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

Later in the season, on this same shell mound, I might have regaled myself with fresh figs. Here, at any rate, was a thrifty-looking fig-tree, though its crop, if it bore one, would perhaps not have waited my coming so patiently as the oranges had done. Here, too, was a red cedar; and to me, who, in my ignorance, had always thought of this tough little evergreen as especially at home on my own bleak and stony hillsides, it seemed an incongruous trio,—fig-tree, orange-tree, and savin. In truth, the cedars of Florida were one of my liveliest surprises. At first I refused to believe that they were red cedars, so strangely 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 their identity,[1] I turned about and protested that I had never seen red cedars before. One, in St. Augustine, near San Marco Avenue, I had the curiosity to measure. The girth of the trunk at the smallest place was six feet five inches, and the spread of the branches was not less than fifty feet.

[Footnote 1: I speak as if I had accepted my own study of the manual as conclusive. I did for the time being, but while writing this paragraph I bethought myself that I might be in error, after all. I referred the question, therefore, to a friend, a botanist of authority. "No wonder the red cedars of Florida puzzled you," he replied. "No one would suppose at first that they were of the same species as our New England savins. The habit is entirely different; but botanists have found no characters by which to separate them, and you are safe in considering them as Juniperus Virginiana."]

The stroller in this road suffered few distractions. The houses, two or three to the mile, stood well back in the woods, with little or no cleared land about them. Picnic establishments they seemed to a Northern eye, rather than permanent dwellings. At one point, in the hammock, a rude camp was occupied by a group of rough-looking men and several small children, who seemed to be getting on as best they could—none too well, to judge from appearances—without feminine ministrations. What they were there for I never made out. They fished, I think, but whether by way 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 oyster season. They might have done worse. They never paid the slightest attention to me, nor once gave me any decent excuse for engaging them in talk. The best thing I remember about them was a tableau caught in passing. A "norther" had descended upon us unexpectedly (Florida is not a whit behind the rest of the world in sudden changes of temperature), and while hastening homeward, toward nightfall, hugging myself to keep warm, I saw, in the woods, this group of campers disposed about a lively blaze.

Let us be thankful, say I, that memory is so little the servant of the will. Chance impressions of this kind, unforeseen, involuntary, and inexplicable, make one of the chief delights of traveling, or rather of having traveled. In the present case, indeed, the permanence of the impression is perhaps not altogether beyond the reach of a plausible conjecture. We have not always lived in houses; and if we love the sight of a fire out-of-doors,—a camp-fire, that is to say,—as we all do, so that the, burning of a brush-heap in a neighbor's yard will draw us to the window, the feeling is but part of an ancestral inheritance. We have come by it honestly, as the phrase is. And so I need not scruple to set down another reminiscence of the same kind,—an early morning street scene, of no importance in itself, in the village of New Smyrna. It may have been on the morning next after the "norther" just mentioned. I cannot say. We had two or three such touches of winter in early March; none of them at all distressing, be it understood, to persons in ordinary health. One night water froze,—"as thick as a silver dollar,"—and orange growers were alarmed for the next season's crop, the trees being just ready to blossom. Some men kept fires burning in their orchards overnight; a pretty spectacle, I should think, especially where the fruit was still ungathered. On one of these frosty mornings, then, I saw a solitary horseman, not "wending his way," but warming his hands over a fire that he had built for that purpose in the village street. One might live and die in a New England village without seeing such a sight. A Yankee would have betaken himself to the corner grocery. But here, though that "adjunct of civilization" was directly across the way, most likely it had never had a stove in it. The sun would give warmth enough in an hour,—by nine o'clock one would probably be glad of a sunshade; but the man was chilly after his ride; it was still a bit early to go about the business that had brought him into town: what more natural than to hitch his horse, get together a few sticks, and kindle a blaze? What an insane idea it would have seemed to him that a passing stranger might remember him and his fire three months afterward, and think 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, as I now remember with a sense of surprise. In my mind the two had never any connection. It was in this thoroughfare that one saw now and then a group of cavaliers strolling about under broad-brimmed hats, with big spurs at their heels, accosting passers-by with hearty familiarity, first names and hand-shakes, while their horses stood hitched to the branches of roadside trees,—a typical Southern picture. Here, on a Sunday afternoon, were two young fellows who had brought to town a mother coon and three young ones, hoping to find a purchaser. The guests at the hotels manifested no eagerness for such pets, but the colored bell-boys and waiters gathered about, and after a little good-humored dickering bought the entire lot, box and all, for a dollar and a half; first having pulled the little ones out between the slats—not without some risk to both parties—to look at them and pass them round. The venders walked off with grins of ill-concealed triumph. The Fates had been kind to them, and they had three silver half-dollars in their pockets. I heard one of them say something about giving part of the money to a third man who had told them where the nest was; but his companion would listen to no such folly. "He wouldn't come with us," he said, "and we won't tell him a damned thing." I fear there was nothing distinctively Southern about that.

Here, too, in the heart of the town, was a magnificent cluster of live-oaks, worth coming to Florida to see; far-spreading, full of ferns and air plants, and heavy with hanging moss. Day after day I went out to admire them. Under them was a neglected orange grove, and in one of the orange-trees, amid the glossy foliage, appeared my first summer tanager. It was a royal setting, and the splendid vermilion-red bird was worthy of it. Among the oaks I walked in the evening, listening to the strange low chant of the chuck-will's-widow,—a name which the owner himself pronounces with a rest after the first syllable. Once, for two or three days, the trees were amazingly full of blue yellow-backed warblers. Numbers of them, a dozen at least, could be heard singing at once directly over one's head, running up the scale not one after another, but literally in unison. Here the tufted titmouse, the very soul of monotony, piped and piped and piped, as if his diapason stop were pulled out 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 on one string for half an hour together. He is the one Southern bird that I should 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, also silent, with prairie warblers, black-and-white creepers, solitary vireos, an occasional chickadee, and many more. It was a birdy spot; and just across the way, on the shrubby island, were red-winged blackbirds, who piqued my curiosity by adding to the familiar conkaree a final syllable,—the Florida termination, I called it,—which made me wonder whether, as has been the case with so many other Florida birds, they might not turn out to be a distinct race, worthy of a name (Agelaius phoeniceus something-or-other), as well as of a local habitation. I suggest the question to those whose business it is to be learned in such matters.[1]

[Footnote 1: My suggestion, I now discover,—since this paper was first printed,—was some years too late. Mr. Ridgway, in his Manual of North American Birds (1887), had already described a subspecies of Florida redwings under the name of Agelaius phoeniceus bryanti. Whether my New Smyrna birds should come under that title cannot be told, of course, in the absence of specimens; but on the strength of the song I venture to think it highly probable.]

The tall grass about the borders of the island was alive with clapper rails. 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 once they would break out with one sharp volley, and then instantly all would be silent again. Theirs is an apt name,—Rallus crepitans. Once I watched two of them in the act of crepitating, and ever after that, when the 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 the morning, looking like half-grown pullets. Their specialty was crab-fishing, at which they were highly expert, plunging into the water up to the depth of their legs, and handling and swallowing pretty large specimens with surprising dexterity. I was greatly pleased with them, as well as with their local name, "everybody's chickens."

Once I feared we had heard the last of them. On a day following a sudden fall of the mercury, a gale from the north set in at noon, with thunder and lightning, hail, and torrents of rain. The river was quickly lashed into foam, and the gale drove the ocean into it through the inlet, till the shrubbery of the rails' island barely showed above the breakers. The street was deep under water, and fears were entertained for the new bridge and the road to the beach. All night the gale continued, and all the next day till late in the afternoon; and when the river should have been at low tide, the island was still flooded. Gravitation was overmatched for the time being. And where were the rails, I asked myself. They could swim, no doubt, when put to it, but it seemed impossible that they could survive so fierce an inundation. Well, the wind ceased, the tide went out at last; and behold, the rails were in full cry, not a voice missing! How they had managed it was beyond my ken.

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

Now, alas, Florida seems very far off. I am never likely to walk again under those New Smyrna live-oaks, nor to see again all that beauty of the Hillsborough. And yet, in a truer and better sense of the word, I do see it, and shall. What a heavenly light falls at this moment on the river 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 no better reason than because that is the name commonly applied to it by the residents of the town. When this sketch was written, I had never heard of a theory since broached in some of our Northern newspapers,—I know 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 can only add my hope that he will be shown to have built also the so-called sugar mill a few miles north of New Smyrna, in the Dunlawton hammock behind Port Orange. In that, to be sure, there is still much old machinery, but perhaps its presence would prove no insuperable objection to a theory so pleasing. In matters of this kind, much depends upon subjective considerations; in one sense, at least, "all things are possible to him that believeth." For my own part, I profess no opinion. I am neither an archaeologist nor an ecclesiastic, and speak simply as a chance observer.]

On the third or fourth day of my sojourn at the Live Oak Inn, the lady of the house, noticing my peripatetic habits, I suppose, asked whether I had been to the old sugar mill. The ruin is mentioned in the guide-books as one of the historic features of the ancient settlement of New Smyrna, but I had forgotten the fact, and was thankful to receive a description of the place, as well as of the road thither,—a rather blind road, my informant 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 it had sounded, I should probably never find the mill; but the walk would be pleasant, and that, after all, was the principal consideration, especially to a man who just then cared more, or thought he did, for a new bird or a new song than for an indefinite number of eighteenth-century relics.

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

What gave its peculiar tropical character to the wood, however, was not so much the trees as the profusion of plants that covered them and depended from them: air-plants (Tillandsia), large and small,—like pineapples, with which they claim a family relationship,—the exuberant hanging moss, itself another air-plant, ferns, and vines. The ferns, a species 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, I should have said, but I was assured that the ground had been under cultivation so recently that, to a practiced eye, the cotton-rows were still visible) stood a grove of wild orange-trees, the handsome fruit glowing like lamps amid the deep green foliage. There was little other brightness. Here and there in the undergrowth were yellow jessamine vines, but already—March 11—they were past flowering. Almost or quite the only blossom just now in sight was the faithful round-leaved houstonia, growing in small flat patches in the sand on the edge of the road, with budding partridge-berry—a Yankee in Florida—to keep it company. Warblers and titmice twittered in the leafy treetops, and butterflies of several kinds, notably one gorgeous creature in yellow and black, like a larger and more resplendent Turnus, went fluttering through the underwoods. I could have believed myself in the heart of a limitless forest; but Florida hammocks, so far as I have seen, are seldom of great extent, and the road presently crossed another railway track, 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 were approaching in a wagon (except on Sunday, I am not certain that I ever met a foot passenger in the flat-woods), and I improved the opportunity to 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 the left. That road will take you to the mill." Here was a man who had traveled in the pine lands,—where, of all places, it is easy to get lost and hard to find yourself,—and not only appreciated the value of explicit instructions, but, being a Southerner, had leisure enough and politeness enough to give them. I thanked him, and sauntered on. The day was before me, and the place was lively with birds. Pine-wood sparrows, pine warblers, and red-winged blackbirds were in song; two red-shouldered hawks were screaming, a flicker was shouting, a red-bellied woodpecker cried kur-r-r-r, brown-headed nuthatches were gossiping in the distance, and suddenly I heard, what I never thought to hear in a pinery, the croak of a green heron. I turned quickly and saw him. It was indeed he. What a friend is ignorance, mother of all those happy surprises which brighten existence as they pass, like the butterflies of the wood. The heron was at home, and I was the stranger. For there was water near, as there is everywhere in Florida; and subsequently, in this very place, I met not only the green heron, but three of his relatives,—the great blue, the little blue, and the dainty Louisiana, 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 heard before,—as if a great Northern shrike had been struck with preternatural hoarseness, and, like so many other victims of the Northern winter, had betaken himself to a sunnier clime. I looked up. In the leafy top of a pine sat a boat-tailed grackle, splendidly iridescent, engaged in a musical performance which afterward became almost too familiar to me, but which now, as a novelty, was as interesting as it was grotesque. This, as well as I can describe it, is what the bird was doing. He opened his bill,—set it, as it were, wide apart,—and holding it thus, emitted four or five rather long and very loud grating, shrikish notes; then instantly shook his wings with an extraordinary flapping noise, and followed that with several highly curious and startling cries, the concluding one of which sometimes suggested the cackle of a robin. All this he repeated again and again with the utmost fervor. He could not have been more enthusiastic if he had been making the sweetest music in the world. And I confess that I thought he had reason to be proud of his work. The introduction of wing-made sounds in the middle of a vocal performance was of itself a stroke of something like genius. It put me in mind of the firing of cannons as an accompaniment to the Anvil Chorus. Why should a creature of such gifts be named for his bodily dimensions, or the shape of his tail? Why not Quiscalus gilmorius, Gilmore's grackle?

That the sounds were wing-made I had no thought of questioning. I had seen 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 flying from one tree to another; and later still, in a country where boat-tailed grackles were an every-day sight near the heart of the village, I more than once saw them produce the sounds in question without any perceptible movement of the wings, and furthermore, their mandibles could be seen moving in time with the beats. So hard is it to be sure of a thing, even when you see it and hear it.

"Oh yes," some sharp-witted reader will say, "you saw the wings flapping,—beating time,—and so you imagined that the sounds were like wing-beats." But for once the sharp-witted reader is in the wrong. The resemblance is not imaginary. Mr. F.M. Chapman, in A List of Birds Observed at Gainesville, Florida,[1] says of the boat-tailed grackle (Quiscalus major): "A singular note of this species greatly resembles the flapping of wings, as of a coot tripping over the water; this sound was very familiar to me, but so excellent is the imitation that for a long time I attributed it to one of the numerous coots which abound in most 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, of course, why the wings are shaken just at the right instant. To that I must respond with the time-honored formula, "Not prepared." The reader may believe, if he will, that the bird is aware of the imitative quality of the notes, and amuses itself by heightening the delusion of the looker-on. My own more commonplace conjecture is that the sounds are produced by snappings and gratings of the big mandibles ("He is gritting his teeth," said a shrewd unornithological Yankee, whose opinion I had solicited), and that the wing movements may be nothing but involuntary accompaniments of this almost convulsive action of the beak. But perhaps the sounds are wing-made, after all.

On the day of which I am writing, at any rate, I was troubled by no misgivings. I had seen something new, and was only desirous to see more of it. Who does not love an original character? For at least half an hour the old mill was forgotten, while I chased the grackle about, as he flew hither and thither, sometimes with a loggerhead shrike in furious pursuit. Once I had gone a few rods into the palmetto scrub, partly to be nearer the bird, but still more to enjoy the shadow of a pine, and was standing under the tree, motionless, when a man came along the road in a gig. "Surveying?" he asked, reining in his horse. "No, sir; I am looking at a bird in the tree yonder." I wished him to go on, and thought it best to gratify his curiosity at once. He was silent a moment; then he said, "Looking at the old sugar house from there?" That was too preposterous, and I answered with more voice, and perhaps with a touch of impatience, "No, no; I am trying to see a bird in that pine-tree." He was silent again. Then he gathered up the reins. "I'm so deaf I can't hear you," he said, and drove on. "Good-by," I remarked, in a needless undertone; "you're a good man, I've no doubt, but deaf people shouldn'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 the profoundest, and at the same time one of the most practical, truths of all devout philosophy; but the testiness of its tone was little to my credit. He was a good man,—and the village doctor,—and more than once afterward put me under obligation. One of his best appreciated favors was unintended and indirect. I was driving with him through the hammock, 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 of the 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 by and by he came back, a bunch of common blue iris in one hand, and his shoes 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 had no doubt of his goodness, and in case of need would certainly have called him rather than his younger rival at the opposite end of the village.

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 the old sugar mill. Presently a lone cabin came into sight. The grass-grown road led straight to it, and stopped at the gate. Two women and a brood of children stood in the door, and in answer to my inquiry one of the women (the children had already scampered out of sight) invited me to enter the yard. "Go round the house," she said, "and you will find a road that runs right down to the mill."

The mill, as it stands, is not much to look at: some fragments of wall built of coquina stone, with two or three arched windows and an arched door, the whole surrounded by a modern plantation of orange-trees, now almost as much a ruin as the mill itself. But the mill was built more than a hundred years ago, and serves well enough the principal use of abandoned and decaying things,—to touch the imagination. For myself, I am 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 been accustomed to call him, but I like the Southern name better, in spite of its ambiguity), now in eager, rapid tones, now slowly and with a dying fall. Now his voice fell almost to a whisper, now it rang out again; but always it was sweet and golden, and always the bird was out of sight in the shrubbery. The orange-trees were in bloom; the air was full of their fragrance, full also of the murmur of bees. All at once a deeper note struck in, and I turned to look. A humming-bird was hovering amid the white blossoms and glossy leaves. I saw his flaming throat, and the next instant he was gone, like a flash of light,—the first hummer of the year. I was far from home, and expectant of new things. That, I dare say, was the reason why I took the sound at first for the boom of a bumble-bee; some strange Floridian bee, with a deeper and more melodious bass than any Northern insect is master of.

It is good to be here, I say to myself, and we need no tabernacle. All things are in harmony. A crow in the distance says caw, caw in a meditative voice, as if he, too, were thinking of days past; and not even the scream of a hen-hawk, off in the pine-woods, breaks the spell that is upon us. A quail whistles,—a true Yankee Bob White, to judge him by his voice,—and the white-eyed chewink (he is not a Yankee) whistles and sings by turns. The bluebird's warble and the pine warbler's trill could never be disturbing to the quietest mood. Only one voice seems out of tune: the white-eyed vireo, even to-day, cannot forget 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 been opened eastward, the sea breeze strikes me. Henceforth the temperature is 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 of an orange-tree, but it is gone (I wonder where) almost before I can say I saw it. Presently a brown one, with light-colored stripes and a bluish tail, is seen traveling over the crumbling wall, running into crannies and out again. Now it stops to look at me with its jewel of an eye. And there, on the rustic arbor, is a third one, matching the unpainted wood in hue. Its throat is white, but when it is inflated, as happens every few seconds, it turns to the loveliest rose color. This inflated membrane should be a vocal sac, I think, but I hear no sound. Perhaps the chameleon's voice is too fine for dull human sense.

On two sides of me, beyond the orange-trees, is a thicket of small oaks and cabbage palmettos,—hammock, I suppose it is called. In all other directions are the pine-woods, with their undergrowth of saw palmetto. The cardinal sings from the hammock, and so does the Carolina wren. The chewinks, the blackbirds (a grackle just now flies over, and a fish-hawk, also), with the bluebirds and the pine warblers, are in the pinery. 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 covered with fresh leaves, straggle over the walls,—Virginia creeper, poison ivy, 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, "bramble roses faint and pale," and in one corner is a tuft of scarlet blooms,—sage, perhaps, or something akin to it. For the moment I feel no curiosity. But withal the place is unkempt, as becomes a ruin. "Winter's ragged hand" has been rather heavy upon it. Withered palmetto leaves and leaf-stalks litter the ground, and of course, being in Florida, there is no lack of orange-peel lying about. Ever since I entered the State a new Scrip-ture text has been running in my head: In the 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 be hundreds of trees. All of them are small, but the greater part are already dead, and the rest are dying. Those nearest the walls are fullest of leaves, as if the walls somehow gave them protection. The forest is creeping into the inclosure. Here and there the graceful palm-like tassel of a young long-leaved pine rises above the tall winter-killed grass. It is not the worst thing about the world that it tends to run wild.

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

This is a place for dreams and quietness. Nothing else seems worth the having. Let us feel no more the fever of life. Surely they are the wise who seek Nirvana; who insist not upon themselves, but wait absorption —reabsorption—into the infinite. The dead have the better part. I think of the stirring, adventurous man who built these walls and dug these canals. His life was full of action, full of journeyings and fightings. Now he is at peace, and his works do follow him—into the land 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 me also the sun and the air are sweet, and I too, for to-day at least, am careless of the world and all its doings.

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

As I started homeward, leaving the mill and the cabin behind me, some cattle were feeding in the grassy road. At sight of my umbrella (there are few places where a sunshade is more welcome than in a Florida pine-wood) they scampered away into the scrub. Poor, wild-eyed, hungry-looking things! I thought of Pharaoh's lean kine. They were like the 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 deg., or thereabout, it is hard for the Northern tourist to remember that he is looking at a winter landscape. He compares a Florida winter with a New England summer, and can hardly find words to tell you how barren and poverty-stricken the country looks.

After this I went more than once to the sugar mill. Morning and afternoon I visited it, but somehow I could never renew the joy of my first visit. Moods are not to be had for the asking, nor earned by a walk. The place was still interesting, the birds were there, the sunshine was pleasant, and the sea breeze fanned me. The orange blossoms were still sweet, and the bees still hummed about them; but it was another day, or I was another man. In memory, none the less, all my visits blend in one, and the ruined mill in the dying orchard remains one of the bright spots in that strange Southern world which, almost from 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, to those who live in it. To the Florida tourist it is important as lying at the head of steamboat navigation on the St. John's River, which here expands into a lake—Lake Monroe—some five miles in width, with Sanford on one side, and Enterprise on the other; or, as a waggish traveler once expressed it, with Enterprise on the north, and Sanford and enterprise on the south.

Walking naturalists and lovers of things natural have their own point of view, individual, unconventional, whimsical, if you please,—very different, at all events, from that of clearer-witted and more serious-minded men; and the inhabitants of Sanford will doubtless take it as a compliment, and be amused rather than annoyed, when I confess that I found their city a discouragement, a widespread desolation of houses and shops. If there is a pleasant country road leading out of it in any direction, I was unlucky enough to miss it. My melancholy condition was hit off before my eyes in a parable, as it were, by a crowd of young fellows, black and white, whom I found one afternoon in a sand-lot just outside the city, engaged in what was intended for a game of baseball. They were doing their best,—certainly they made noise enough; but circumstances were against them. When the ball came to the ground, from no matter what height or with what impetus, it fell dead in the sand; if it had been made of solid rubber, it could not have rebounded. "Base-running" was little better than base-walking. "Sliding" was safe, but, by the same token, impossible. Worse yet, at every "foul strike" or "wild throw" the ball was lost, and the barefooted fielders had to pick their way painfully about in the outlying saw-palmetto scrub till they found it. I had never seen our "national game" played under conditions so untoward. None but true patriots would have the heart to try it, I thought, and I meditated writing to Washington, where the quadrennial purification of the civil service was just then in progress,—under a new broom,—to secure, if possible, a few bits of recognition ("plums" is the technical term, I believe) for men so deserving. The first baseman certainly, who had oftenest to wade into the scrub, should have received a consulate, at the very least. Yet they were a merry crew, those national gamesters. Their patriotism was of the noblest type,—the unconscious. They had no thought of being heroes, nor dreamed of bounties or pensions. They quarreled with the umpire, of course, but not with Fate; and I hope I profited by their example. My errand in Sanford was to see something of the river in its narrower and better part; and having done that, I did not regret what otherwise might have 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 in free song. They are birds of the town. And the same is true of the loggerhead shrikes, a pair of which had built a nest in a small water-oak at the edge of the sidewalk, on a street corner, just beyond the reach of passers-by. In the roadside trees—all freshly planted, like the city—were myrtle warblers, prairie warblers, and blue yellowbacks, the two latter in song. Once, after a shower, I watched a myrtle bird bathing on a branch among the wet leaves. The street gutters were running with sulphur water, but he had waited for rain. I commended his taste, being myself one of those to whom water and brimstone is a combination as malodorous as it seems unscriptural. Noisy boat-tailed grackles, or "jackdaws," were plentiful about the lakeside, monstrously long in the tail, and almost as large as the fish crows, which were often there with them. Over the broad lake swept purple martins and white-breasted swallows, and nearer the shore fed peacefully a few pied-billed grebes, or dabchicks, birds that I had seen only two or three times before, and at which I looked more than once before I made out what they were. They had every appearance of passing a winter of content. At the tops of three or four stakes, which stood above the water at wide intervals,—and at long distances from the shore,—sat commonly as many cormorants, here, as everywhere, with plenty of idle time upon their hands. On the other side of the city were orange groves, large, well kept, thrifty looking; the fruit still on the trees (March 20, or thereabouts), or lying in heaps underneath, ready for the boxes. One man's house, I remember, was surrounded by a fence overrun with Cherokee 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 picked a goodly number of novelties, including what looked like a beautiful pink chicory, only the plant itself was much prettier (Lygodesmia); a very curious sensitive-leaved plant (Schrankia), densely beset throughout with curved prickles, and bearing globes of tiny pink-purple flowers; a calopogon, quite as pretty as our Northern pulchellus; a clematis (Baldwinii), which looked more like a bluebell than a clematis till I commenced pulling it to pieces; and a great profusion of one of the smaller papaws, or custard-apples, a low shrub, just then full of large, odd-shaped, creamy-white, heavy-scented blossoms. I was carrying a sprig of it in my hand when I met a negro. "What is this?" I asked. "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 dog banana."

Oftener than anywhere else I resorted to the shore of the lake,—to the one small part of it, that is to say, which was at the same time easily reached and comparatively unfrequented. There—going one day farther than usual—I found myself in the borderland of a cypress swamp. On one side was the lake, but between me and it were cypress-trees; and on the other side was the swamp itself, a dense wood growing in stagnant black water covered here and there with duckweed or some similar growth: a frightful place it seemed, the very abode of snakes and everything evil. Stories of slaves hiding in cypress swamps came into my mind. It must have been cruel treatment that drove them to it! Buzzards flew about my head, and looked at me. "He has come here to die," I imagined them saying among themselves. "No one comes here for anything else. Wait a little, and we will pick his bones." They perched near by, and, not to lose time, employed the interval in drying their wings, for the night had been showery. Once in a while one of them shifted his perch with an ominous rustle. They were waiting for me, and were becoming impatient. "He is long about it," one said to another; and I did not wonder. The place seemed one from which none who entered it could ever go out; and there was no going farther in without plunging into that horrible mire. I stood still, and looked and listened. Some strange noise, "bird or devil," came from the depths of the wood. A flock of grackles settled in a tall cypress, and for a time made the place loud. How still it was after they were gone! I could hardly withdraw my gaze from the green water full of slimy black roots and branches, any one of which might suddenly lift its head and open its deadly white mouth! Once a fish-hawk fell 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 uttering the same cries. All about me gigantic cypresses, every one swollen enormously at the base, rose straight and branchless into the air. Dead trees, one might have said,—light-colored, apparently with no bark to cover them; but if I glanced up, I saw that each bore at the top a scanty head of branches just now putting forth fresh green leaves, while long funereal streamers of dark Spanish moss hung thickly from every bough.

I am not sure how long I could have stayed in such a spot, if I had not been able to look now and then through the branches of the under-woods out upon the sunny lake. Swallows innumerable were playing over the water, many of them soaring so high as to be all but invisible. Wise and happy birds, lovers of sunlight and air. They would never be found in a cypress swamp. Along the shore, in a weedy shallow, the peaceful dabchicks were feeding. Far off on a post toward the middle of the lake stood a cormorant. But I could not keep my eyes long at once in that direction. The dismal swamp had me under its spell, and meanwhile the patient buzzards looked at me. "It is almost time," they said; "the fever will do its work,"—and I began to believe it. It was too bad to come away; the stupid town offered no attraction; but it seemed perilous to remain. Perhaps I could not come away. I would try it and see. It was amazing that I could; and no sooner was I out in the sunshine than I wished I had stayed where I was; for having once left the place, I was never likely to find it again. The way was plain enough, to be sure, and my 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 cannot be repeated.

With the fascination of the swamp still upon me, I heard somewhere in the distance a musical voice, and soon came in sight of a garden where a middle-aged negro was hoeing,—hoeing and singing: a wild, minor, endless kind of tune; a hymn, as seemed likely from a word caught here and there; a true piece of natural melody, as artless as any bird's. I walked 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 his crop may have been,—I did not notice, or, if I did, I have forgotten,—it should have prospered under his hand.

Farther along, in the highway,—a sandy track, with wastes of scrub on either side,—boy of eight or nine, armed with a double-barreled gun, was lingering about a patch of dwarf oaks and palmettos. "Haven't got that rabbit yet, eh?" said I. (I had passed him there on my way out, and he 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 away before I could get pretty near."

"Good!" I thought. "Here is a grammarian. Not one boy in ten in this country but would have said 'I seen.'" A scholar like this was worth talking 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 the town,—saved from the horrible, and delivered to the commonplace and the dreary.

My best days in Sanford were two that I spent on the river above the lake. A youthful boatman, expert alike with the oar and the gun, served me faithfully and well, impossible as it was for him to enter fully into the spirit of a man who wanted to look at birds, but not to kill them. I think he had never before seen a customer of that breed. First he rowed me up the "creek," under promise to show me alligators, moccasins, and no lack of birds, including the especially desired purple gallinule. The snakes were somehow missing (a loss not irreparable), and so were the purple gallinules; for them, the boy thought, it was still rather early in the season, although he had killed one a few days before, and for proof had brought me a wing. But as we were skirting along the shore I suddenly called "Hist!" An alligator lay on the bank just before us. The boy turned his head, and instantly was all excitement. It was a big fellow, he said,—one of three big ones that inhabited the creek. He would get him this time. "Are you sure?" I asked. "Oh yes, I'll blow the top of his head off." He was loaded for gallinules, and I, being no sportsman, and never having seen an alligator before, was some shades less confident. But it was his game, and I left him to his way. He pulled the boat noiselessly against the bank in the shelter of tall reeds, put down the oars, with which he could almost have touched the alligator, and took up his gun. At that moment the creature got wind of us, 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 showed his 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 bay after another, among the dense "bonnets,"—huge leaves of the common yellow pond lily,—but found nothing that I had not seen before. Here and there a Florida gallinule put up its head among the leaves, or took flight as we pressed too closely upon it; but I saw them to no advantage, and with a single exception they were dumb. One bird, as it dashed into the rushes, uttered two or three cries that sounded familiar. The Florida gallinule is in general pretty silent, I think; but he has a noisy season; then he is indeed noisy enough. A swamp containing a single pair might be supposed to be populous with barn-yard fowls, 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 once expressed it; then soft and full of content, as if the aforesaid hen had laid an egg ten minutes before, and were still felicitating herself upon the achievement. It was vexatious that here, in the very home of Florida gallinules, I should see and hear less of them than I had more than once done in Massachusetts, where they are esteemed a pretty choice rarity, and where, in spite of what I suppose must be called exceptional good luck, my acquaintance with them had been limited to perhaps half a dozen birds. But in affairs of this kind a direct chase is seldom the best rewarded. At one point the boatman pulled up to a thicket of small willows, bidding me be prepared to see birds in enormous numbers; but we found only a small company of night herons—evidently breeding there—and a green heron. The latter my boy shot before I knew what he was doing. He took my reproof in good part, protesting that he had had only 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 lake were many white-billed coots (Fulica americana); so many that we did our best to count them as they rose, flock after flock, dragging their feet over the water behind them with a multitudinous splashing noise. There were a thousand, at least. They had an air of being not so very shy, but they were nobody's fools. "See there!" my boy would exclaim, as a hundred or two of them dashed past the boat; "see how they keep just out of range!"

We were hardly on the river itself before he fell into a state of something like frenzy at the sight of an otter swimming before us, showing its head, and then diving. He made after it in hot haste, and fired I know not how many times, but all for nothing. He had killed several before now, he said, but had never been obliged to chase one in this fashion. Perhaps there was a Jonah in the ship; for though I sympathized 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 I knew it had as good a right to live as either the boy or I. No such qualms disturbed me a few minutes later, when, as the boat was grazing the reeds, I espied just ahead a snake lying in wait among them. I gave the alarm, and the boy looked round. "Yes," he said, "a big one, a moccasin,—a cotton-mouth; but I'll fix him." He pulled a stroke or two nearer, then lifted his oar and brought it down splash; but the reeds broke the blow, and the moccasin slipped into the water, apparently unharmed. That was a case for powder and shot. Florida people have a poor 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 boatman gave me proof within ten minutes after his failure with the cotton-mouth. He had pulled out into the middle of the river, when I noticed a beautiful snake, short and rather stout, lying coiled on the water. Whether it was an optical illusion I cannot say, but it seemed to me that the creature lay entirely above the surface,—as if it had been an inflated skin rather than a live snake. We passed close by it, but it made no offer to move, only darting out its tongue as the boat slipped past. 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 a curiosity.

"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 to come aboard. "Oh, you're coming this way, are you?" said the boy sarcastically. "Well, come on!" The snake came on, and when it got well within range he took up his fishing-rod (with hooks at the end for drawing game out of the reeds and bonnets), and the next moment the snake lay dead upon the water. He slipped the end of the pole under it and slung it ashore. "There! how do you like that?" said he, and he headed the boat upstream again. It was a "copper-bellied moccasin," he declared, whatever that may be, and was worse than a rattlesnake.

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

"They are not common yet," he would say. "By and by they will be as thick 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 here in the winter without my knowing it."

I wondered whether he could be right, or partly right, notwithstanding the book statements to the contrary. I notice that Mr. Chapman, writing of his experiences with this bird at Gainesville, says, "None were seen until May 25, when, in a part of the lake before unvisited,—a mass of floating islands and 'bonnets,'—I found them not uncommon." The boy's assertions 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 as long as that," with one finger laid crosswise upon another. He hauled the prize into the boat, and sure enough, it was a novelty,—a king rail, new to both of us. We had gone a little farther, and were passing a prairie, on which were pools of water where the boy said he had often seen 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 over our heads. It showed sidewise at the moment, but an instant later it turned, and I saw its long forked tail, and almost in the same breath its white head. A fork-tailed kite! and purple gallinules were for the time forgotten. It was performing the most graceful evolutions, swooping half-way to the earth from a great height, and then sweeping upward again. Another minute, and I saw a second bird, farther away. I watched the nearer one till it faded from sight, soaring and swooping by turns,—its long, scissors-shaped tail all the while fully spread,—but never coming down, as its habit is said to be, to skim over the surface of the water. There is nothing more beautiful on wings, I believe: a large hawk, with a swallow's grace of form, color, and motion. I saw it once more (four birds) over the St. Mark's River, and counted the sight one of the chief rewards of my Southern winter.

At noon we rested and ate our luncheon in the shade of three or four tall palmetto-trees standing by themselves on a broad prairie, a place brightened by beds of blue iris and stretches of golden senecio,—homelike as well as pretty, both of them. Then we set out again. The day was intensely hot (March 24), and my oarsman was more than half sick with a sudden cold. I begged him to take things easily, but he soon experienced an almost miraculous renewal of his forces. In one 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, as proud as a prince. "There, sir!" he said; "didn't I tell you it was handsome? It has every color there is." And indeed it was handsome, worthy to be called the "Sultana;" with the most exquisite iridescent bluish-purple plumage, the legs yellow, or greenish-yellow (a point by which it may be distinguished from the Florida gallinule, as the bird flies from you), the bill red tipped with pale green, and the shield (on the forehead, like a continuation of the upper mandible) light blue, of a peculiar shade, "just as if it had been painted." From that moment the boy was a new creature. Again and again he spoke of his altered feelings. He could pull the boat now anywhere I wanted to go. He was perfectly fresh, he declared, although I thought he had already done a pretty good day's work under that scorching sun. I had not imagined how deeply his heart was set upon showing me the bird I was after. It made me twice as glad to see it, dead though it was.

Within an hour, on our way homeward, we came upon another. It sprang out of the lily pads, and sped toward the tall grass of the shore. "Look! look! a purple!" the boy cried. "See his yellow legs!" Instinctively he raised his gun, but I said No. It would be inexcusable to shoot a second one; and besides, we were at that moment approaching a bird about which I felt a stronger curiosity,—a snake-bird, or water-turkey, sitting in a willow shrub at the further end of the bay. "Pull me as near it as it will let us come," I said. "I want to see as much of it as possible." At every rod or two I stopped the boat and put up my glasses, till we were within perhaps sixty feet of the bird. Then it took wing, but instead of flying away went sweeping about us. On getting round to the willows again it made as if it would alight, uttering at the same time some faint ejaculations, like "ah! ah! ah!" but it kept on for a second sweep of the circle. Then it perched in its old place, but faced us a little less directly, so that I could see the beautiful silver tracery of its wings, like the finest of embroidery, as I thought. After we had eyed it for some minutes we suddenly perceived a second bird, ten feet or so from 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 the bird showed against the sky, I could think of nothing but an animated sign of addition. A better man—the Emperor Constantine, shall we say?—might have seen in it a nobler symbol.

While we were loitering down the river, later in the afternoon, an eagle made its appearance far overhead, the first one of the day. The boy, for some reason, refused to believe that it was an eagle. Nothing but a sight 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 pretty strong mark, at no matter what distance.) Presently an osprey, not far from us, with a fish in his claws, set up a violent screaming. "It is because 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." In fact, 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's way of appealing to Heaven against his oppressor. He was safe for that time. Three negroes, shad-fishers, were just beyond us (we had seen them there in the morning, wading about the river setting their nets), and at the sight of them and of us, I have no doubt, the eagle turned away. The boy was not peculiar in his notion about the osprey's scream. Some one else 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 to all you hear, and believe it—after you have verified it for yourself.

It was while we were discussing this question, I think, that the boy opened his heart to me about my methods of study. He had looked through the 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 fun just to look at birds in the way you do!" I liked the turn of his phrase. It seemed to say, "Yes, I begin to see through it. We are in the same boat. This that you call study is only another kind of sport." I could have shaken hands with him but that he had the oars. Who does not love to be flattered by an ingenuous boy?

All in all, the day had been one to be remembered. In addition to the birds already named—three of them new to me—we had seen great blue herons, little blue herons, Louisiana herons, night herons, cormorants, pied-billed grebes, kingfishers, red-winged blackbirds, boat-tailed grackles, 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 tameness and their ridiculous outcries, kept us amused whenever there was nothing else to absorb our attention. The prairie lands through which the river meanders proved to be surprisingly dry and passable (the water being unusually low, the boy said), with many cattle pastured upon them. Here we found the savanna sparrows; here, too, the meadow larks were singing.

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

The next morning I took the steamer down the river to Blue Spring, a distance of some thirty miles, on my way back to New Smyrna, to a place where there were accessible woods, a beach, and, not least, a daily sea breeze. The river in that part of its course is comfortably narrow,—a great advantage,—winding through cypress swamps, hammock woods, stretches of prairie, and in one place a pine barren; an interesting and in many ways beautiful country, but so unwholesome looking as to lose much of its attractiveness. Three or four large alligators lay sunning themselves in the most obliging manner upon the banks, here one and there one, to the vociferous delight of the passengers, who ran from one side 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. Each appeared 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 big for the river at some of the sharper turns—had come to seem a commonplace event. Herons in the usual variety were present, with ospreys, an eagle, kingfishers, ground doves, Carolina doves, blackbirds (red-wings and boat-tails), tree swallows, purple martins, and a single wild turkey, the first one I had ever seen. It was near the bank of the river, on a bushy prairie, fully exposed, and crouched as the steamer passed. For a Massachusetts ornithologist the mere sight of such a bird was enough to make a pretty good Thanksgiving Day. Blue yellow-backed warblers were singing here and there, and I retain a particular remembrance of one bluebird that warbled to us from the pine-woods. The captain told me, somewhat to my surprise, that he had seen two flocks of paroquets during the winter (they had been very abundant along the river within his time, he said), but for me there was no such fortune. One bird, soaring in company with a buzzard at a most extraordinary height straight over the river, greatly excited my curiosity. The captain declared that it must be a great blue heron; but he had never seen one thus 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 that it may have been a sandhill crane, a bird which is said to have such a habit.

As I left the boat I had a little experience of the seamy side of Southern travel; nothing to be angry about, perhaps, but annoying, nevertheless, on a hot day. I surrendered my check to the purser of the boat, 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. We had missed the noon train, with which we were advertised to connect, by so many hours that I had ceased to think about it. Finally, a negro, one of several who were fishing thereabouts, advised me to go "up to the house," which he pointed out behind some woods, and see the agent. This I 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 train arrived, as it probably would do some hours later, that I had a trunk at the landing. Otherwise the train would not run down to the river, and my baggage would lie there till Monday. He would go down presently and put it under cover. Happily, he fulfilled his promise, for it was already beginning to thunder, and soon it rained in torrents, with a cold wind that 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 have been, had not the tedium of it been relieved by the presence of a newly married couple, whose honeymoon was just then at the full. Their delight in each other was exuberant, effervescent, beatific,—what shall I say?—quite beyond veiling or restraint. At first I bestowed upon them sidewise and cornerwise glances only, hiding bashfully behind my spectacles, as it were, and pretending to see nothing; but I soon perceived that I was to them of no more consequence than a fly on the wall. If they saw me, which sometimes seemed doubtful,—for love is blind,—they evidently thought me too sensible, or too old, to mind a little billing and cooing. And they were right in their opinion. What was I in Florida for, if not for the study of natural history? And truly, I have seldom seen, even among birds, a pair less sophisticated, less cabined and confined by that disastrous knowledge of good and evil which is commonly understood to have resulted from the eating of forbidden fruit, and which among prudish people goes by the name of modesty. It was refreshing. Charles Lamb himself would have enjoyed it, and, I should hope, would have added some qualifying footnotes to a certain unamiable essay of his concerning the behavior of married people.



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD.

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

The road goes abruptly downhill to the railway track, first between deep red gulches, and then between rows of negro cabins, each with its garden of rosebushes, now (early April) in full bloom. The deep sides of the gulches were draped with pendent lantana branches full of purple flowers, or, more beautiful still, with a profusion of fragrant white honeysuckle. On the roadside, between the wheel-track and the gulch, grew brilliant Mexican poppies, with Venus's looking-glass, yellow oxalis, and beds of blackberry vines. The woods of which my informant had spoken lay a little beyond the railway, on the right hand of the road, just as it began another ascent. I entered them at once, and after a 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-leaved pines, came out into the road again a quarter of a mile farther up the hill. They were the fairest of woods to stroll in, it seemed to me, with paths enough, and not too many, and good enough, but not too good; that is to say, they were footpaths, not roads, though afterwards, on a Sunday afternoon, I met two young fellows riding through them on bicycles. The wood was delightful, also, after my two months in eastern Florida, for lying on a slope, and for having an undergrowth of loose shrubbery instead of a jungle of scrub oak and saw palmetto. Blue jays and crested flycatchers were doing their best to outscream one another,—with the odds in favor of the flycatchers,—and a few smaller birds were singing, especially two or three summer tanagers, as many yellow-throated warblers, and a ruby-crowned kinglet. In one part of the wood, near what I took to be an old city reservoir, I came upon a single white-throated sparrow and a humming-bird,—the latter a strangely uncommon sight in Tallahassee, where, of all the places I have ever seen, it ought to find itself in clover. Here, too, were a pair of Carolina wrens, just now in search of a building-site, and conducting themselves exactly in the manner of bluebirds intent on such business; peeping into every hole that offered itself, and then, after the briefest interchange of opinion,—unfavorable on the female's part, if we may guess,—concluding to look a little farther.

As I struck the road again, a man came along on horseback, and we fell into conversation about the country. "A lovely country," he called it, and I agreed with him. He inquired where I was from, and I mentioned that I had lately been in southern Florida, and found this region a strong contrast. "Yes," he returned; and, pointing to the grass, he remarked upon the richness of the soil. "This yere land would fertilize that," he said, speaking of southern Florida. "I shouldn't wonder," said I. I meant to be understood as concurring in his opinion, but such a qualified, Yankeefied assent seemed to him no assent at all. "Oh, it will, it will!" he responded, as if the point were one about which I must on no account be left unconvinced. He told me that the fine house at which I had looked, a little distance back, through a long vista of trees, was the residence of Captain H., who owned all the land along the road for a good distance. I inquired how far the road was pretty, like this. "For forty miles," he said. That was farther than I was ready to walk, and coming soon to the top of the hill, or, more exactly, of the plateau, I stopped in the shade of a china-tree, and looked at the pleasing prospect. Behind me was a plantation of young pear-trees, and before me, among the hills northward, lay broad, cultivated slopes, dotted here and there with cabins and tall, solitary trees. On the nearer slope, perhaps a sixteenth of a mile away, a negro was ploughing, with a single ox harnessed in some primitive manner,—with pieces of wood, for the most part, as well as I could make out through an opera-glass. The soil offered the least possible hindrance, and both he and the ox seemed to be having a literal "walk-over." Beyond him—a full half-mile away, perhaps—another man was ploughing with a mule; and in another direction a third was doing likewise, with a woman following in his wake. A colored boy of seventeen—I guessed his age at twenty-three—came up the road in a cart, and I stopped him to inquire about the crops and other matters. The land in front of me was planted with cotton, he said; and the men ploughing in the distance were getting ready to plant the same. They hired the land and the cabins of Captain H., 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 about one thing and another. He had been south as far as the Indian River country, but was glad to be back again in Tallahassee, where he was born. I asked him about the road, how far it went. "They tell me it goes smack to St. Augustine," he replied; "I ain't tried it." It was an unlikely story, it seemed to me, but I was assured afterward that he was right; that the road actually runs across the country from Tallahassee to St. Augustine, a distance of about two hundred miles. With company of my own choosing, and in cooler weather, I thought I should like to walk its whole length.[1] My young man was in no haste. With the reins (made of rope, after a fashion much followed in Florida) lying on the forward axle 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 to look upon as characteristic of Tallahassee negroes,—a gentleness of speech, and a kindly, deferential air, neither forward nor servile, such as 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 the other on the strength of what is here written. After this sketch was first printed—in The Atlantic Monthly—a gentleman who ought to know whereof he speaks sent me word that my informants were all of them wrong—that the road does not run to St. Augustine. For myself, I assert nothing. As my colored boy said, "I ain't tried it."]

In that respect he was like another boy of about his own age, who lived in the cabin directly before us, but whom I did not see till I had been several times over the road. Then he happened to be at work near the edge of the field, and I beckoned him to me. He, too, was serious and manly in his bearing, and showed no disposition to go back to his hoe till I broke off the interview,—as if it were a point of good manners with him to await my pleasure. Yes, the plantation was a good one and easily cultivated, he said, in response to some remark of my own. There were five in the family, and they all worked. "We are all big enough to eat," he added, quite simply. He had never been North, but had lately declined the offer of a gentleman who wished to take him there,—him and "another fellow." He once went to Jacksonville, but couldn't stay. "You can get along without your father pretty well, but it's another thing to do without your mother." He never meant to leave home again as long as his mother lived; which was likely to be for some years, I thought, if she were still able to do her part in the cotton-field. As a general thing, the colored tenants of the cabins made out pretty well, he believed, unless something happened to the crops. As for the old servants of the H. family, they didn't have to work,—they were provided for; Captain H.'s father "left it so in his testimonial." I spoke of the purple martins which were flying back and forth over the field with many cheerful noises, and of the calabashes that hung from a tall pole in one corner of the cabin yard, for their accommodation. On my way South, I told him, I had noticed these dangling long-necked squashes everywhere, and had wondered what they were for. I had found out since that they were the colored man's martin-boxes, and was glad to see the people so fond of the birds. "Yes," he said, "there's no danger of hawks carrying off the chickens as long as the martins are round."

Twice afterward, as I went up the road, I found him ploughing between the cotton rows; but he was too far away to be accosted without shouting, 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, the hens and chickens following. No doubt they thought the work was all for their benefit. Farther away, a man and two women were hoeing. The family deserved to prosper, I said to myself, as I lay under a big magnolia-tree (just beginning to open its large white flowers) and idly enjoyed the scene. And it was just here, by the bye, that I solved an interesting etymological puzzle, to wit, the origin and precise meaning of the word "baygall,"—a word which the visitor often hears upon the lips of Florida people. An old hunter in Smyrna, when I questioned him about it, told me that it meant a swampy piece of wood, and took its origin, he had always supposed, from the fact that bay-trees and gall-bushes commonly grew in such places. A Tallahassee gentleman agreed with this explanation, and promised to bring home some gall-berries the next time he came across any, that I might see what they were; but the berries were never forthcoming, and I was none the wiser, till, on one of my last trips up the St. Augustine road, as I stood under the large magnolia just mentioned, a colored man came along, hat in hand, and a bag 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 scratched his head, if that useful organ had been accessible. He hesitated; but it isn't like an uneducated man to confess ignorance. "'Cause it's a desert," 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 looked quite like a flower garden, it was so full of bright dresses coming home from church. "Now'-days folks git religion so easy!" one young woman said to another, as they passed me. She was a conservative. I did not join the procession, but on other days I talked, first and last, with a good many of the people; from the preacher, who carried a handsome cane and made me a still handsomer bow, down to a serious little fellow of six 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 family stove, and had set it down for a minute's rest. I said something about his burden, and as I went on he called after me: "What kind of birds are you hunting for? Ricebirds?" I answered that I was looking for birds of all sorts. Had he seen any ricebirds lately? Yes, he said; he started a flock 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 had heard the redwing called the ricebird. But how did the boy know me for a bird-gazer? That was a mystery. It came over me all at once that possibly I had become better known in the community than I had in the least suspected; and then I remembered my field-glass. That, as I could not help being aware, was an object of continual attention. Every day I saw people, old and young, black and white, looking at it with undisguised curiosity. Often they passed audible comments upon it among themselves. "How far can you see through the spyglass?" a bolder spirit would now and then venture to ask; and once, on the railway track out in the pine lands, a barefooted, happy-faced urchin made a guess that was really admirable for its ingenuity. "Looks like you're goin' over inspectin' the wire," he remarked. On rare occasions, as an act of special grace, I offered such an inquirer a peep through the magic lenses,—an experiment that never failed to elicit exclamations of wonder. Things were so near! And the observer looked comically incredulous, on putting down the glass, to find how suddenly the landscape had slipped away again. More than one colored man wanted to know 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 solitary wanderings 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 boys do.]

Here, however, there could be no thought of such a contingency. Here were no vagabonds (one inoffensive Yankee specimen excepted), but hard-working people going into the city or out again, each on his own lawful business. Scarcely one of them, man or woman, but greeted me kindly. One, a white man on horseback, invited, and even urged me, to mount his horse, and let him walk a piece. I must be fatigued, he was sure,—how could I help it?—and he would as soon walk as not. Finding me obstinate, he walked his horse at my side, chatting about the country, the trees, and the crops. He it was who called my particular attention 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 an hour later to a middle-aged colored man. Yes, he said, the blackberries were plenty enough and sweet enough; but, for his part, he didn't trouble them a great deal. The vines (and he pointed at them, fringing the roadside indefinitely) were great places for rattlesnakes. He liked the berries, but he liked somebody else to pick them. He was awfully afraid of snakes; they were so dangerous. "Yes, sir" (this in answer to an inquiry), "there are plenty of rattlesnakes here clean up to Christmas." I liked him for his frank avowal of cowardice, and still more for his quiet bearing. He remembered the days of slavery,—"before the surrender," as the current Southern phrase is,—and his face beamed when I spoke of my joy in thinking that his people were free, no matter what might befall them. He, too, raised cotton on hired land, and was bringing up his children—there were eight of them, he said—to habits of industry.

My second stroll toward St. Augustine carried me perhaps three miles,—say one sixty-sixth of the entire distance,—and none of my subsequent excursions took me any farther; and having just now commended a negro for his candor, I am moved to acknowledge that, between the sand underfoot and the sun overhead, I found the six miles, which I spent at least four hours in accomplishing, more fatiguing than twice that distance would have been over New Hampshire hills. If I were to settle in that country, I should probably fall into the way of riding more, and walking less. I remember thinking how comfortable a certain ponderous black mammy looked, whom I met on one of these same sunny and sandy tramps. She sat in the very middle of a tipcart, with an old and truly picturesque man's hat on her head (quite in the fashion, feminine readers will notice), driving a one-horned ox with a pair of clothes-line reins. She was traveling slowly, just as I like to travel; and, as I say, I was impressed by her comfortable appearance. Why would not 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 Cherokee rosebush, one of the most beautiful of plants,—white, fragrant, single roses (real roses) set in the midst of the handsomest of glossy green leaves. I was delighted to find it still in flower. A hundred miles farther south I had seen it finishing its season a full month earlier. I stopped, of course, to pluck a blossom. At that moment a female redbird flew out of the bush. Her mate was beside her instantly, and a nameless something in their manner told me they were trying to keep a secret. The nest, built mainly of pine needles and other leaves, was in the middle of the bush, a foot or two from the grass, and contained two bluish or greenish eggs thickly spattered with dark brown. I meant to look into it again (the owners seemed to have no great objection), but somehow missed it every time I passed. From that point, as far as I went, the road was lined with Cherokee roses,—not continuously, but with short intermissions; and from the number of redbirds seen, almost invariably in pairs, I feel safe in saying that the nest I had found was probably one of fifteen or twenty scattered along the wayside. How gloriously the birds sang! It was their day for singing. I was ready to christen the road anew,—Redbird Road.

But the redbirds, many and conspicuous as they were, had no monopoly of the road or of the day. House wrens were equally numerous and equally at home, though they sang more out of sight. Red-eyed chewinks, still far from 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 have half recognized an old acquaintance. A bunch of quails ran across the road a little in front of me, and in another place fifteen or twenty red-winged blackbirds (not a red wing among them) sat gossiping in a treetop. Elsewhere, even later than this (it was now April 7), I saw flocks, every bird of which wore shoulder-straps,—like the traditional militia company, all officers. They did not gossip, of course (it is the male that sports the red), but they made a lively noise.

As for the mocking-birds, they were at the front here, as they were everywhere. During my fortnight in Tallahassee there were never many consecutive five minutes of daylight in which, if I stopped to listen, I could not hear at least one mocker. Oftener two or three were singing at once in as many different directions. And, speaking of them, I must speak also of their more northern cousin. From the day I entered Florida I had been saying that the mocking-bird, save for his occasional mimicry of other birds, sang so exactly like the thrasher that I did not believe I could tell one from the other. Now, however, on this St. Augustine road, 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 of coarseness in the voice, perhaps; a tendency to force the tone, as we say of human singers,—a something, at all events, and the longer I hearkened, the more confident I felt that the bird was a thrasher. And so it was,—the first one I had heard in Florida, although I had seen many. Probably the two birds have peculiarities of voice and method that, with longer familiarity on the listener's part, would render them easily distinguishable. On general principles, I must believe that to be true of all birds. But the experience just described is not to be taken as proving that I have any such familiarity. Within a week afterward, while walking along the railway, I came upon a thrasher and a mocking-bird singing side by side; the mocker upon a telegraph pole, and the 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 and listened; and if my life had depended on my seeing how one song differed from the other, I could not have done it. With my eyes shut, the birds might have changed places,—if they could have done it quickly enough,—and I should have been none the wiser.

As I have said, I followed the road over the nearly level plateau for what I guessed to be about three miles. Then I found myself in a bit of hollow that seemed made for a stopping-place, with a plantation road running off to the right, and a hillside cornfield of many acres on the left. In the field were a few tall dead trees. At the tip of one sat a sparrow-hawk, and to the trunk of another clung a red-bellied woodpecker, who, with characteristic foolishness, sat beside his hole calling persistently, and then, as if determined to publish what other birds so carefully conceal, went inside, thrust out his head, and resumed his clatter. Here, too, were a pair of bluebirds, noticeable for their rarity, and for the wonderful color—a shade deeper than is ever seen at the North, I think—of the male's blue coat. In a small thicket in the hollow beside the road were noisy white-eyed vireos, a ruby-crowned kinglet,—a tiny thing that within a month would be singing in Canada, or beyond,—an unseen wood pewee, and (also unseen) a hermit thrush, one of perhaps twenty solitary individuals that I found scattered about the woods in the course of my journeyings. Not one of them sang a note. Probably they did not know that there was a Yankee in Florida who—in some moods, at least—would have given more for a dozen bars of hermit thrush music than for a day and a night of the mocking-bird's medley. Not that I mean to disparage the great Southern performer; as a vocalist he is so far beyond the hermit thrush as to render a comparison absurd; but what I love is a singer, a voice to reach the soul. An old Tallahassee negro, near the "white Norman school,"—so he called it,—hit off the mocking-bird pretty well. I had called his attention to one singing in an adjacent dooryard. "Yes," he said, "I love to hear 'em. They's very amusin', very amusin'." My own feeling can hardly be a prejudice, conscious or unconscious, in favor of what 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 the wood thrush is one of kind, not of degree; and I have heard music of the mocking-bird's kind (the thrasher's, that is to say) as long as I have heard music at all. The question is one of taste, it is true; but it is not a question of familiarity or favoritism. All praise to the mocker and the thrasher! May their tribe increase! But if we are to indulge in comparisons, give me the wood thrush, the hermit, and the veery; with tones that the mocking-bird can never imitate, and a simplicity which the Fates—the wise Fates, who will have variety—have put forever beyond his appreciation and his reach.

Florida as I saw it (let the qualification be noted) is no more a land of flowers than New England. In some respects, indeed, it is less so. Flowering shrubs and climbers there are in abundance. I rode in the cars through miles on miles of flowering dogwood and pink azalea. Here, on this Tallahassee road, were miles of Cherokee roses, with plenty of the climbing scarlet honeysuckle (beloved of humming-birds, although I saw none here), and nearer the city, as already described, masses of lantana and white honeysuckle. In more than one place pink double roses (vagrants from cultivated grounds, no doubt) offered buds and blooms to all who would have them. The cross-vine (Bignonia), less freehanded, hung its showy bells out of reach in the treetops. Thorn-bushes of several kinds were in flower (a puzzling lot), and the treelike blueberry (Vaccinium arboreum), loaded with its large, flaring white corollas, was a real spectacle of beauty. Here, likewise, I found one tiny crab-apple shrub, with a few blossoms, exquisitely tinted with rose-color, and most exquisitely fragrant. But the New Englander, when he 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 trailing arbutus, hepaticas, bloodroot, anemones, saxifrage, violets, dogtooth violets, spring beauties, "cowslips," buttercups, corydalis, columbine, Dutchman's breeches, clintonia, five-finger, and all the rest of that bright and fragrant host which, ever since he can remember, he has seen covering his native hills and valleys with the return of May.

It is not meant, of course, that plants like these are wholly wanting in Florida. I remember an abundance of violets, blue and white, especially in the flat-woods, where also I often found pretty butterworts of two or three sorts. The smaller blue ones took very acceptably the place of hepaticas, and indeed I heard them called by that name. But, as compared with what one sees in New England, such "ground flowers," flowers which it seems perfectly natural to pluck for a nosegay, were very little in evidence. I heard Northern visitors remark the fact again and again. On this pretty road out of Tallahassee—itself a city of flower gardens—I can recall nothing of the kind except half a dozen strawberry blossoms, and the oxalis and specularia before mentioned. Probably the round-leaved houstonia grew here, as it did everywhere, in small scattered patches. If there were violets as well, I can only say I have forgotten them.

Be it added, however, that at the time I did not miss them. In a garden of roses one does not begin by sighing for mignonette and lilies of the valley. Violets or no violets, there was no lack of beauty. The Southern highway surveyor, if such a personage exists, is evidently not consumed by that distressing puritanical passion for "slicking up things" which too often makes of his Northern brother something scarcely better than a public nuisance. At the South you will not find a woman cultivating with pain a few exotics beside the front door, while her husband is mowing and burning the far more attractive wild garden that nature has planted just outside the fence. The St. Augustine road, at any rate, after climbing the hill and getting beyond the wood, runs between natural hedges,—trees, vines, and shrubs carelessly intermingled,—not dense enough to conceal the prospect or shut out the breeze ("straight from the Gulf," as the Tallahassean is careful to inform you), but sufficient to afford much welcome protection from the sun. Here it was good to find the sassafras growing side by side with the persimmon, although when, for old acquaintance' sake, I put a leaf into my mouth I was half glad to 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 that certain plants—the sumach and the Virginia creeper, to mention no others—were less at home here than a thousand miles farther north. With the wild-cherry trees, I was obliged to confess, the case was reversed. I had seen larger ones in Massachusetts, perhaps, but none that looked half so clean and thrifty. In truth, their appearance was a puzzle, rum-cherry trees as by all tokens they undoubtedly were, till of a sudden it flashed upon me that there were no caterpillars' nests in them! Then I ceased to wonder at their odd look. It spoke well for my botanical acumen that I had recognized them at all.

Before I had been a week in Tallahassee I found that, without forethought or plan, I had dropped into the habit (and how pleasant it is to think that some good habits can be dropped into!) of making the St. Augustine road my after-dinner sauntering-place. The morning was for a walk: to Lake Bradford, perhaps, in search of a mythical ivory-billed woodpecker, or westward on the railway for a few miles, with a view to rare migratory warblers. But in the afternoon I did not walk,—I loitered; and though I still minded the birds and flowers, I for the most 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 an hour or two on the plateau strolled back again, facing the sunset through a vista of moss-covered live-oaks and sweet gums. Those quiet, incurious hours are among the pleasantest of all my Florida memories. A cuckoo 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 three night-hawks would be sweeping back and forth high above the valley; or a marsh hawk would be quartering over the big oatfield. The martins would be cackling, in any event, and the kingbirds practicing their aerial mock somersaults; and the mocking-bird would be singing, and the redbird whistling. On the western slope, just below the oatfield, the Northern woman who owned the pretty cottage there (the only one on the road) was sure to be at work among her flowers. A laughing colored boy who did chores for her (without injury to his health, I could warrant) told me that she was a Northerner. But I knew it already; I needed no witness but her beds of petunias. In the valley, as I crossed the railroad track, a loggerhead shrike sat, almost of course, on the telegraph wire in dignified silence; and just beyond, among the cabins, I had my choice of mocking-birds and orchard orioles. And so, admiring the roses and the pomegranates, the lantanas and the honeysuckles, or chatting with some dusky fellow-pilgrim, I mounted the hill to the city, and likely as not saw before me a red-headed woodpecker sitting on the roof of the State House, calling attention to his patriotic self—in his tri-colored dress—by occasional vigorous tattoos on the tinned ridgepole. I never saw him there without gladness. The legislature had begun its session in an economical mood,—as is more or less the habit of legislatures, I believe,—and was even considering a proposition to reduce the salary and mileage of its members. Under such circumstances, it ought not to have been a matter of surprise, perhaps, that no flag floated from the cupola of the capitol. The people's money should not be wasted. And possibly I should never have remarked the omission but for a certain curiosity, natural, if not inevitable, on the part of a Northern visitor, as to the real feeling of the South toward the national government. Day after day I had seen a portly gentleman—with an air, or with airs, as the spectator might choose to express it—going in and out of the State House gate, dressed ostentatiously in a suit of Confederate gray. He had worn nothing else since the war, I was told. But of course the State of Florida was not to be judged by the freak of one man, and he only a member of the "third house." And even when I went into the governor's office, and saw the original "ordinance of secession" hanging in a conspicuous place on the wall, as if it were an heirloom to be proud of, I felt no stirring of sectional animosity, thorough-bred Massachusetts Yankee and old-fashioned abolitionist as I am. A brave people 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 upon it as a happy coincidence when, one morning, I heard the familiar cry of the red-headed woodpecker, for the first time in Florida, and looked up to see him flying the national colors from the ridgepole of the State House. I did not break out with "Three cheers for the red, white, and blue!" I am naturally undemonstrative; but I said to myself that Melanerpes erythrocephalus was a very handsome bird.