Crow, Cuckoo, yellow-billed, Cypress-tree, Dabchick, Dove:-- Carolina, ground, Duck, wood, Eagle, bald, Egret:-- great white, little white, Fish-hawk, Flicker (Golden-winged Woodpecker), Flowering Dogwood, Flycatchers:-- Acadian, crested, kingbird, phoebe, wood pewee, Fringe-bush, Frogs, Gallinule:-- Florida, purple, Gannet, Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, Golden club, Goldenrod, Grackle, boat-tailed, Grebe, pied-billed, Grosbeak:-- cardinal, blue, Gull:-- Bonaparte's, ring-billed, Hawk:-- fish, marsh, red-shouldered, sparrow, swallow-tailed, Heron:-- great blue, great white (_or_ Egret), green, little blue, Louisiana, night (black-crowned), Honeysuckle:-- scarlet, white, Houstonia, round-leaved, Humming-bird, ruby-throated, Hypoxis, Iris versicolor, Jay:-- Florida, Florida blue, Judas-tree, Killdeer Plover, Kingbird, Kingfisher, Kinglet, ruby--crowned, Kite, fork-tailed, Krigia, Lantana, Lark, meadow, Leptopoda, Live-oak, Lizards, Lobelia Feayana, Loggerhead Shrike, Lygodesmia, Martin, purple, Maryland Yellow-throat, Mocking-bird, Mullein, Myrtle Bird. _See_ Warbler. 

Night-hawk, Nuthatch, brown-headed, Orange, wild, Oriole, orchard, Osprey. _See_ Fish-Hawk. Oven-bird, Oxalis, yellow, Papaw, Paroquet, Partridge-berry, Pelican:-- brown, white, Persimmon, Phoebe, Pipewort, Poison Ivy, Poppy, Mexican, Quail, Rail:-- Carolina, clapper, king, Redbird (Cardinal Grosbeak), "Ricebird". Robin, Salvia lyrata, Sanderling, Sandpiper:-- solitary, spotted, Sassafras, Schrankia, Senecio, Shrike, loggerhead, Sow Thistle, Snakebird (Water Turkey), Sparrow:-- chipping, field, grasshopper (yellow-winged), pine-wood, savanna, song, white-crowned, white-throated, Spiderwort, St. Peter's-wort, Strawberry, Swallow:-- barn, rough-winged, tree (white-bellied), Swift, chimney, Tanager, summer, Tern, Thorns, Thrasher (Brown Thrush), Thrush:-- hermit, Northern water, Louisiana water, Titlark, Titmouse:-- Carolina, tufted, Towhee. _See_ Chewink. Turkey, Vaccinium, arboreum, Venus's Looking-glass (Specularia), Verbena, Violets, Vireo:-- red-eyed, solitary, white-eyed, yellow-throated, Virginia creeper, Vulture (Carrion Crow), Warbler:-- black-throated green, blue yellow-backed, myrtle (yellow-rumped), palm (yellow redpoll), pine, prairie, yellow-throated (Dendroica dominica), Water Lily, Water Thrush:-- Louisiana, Northern, Water Turkey (Snakebird), Wood Pewee, Woodpecker:-- downy, golden-winged (flicker), ivory-billed, pileated, red-bellied, red-cockaded, red-headed, Wren:-- Carolina (mocking), house, long-billed marsh, winter, Yellow Jessamine, Yellow-legs (Totanus flavipes),