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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Florida Sketch-Book, by Bradford Torrey
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Florida Sketch-Book
+
+Author: Bradford Torrey
+
+Release Date: January 21, 2004 [EBook #10760]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sandra Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+and the Internet Archive; University of Florida
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: The original scan for text page 142 is missing
+This is noted where it occurs in the text.]
+
+
+
+
+A FLORIDA SKETCH BOOK
+
+
+
+By
+
+BRADFORD TORREY
+
+
+
+
+Books by Mr. Torrey.
+
+BIRDS IN THE BUSH.
+A RAMBLER'S LEASE.
+THE FOOT-PATH WAY.
+A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK.
+
+
+
+1894
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+IN THE FLAT-WOODS
+
+BESIDE THE MARSH
+
+ON THE BEACH AT DAYTONA
+
+ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH
+
+A MORNING AT THE OLD SUGAR MILL
+
+ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S
+
+ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD
+
+ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLANTATION
+
+A FLORIDA SHRINE
+
+WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE
+
+
+
+
+
+A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE FLAT-WOODS.
+
+
+In approaching Jacksonville by rail, the traveler rides hour after
+hour through seemingly endless pine barrens, otherwise known as low
+pine-woods and flat-woods, till he wearies of the sight. It would be
+hard, he thinks, to imagine a region more unwholesome looking and
+uninteresting, more poverty-stricken and God-forsaken, in its entire
+aspect. Surely, men who would risk life in behalf of such a country
+deserved to win their cause.
+
+Monotonous as the flat-woods were, however, and malarious as they
+looked,--arid wastes and stretches of stagnant water flying past the car
+window in perpetual alternation, I was impatient to get into them. They
+were a world the like of which I had never seen; and wherever I went in
+eastern Florida, I made it one of my earliest concerns to seek them out.
+
+My first impression was one of disappointment, or perhaps I should
+rather say, of bewilderment. In fact, I returned from my first visit to
+the flat-woods under the delusion that I had not been into them at all.
+This was at St. Augustine, whither I had gone after a night only in
+Jacksonville. I looked about the quaint little city, of course, and went
+to the South Beach, on St. Anastasia Island; then I wished to see the
+pine lands. They were to be found, I was told, on the other side of the
+San Sebastian. The sun was hot (or so it seemed to a man fresh from the
+rigors of a New England winter), and the sand was deep; but I sauntered
+through New Augustine, and pushed on up the road toward Moultrie (I
+believe it was), till the last houses were passed and I came to the edge
+of the pine-woods. Here, presently, the roads began to fork in a very
+confusing manner. The first man I met--a kindly cracker--cautioned me
+against getting lost; but I had no thought of taking the slightest risk
+of that kind. I was not going to _explore_ the woods, but only to enter
+them, sit down, look about me, and listen. The difficulty was to get
+into them. As I advanced, they receded. It was still only the beginning
+of a wood; the trees far apart and comparatively small, the ground
+covered thickly with saw palmetto, interspersed here and there with
+patches of brown grass or sedge.
+
+In many places the roads were under water, and as I seemed to be making
+little progress, I pretty soon sat down in a pleasantly shaded spot.
+Wagons came along at intervals, all going toward the city, most of them
+with loads of wood; ridiculously small loads, such as a Yankee boy would
+put upon a wheelbarrow. "A fine day," said I to the driver of such a
+cart. "Yes, sir," he answered, "it's a _pretty_ day." He spoke with an
+emphasis which seemed to imply that he accepted my remark as well meant,
+but hardly adequate to the occasion. Perhaps, if the day had been a few
+shades brighter, he would have called it "handsome," or even "good
+looking." Expressions of this kind, however, are matters of local or
+individual taste, and as such are not to be disputed about. Thus, a man
+stopped me in Tallahassee to inquire what time it was. I told him, and
+he said, "Ah, a little sooner than I thought." And why not "sooner" as
+well as "earlier"? But when, on the same road, two white girls in an
+ox-cart hailed me with the question, "What time 't is?" I thought the
+interrogative idiom a little queer; almost as queer, shall we say, as
+"How do you do?" may have sounded to the first man who heard it,--if the
+reader is able to imagine such a person.
+
+Meanwhile, let the morning be "fine" or "pretty," it was all one to the
+birds. The woods were vocal with the cackling of robins, the warble of
+bluebirds, and the trills of pine warblers. Flickers were shouting--or
+laughing, if one pleased to hear it so--with true flickerish prolixity,
+and a single downy woodpecker called sharply again and again. A
+mocking-bird near me (there is _always_ a mocking-bird near you, in
+Florida) added his voice for a time, but soon relapsed into silence. The
+fact was characteristic; for, wherever I went, I found it true that the
+mocker grew less musical as the place grew wilder. By instinct he is a
+public performer, he demands an audience; and it is only in cities, like
+St. Augustine and Tallahassee, that he is heard at his freest and best.
+A loggerhead shrike--now close at my elbow, now farther away--was
+practicing his extensive vocabulary with perseverance, if not with
+enthusiasm. Like his relative the "great northern," though perhaps in a
+less degree, the loggerhead is commonly at an extreme, either loquacious
+or dumb; as if he could not let his moderation be known unto any man.
+Sometimes I fancied him possessed with an insane ambition to match the
+mocking-bird in song as well as in personal appearance. If so, it is not
+surprising that he should be subject to fits of discouragement and
+silence. Aiming at the sun, though a good and virtuous exercise, as we
+have all heard, is apt to prove dispiriting to sensible marksmen. Crows
+(fish crows, in all probability, but at the time I did not know it)
+uttered strange, hoarse, flat-sounding caws. Everv bird of them must
+have been born without a palate, it seemed to me. White-eyed chewinks
+were at home in the dense palmetto scrub, whence they announced
+themselves unmistakably by sharp whistles. Now and then one of them
+mounted a leaf, and allowed me to see his pale yellow iris. Except for
+this mark, recognizable almost as far as the bird could be distinguished
+at all, he looked exactly like our common New England towhee. Somewhere
+behind me was a kingfisher's rattle, and from a savanna in the same
+direction came the songs of meadow larks; familiar, but with something
+unfamiliar about them at the same time, unless my ears deceived me.
+
+More interesting than any of the birds yet named, because more strictly
+characteristic of the place, as well as more strictly new to me, were
+the brown-headed nuthatches. I was on the watch for them: they were one
+of the three novelties which I knew were to be found in the pine lands,
+and nowhere else,--the other two being the red-cockaded woodpecker and
+the pine-wood sparrow; and being thus on the lookout, I did not expect
+to be taken by surprise, if such a paradox (it is nothing worse) maybe
+allowed to pass. But when I heard them twittering in the distance, as I
+did almost immediately, I had no suspicion of what they were. The voice
+had nothing of that nasal quality, that Yankee twang, as some people
+would call it, which I had always associated with the nuthatch family.
+On the contrary, it was decidedly finchlike,--so much so that some of
+the notes, taken by themselves, would have been ascribed without
+hesitation to the goldfinch or the pine finch, had I heard them in New
+England; and even as things were, I was more than once deceived for the
+moment. As for the birds themselves, they were evidently a cheerful and
+thrifty race, much more numerous than the red-cockaded woodpeckers, and
+much less easily overlooked than the pine-wood sparrows. I seldom
+entered the flat-woods anywhere without finding them. They seek their
+food largely about the leafy ends of the pine branches, resembling the
+Canadian nuthatches in this respect, so that it is only on rare
+occasions that one sees them creeping about the trunks or larger limbs.
+Unlike their two Northern relatives, they are eminently social, often
+traveling in small flocks, even in the breeding season, and keeping up
+an almost incessant chorus of shrill twitters as they flit hither and
+thither through the woods. The first one to come near me was full of
+inquisitiveness; he flew back and forth past my head, exactly as
+chickadees do in a similar mood, and once seemed almost ready to alight
+on my hat. "Let us have a look at this stranger," he appeared to be
+saying. Possibly his nest was not far off, but I made no search for it.
+Afterwards I found two nests, one in a low stump, and one in the trunk
+of a pine, fifteen or twenty feet from the ground. Both of them
+contained young ones (March 31 and April 2), as I knew by the continual
+goings-in-and-out of the fathers and mothers. In dress the brown-head is
+dingy, with little or nothing of the neat and attractive appearance of
+our New England nuthatches.
+
+In this pine-wood on the road to Moultrie I found no sign of the new
+woodpecker or the new sparrow. Nor was I greatly disappointed. The place
+itself was a sufficient novelty,--the place and the summer weather. The
+pines murmured overhead, and the palmettos rustled all about. Now a
+butterfly fluttered past me, and now a dragonfly. More than one little
+flock of tree swallows went over the wood, and once a pair of phoebes
+amused me by an uncommonly pretty lover's quarrel. Truly it was a
+pleasant hour. In the midst of it there came along a man in a cart, with
+a load of wood. We exchanged the time of day, and I remarked upon the
+smallness of his load. Yes, he said; but it was a pretty heavy load to
+drag seven or eight miles over such roads. Possibly he understood me as
+implying that he seemed to be in rather small business, although I had
+no such purpose, for he went on to say: "In 1861, when this beautiful
+war broke out between our countries, my father owned niggers. We didn't
+have to do _this_. But I don't complain. If I hadn't got a bullet in me,
+I should do pretty well."
+
+"Then you were in the war?" I said.
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, sir! I was in the Confederate service. Yes, sir, I'm a
+Southerner to the backbone. My grandfather was a ----" (I missed the
+patronymic), "and commanded St. Augustine."
+
+The name had a foreign sound, and the man's complexion was swarthy, and
+in all simplicity I asked if he was a Minorcan. I might as well have
+touched a lighted match to powder. His eyes flashed, and he came round
+the tail of the cart, gesticulating with his stick.
+
+"Minorcan!" he broke out. "Spain and the island of Minorca are two
+places, ain't they?" I admitted meekly that they were.
+
+"You are English, ain't you?" he went on. "You are English,--Yankee
+born,--ain't you?"
+
+I owned it.
+
+"Well, I'm Spanish. That ain't Minorcan. My grandfather was a ----, and
+commanded St. Augustine. He couldn't have done that if he had been
+Minorcan."
+
+By this time he was quieting down a bit. His father remembered the
+Indian war. The son had heard him tell about it.
+
+"Those were dangerous times," he remarked. "You couldn't have been
+standing out here in the woods then."
+
+"There is no danger here now, is there?" said I.
+
+"No, no, not now." But as he drove along he turned to say that _he_
+wasn't afraid of _any_ thing; he wasn't that kind of a man. Then, with a
+final turn, he added, what I could not dispute, "A man's life is always
+in danger."
+
+After he was gone, I regretted that I had offered no apology for my
+unintentionally offensive question; but I was so taken by surprise, and
+so much interested in the man as a specimen, that I quite forgot my
+manners till it was too late. One thing I learned: that it is not
+prudent, in these days, to judge a Southern man's blood, in either sense
+of the word, by his dress or occupation. This man had brought seven or
+eight miles a load of wood that might possibly be worth seventy-five
+cents (I questioned the owner of what looked like just such a load
+afterward, and found his asking price half a dollar), and for clothing
+had on a pair of trousers and a blue cotton shirt, the latter full of
+holes, through which the skin was visible; yet his father was a ---- and
+had "owned niggers."
+
+A still more picturesque figure in this procession of wood-carters was a
+boy of perhaps ten or eleven. He rode his horse, and was barefooted and
+barelegged; but he had a cigarette in his mouth, and to each brown heel
+was fastened an enormous spur. Who was it that infected the world with
+the foolish and disastrous notion that work and play are two different
+things? And was it Emerson, or some other wise man, who said that a boy
+was the true philosopher?
+
+When it came time to think of returning to St. Augustine, for dinner, I
+appreciated my cracker's friendly warning against losing my way; for
+though I had hardly so much as entered the woods, and had taken, as I
+thought, good heed to my steps, I was almost at once in a quandary as to
+my road. There was no occasion for worry,--with the sun out, and my
+general course perfectly plain; but here was a fork in the road, and
+whether to bear to the left or to the right was a simple matter of
+guess-work. I made the best guess I could, and guessed wrong, as was
+apparent after a while, when I found the road under deep water for
+several rods. I objected to wading, and there was no ready way of going
+round, since the oak and palmetto scrub crowded close up to the
+roadside, and just here was all but impenetrable. What was still more
+conclusive, the road was the wrong one, as the inundation proved, and,
+for aught I could tell, might carry me far out of my course. I turned
+back, therefore, under the midday sun, and by good luck a second attempt
+brought me out of the woods very near where I had entered them.
+
+I visited this particular piece of country but once afterward, having in
+the mean time discovered a better place of the same sort along the
+railroad, in the direction of Palatka. There, on a Sunday morning, I
+heard my first pine-wood sparrow. Time and tune could hardly have been
+in truer accord. The hour was of the quietest, the strain was of the
+simplest, and the bird sang as if he were dreaming. For a long time I
+let him go on without attempting to make certain who he was. He seemed
+to be rather far off: if I waited his pleasure, he would perhaps move
+toward me; if I disturbed him, he would probably become silent. So I sat
+on the end of a sleeper and listened. It was not great music. It made me
+think of the swamp sparrow; and the swamp sparrow is far from being a
+great singer. A single prolonged, drawling note (in that respect unlike
+the swamp sparrow, of course), followed by a succession of softer and
+sweeter ones,--that was all, when I came to analyze it; but that is no
+fair description of what I heard. The quality of the song is not there;
+and it was the quality, the feeling, the soul of it, if I may say what I
+mean, that made it, in the true sense of a much-abused word, charming.
+
+There could be little doubt that the bird was a pine-wood sparrow; but
+such things are not to be taken for granted. Once or twice, indeed, the
+thought of some unfamiliar warbler had crossed my mind. At last,
+therefore, as the singer still kept out of sight, I leaped the ditch and
+pushed into the scrub. Happily I had not far to go; he had been much
+nearer than I thought. A small bird flew up before me, and dropped
+almost immediately into a clump of palmetto. I edged toward the spot and
+waited. Then the song began again, this time directly in front of me,
+but still far-away-sounding and dreamy. I find that last word in my
+hasty note penciled at the time, and can think of no other that
+expresses the effect half so well. I looked and looked, and all at once
+there sat the bird on a palmetto leaf. Once again he sang, putting up
+his head. Then he dropped out of sight, and I heard nothing more. I had
+seen only his head and neck,--enough to show him a sparrow, and almost
+of necessity the pine-wood sparrow. No other strange member of the finch
+family was to be looked for in such a place.
+
+On further acquaintance, let me say at once, _Pucaea aestivalis_ proved
+to be a more versatile singer than the performances of my first bird
+would have led me to suppose. He varies his tune freely, but always
+within a pretty narrow compass; as is true, also, of the field sparrow,
+with whom, as I soon came to feel, he has not a little in common. It is
+in musical form only that he suggests the swamp sparrow. In tone and
+spirit, in the qualities of sweetness and expressiveness, he is nearly
+akin to _Spizella pusilla_. One does for the Southern pine barren what
+the other does for the Northern berry pasture. And this is high praise;
+for though in New England we have many singers more brilliant than the
+field sparrow, we have none that are sweeter, and few that in the long
+run give more pleasure to sensitive hearers.
+
+I found the pine-wood sparrow afterward in New Smyrna, Port Orange,
+Sanford, and Tallahassee. So far as I could tell, it was always the same
+bird; but I shot no specimens, and speak with no authority.[1] Living
+always in the pine lands, and haunting the dense undergrowth, it is
+heard a hundred times where it is seen once,--a point greatly in favor
+of its effectiveness as a musician. Mr. Brewster speaks of it as singing
+always from an elevated perch, while the birds that I saw in the act of
+song, a very limited number, were invariably perched low. One that I
+watched in New Smyrna (one of a small chorus, the others being
+invisible) sang for a quarter of an hour from a stake or stump which
+rose perhaps a foot above the dwarf palmetto. It was the same song that
+I had heard in St. Augustine; only the birds here were in a livelier
+mood, and sang _out_ instead of _sotto voce_. The long introductory note
+sounded sometimes as if it were indrawn, and often, if not always, had a
+considerable burr in it. Once in a while the strain was caught up at the
+end and sung over again, after the manner of the field sparrow,--one of
+that bird's prettiest tricks. At other times the song was delivered with
+full voice, and then repeated almost under the singer's breath. This was
+done beautifully in the Port Orange flat-woods, the bird being almost at
+my feet. I had seen him a moment before, and saw him again half a minute
+later, but at that instant he was out of sight in the scrub, and
+seemingly on the ground. This feature of the song, one of its chief
+merits and its most striking peculiarity, is well described by Mr.
+Brewster. "Now," he says, "it has a full, bell-like ring that seems to
+fill the air around; next it is soft and low and inexpressibly tender;
+now it is clear again, but so modulated that the sound seems to come
+from a great distance."[2]
+
+[Footnote 1: Two races of the pine-wood sparrow are recognized by
+ornithologists, _Pucaea aestivalis_ and _P. aestivalis bachmanii_, and
+both of them have been found in Florida; but, if I understand the matter
+right, _Pucaea aestivalis_ is the common and typical Florida bird.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Bulletin on the Nuttall Ornithological Club_, vol. vii. p.
+98.]
+
+Not many other birds, I think (I cannot recall any), habitually vary
+their song in this manner. Other birds sing almost inaudibly at times,
+especially in the autumnal season. Even the brown thrasher, whose
+ordinary performance, is so full-voiced, not to say boisterous, will
+sometimes soliloquize, or seem to soliloquize, in the faintest of
+undertones. The formless autumnal warble of the song sparrow is familiar
+to every one. And in this connection I remember, and am not likely ever
+to forget, a winter wren who favored me with what I thought the most
+bewitching bit of vocalism to which I had ever listened. He was in the
+bushes close at my side, in the Franconia Notch, and delivered his whole
+song, with all its customary length, intricacy, and speed, in a tone--a
+whisper, I may almost say--that ran along the very edge of silence. The
+unexpected proximity of a stranger may have had something to do with his
+conduct, as it often appears to have with the thrasher's; but, however
+that may be, the cases are not parallel with that of the pine-wood
+sparrow, inasmuch as the latter bird not merely sings under his breath
+on special occasions, whether on account of the nearness of a listener
+or for any other reason, but in his ordinary singing uses louder and
+softer tones interchangeably, almost exactly as human singers and
+players do; as if, in the practice of his art, he had learned to
+appreciate, consciously or unconsciously (and practice naturally goes
+before theory), the expressive value of what I believe is called musical
+dynamics.
+
+I spent many half-days in the pine lands (how gladly now would I spend
+another!), but never got far into them. ("Into their depths," my pen was
+on the point of making me say; but that would have been a false note.
+The flat-woods have no "depths.") Whether I followed the railway,--in
+many respects a pretty satisfactory method,--or some roundabout, aimless
+carriage road, a mile or two was generally enough. The country offers no
+temptation to pedestrian feats, nor does the imagination find its
+account in going farther and farther. For the reader is not to think of
+the flat-woods as in the least resembling a Northern forest, which at
+every turn opens before the visitor and beckons him forward. Beyond and
+behind, and on either side, the pine-woods are ever the same. It is this
+monotony, by the bye, this utter absence of landmarks, that makes it so
+unsafe for the stranger to wander far from the beaten track. The sand is
+deep, the sun is hot; one place is as good as another. What use, then,
+to tire yourself? And so, unless the traveler is going somewhere, as I
+seldom was, he is continually stopping by the way. Now a shady spot
+entices him to put down his umbrella,--for there _is_ a shady spot, here
+and there, even in a Florida pine-wood; or blossoms are to be plucked;
+or a butterfly, some gorgeous and nameless creature, brightens the wood
+as it passes; or a bird is singing; or an eagle is soaring far overhead,
+and must be watched out of sight; or a buzzard, with upturned wings,
+floats suspiciously near the wanderer, as if with sinister intent
+(buzzard shadows are a regular feature of the flat-wood landscape, just
+as cloud shadows are in a mountainous country); or a snake lies
+stretched out in the sun,--a "whip snake," perhaps, that frightens the
+unwary stroller by the amazing swiftness with which it runs away from
+him; or some strange invisible insect is making uncanny noises in the
+underbrush. One of my recollections of the railway woods at St.
+Augustine is of a cricket, or locust, or something else,--I never saw
+it,--that amused me often with a formless rattling or drumming sound. I
+could think of nothing but a boy's first lesson upon the bones, the
+rhythm of the beats was so comically mistimed and bungled.
+
+One fine morning,--it was the 18th of February,--I had gone down the
+railroad a little farther than usual, attracted by the encouraging
+appearance of a swampy patch of rather large deciduous trees. Some of
+them, I remember, were red maples, already full of handsome,
+high-colored fruit. As I drew near, I heard indistinctly from among them
+what might have been the song of a black-throated green warbler, a bird
+that would have made a valued addition to my Florida list, especially at
+that early date.[1] No sooner was the song repeated, however, than I saw
+that I had been deceived; it was something I had never heard before. But
+it certainly had much of the black-throated green's quality, and without
+question was the note of a warbler of some kind. What a shame if the
+bird should give me the slip! Meanwhile, it kept on singing at brief
+intervals, and was not so far away but that, with my glass, I should be
+well able to make it out, if only I could once get my eyes on it. That
+was the difficulty. Something stirred among the branches. Yes, a
+yellow-throated warbler (_Dendroica dominica_), a bird of which I had
+seen my first specimens, all of them silent, during the last eight days.
+Probably he was the singer. I hoped so, at any rate. That would be an
+ideal case of a beautiful bird with a song to match. I kept him under my
+glass, and presently the strain was repeated, but not by him. Then it
+ceased, and I was none the wiser. Perhaps I never should be. It was
+indeed a shame. Such a _taking_ song; so simple, and yet so pretty, and
+so thoroughly distinctive. I wrote it down thus: _tee-koi,
+tee-koo_,--two couplets, the first syllable of each a little emphasized
+and dwelt upon, not drawled, and a little higher in pitch than its
+fellow. Perhaps it might be expressed thus:--
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I cannot profess to be sure of that, however, nor have I unqualified
+confidence in the adequacy of musical notation, no matter how skillfully
+employed, to convey a truthful idea of any bird song.
+
+[Footnote 1: As it was, I did not find _Dendroica virens_ in Florida. On
+my way home, in Atlanta, April 20, I saw one bird in a dooryard
+shade-tree.]
+
+The affair remained a mystery till, in Daytona, nine days afterward, the
+same notes were heard again, this time in lower trees that did not stand
+in deep water. Then it transpired that my mysterious warbler was not a
+warbler at all, but the Carolina chickadee. That was an outcome quite
+unexpected, although I now remembered that chickadees were in or near
+the St. Augustine swamp; and what was more to the purpose, I could now
+discern some relationship between the _tee-koi, tee-koo_ (or, as I now
+wrote it, _see-toi, see-too_), and the familiar so-called phoebe whistle
+of the black-capped titmouse. The Southern bird, I am bound to
+acknowledge, is much the more accomplished singer of the two. Sometimes
+he repeats the second dissyllable, making six notes in all. At other
+times he breaks out with a characteristic volley of fine chickadee
+notes, and runs without a break into the _see-toi, see-too_, with a
+highly pleasing effect. Then if, on the top of this, he doubles the
+_see-too_, we have a really prolonged and elaborate musical effort,
+quite putting into the shade our New England bird's _hear, hear me_,
+sweet and welcome as that always is.
+
+The Southern chickadee, it should be said, is not to be distinguished
+from its Northern relative--in the bush, I mean--except by its notes. It
+is slightly smaller, like Southern birds in general, but is practically
+identical in plumage. Apart from its song, what most impressed me was
+its scarcity. It was found, sooner or later, wherever I went, I believe,
+but always in surprisingly small numbers, and I saw only one nest. That
+was built in a roadside china-tree in Tallahassee, and contained young
+ones (April 17), as was clear from the conduct of its owners.
+
+It must not be supposed that I left St. Augustine without another search
+for my unknown "warbler." The very next morning found me again at the
+swamp, where for at least an hour I sat and listened. I heard no
+_tee-koi, tee-koo_, but was rewarded twice over for my walk. In the
+first place, before reaching the swamp, I found the third of my
+flat-wood novelties, the red-cockaded woodpecker. As had happened with
+the nuthatch and the sparrow, I heard him before seeing him: first some
+notes, which by themselves would hardly have suggested a woodpecker
+origin, and then a noise of hammering. Taken together, the two sounds,
+left little doubt as to their author; and presently I saw him,--or
+rather them, for there were two birds. I learned nothing about them,
+either then or afterwards (I saw perhaps eight individuals during my ten
+weeks' visit), but it was worth something barely to see and hear them.
+Henceforth _Dryobates borealis_ is a bird, and not merely a name. This,
+as I have said, was among the pines, before reaching the swamp. In the
+swamp itself, there suddenly appeared from somewhere, as if by magic (a
+dramatic entrance is not without its value, even out-of-doors), a less
+novel but far more impressive figure, a pileated woodpecker; a truly
+splendid fellow, with the scarlet cheek-patches. When I caught sight of
+him, he stood on one of the upper branches of a tall pine, looking
+wonderfully alert and wide-awake; now stretching out his scrawny neck,
+and now drawing it in again, his long crest all the while erect and
+flaming. After a little he dropped into the underbrush, out of which
+came at intervals a succession of raps. I would have given something to
+have had him under my glass just then, for I had long felt curious to
+see him in the act of chiseling out those big, oblong, clean-cut,
+sharp-angled "peck-holes" which, close to the base of the tree, make so
+common and notable a feature of Vermont and New Hampshire forests; but,
+though I did my best, I could not find him, till all at once he came up
+again and took to a tall pine,--the tallest in the wood,--where he
+pranced about for a while, striking sundry picturesque but seemingly
+aimless attitudes, and then made off for good. All in all, he was a
+wild-looking bird, if ever I saw one.
+
+I was no sooner in St. Augustine, of course, than my eyes were open for
+wild flowers. Perhaps I felt a little disappointed. Certainly the land
+was not ablaze with color. In the grass about the old fort fhere was
+plenty of the yellow oxalis and the creeping white houstonia; and from a
+crevice in the wall, out of reach, leaned a stalk of goldenrod in full
+bloom. The reader may smile, if he will, but this last flower was a
+surprise and a stumbling-block. A vernal goldenrod! Dr. Chapman's Flora
+made no mention of such an anomaly. Sow thistles, too, looked strangely
+anachronistic. I had never thought of them as harbingers of springtime.
+The truth did not break upon me till a week or so afterward. Then, on
+the way to the beach at Daytona, where the pleasant peninsula road
+traverses a thick forest of short-leaved pines, every tree of which
+leans heavily inland at the same angle ("the leaning pines of Daytona,"
+I always said to myself, as I passed), I came upon some white
+beggar's-ticks,--like daisies; and as I stopped to see what they were,
+I noticed the presence of ripe seeds. The plant had been in flower a
+long time. And then I laughed at my own dullness. It fairly deserved a
+medal. As if, even in Massachusetts, autumnal flowers--the groundsel,
+at least--did not sometimes persist in blossoming far into the winter! A
+day or two after this, I saw a mullein stalk still presenting arms, as
+it were (the mullein, always looks the soldier to me), with one bright
+flower. If I had found _that_ in St. Augustine, I flatter myself I
+should have been less easily fooled.
+
+There were no such last-year relics in the flat-woods, so far as I
+remember, but spring blossoms were beginning to make their appearance
+there by the middle of February, particularly along the
+railroad,--violets in abundance (_Viola cucullata_), dwarf
+orange-colored dandelions (_Krigia_), the Judas-tree, or redbud, St.
+Peter's-wort, blackberry, the yellow star-flower (_Hypoxis juncea_), and
+butterworts. I recall, too, in a swampy spot, a fine fresh tuft of the
+golden club, with its gorgeous yellow spadix,--a plant that I had never
+seen in bloom before, although I had once admired a Cape Cod "hollow"
+full of the rank tropical leaves. St. Peter's-wort, a low shrub, thrives
+everywhere in the pine barrens, and, without being especially
+attractive, its rather sparse yellow flowers--not unlike the St.
+John's-wort--do something to enliven the general waste. The butterworts
+are beauties, and true children of the spring. I picked my first ones,
+which by chance were of the smaller purple species (_Pinguicula
+pumila_), on my way down from the woods, on a moist bank. At that moment
+a white man came up the road. "What do you call this flower?" said I.
+"Valentine's flower," he answered at once. "Ah," said I, "because it is
+in bloom on St. Valentine's Day, I suppose?" "No, sir," he said. "Do you
+speak Spanish?" I had to shake my head. "Because I could explain it
+better in Spanish," he continued, as if by way of apology; but he went
+on in perfectly good English: "If you put one of them under your pillow,
+and think of some one you would like very much to see,--some one who has
+been dead a long time,--you will be likely to dream of him. It is a very
+pretty flower," he added. And so it is; hardly prettier, however, to my
+thinking, than the blossoms of the early creeping blackberry (_Rubus
+trivialis_). With them I fairly fell in love: true white roses, I called
+them, each with its central ring of dark purplish stamens; as beautiful
+as the cloudberry, which once, ten years before, I had found, on the
+summit of Mount Clinton, in New Hampshire, and refused to believe a
+_Rubus_, though Dr. Gray's key led me to that genus again and again.
+There _is_ something in a name, say what you will.
+
+Some weeks later, and a little farther south,--in the flat-woods behind
+New Smyrna,--I saw other flowers, but never anything of that tropical
+exuberance at which the average Northern tourist expects to find himself
+staring. Boggy places were full of blue iris (the common _Iris
+versicolor_ of New England, but of ranker growth), and here and there a
+pool was yellow with bladderwort. I was taken also with the larger and
+taller (yellow) butterwort, which I used never to see as I went through
+the woods in the morning, but was sure to find standing in the tall dry
+grass along the border of the sandy road, here one and there one, on my
+return at noon. In similar places grew a "yellow daisy" (_Leptopoda_), a
+single big head, of a deep color, at the top of a leafless stem. It
+seemed to be one of the most abundant of Florida spring flowers, but I
+could not learn that it went by any distinctive vernacular name. Beside
+the railway track were blue-eyed grass and pipewort, and a dainty blue
+lobelia (_L. Feayana_), with once in a while an extremely pretty
+coreopsis, having a purple centre, and scarcely to be distinguished from
+one that is common in gardens. No doubt the advancing season brings an
+increasing wealth of such beauty to the flat-woods. No doubt, too, I
+missed the larger half of what might have been found even at the time of
+my visit; for I made no pretense of doing any real botanical work,
+having neither the time nor the equipment. The birds kept me busy, for
+the most part, when the country itself did not absorb my attention.
+
+More interesting, and a thousand times more memorable, than any flower
+or bird was the pine barren itself. I have given no true idea of it, I
+am perfectly aware: open, parklike, flooded with sunshine, level as a
+floor. "What heartache," Lanier breaks out, poor exile, dying of
+consumption,--"what heartache! Ne'er a hill!" A dreary country to ride
+through, hour after hour; an impossible country to live in, but most
+pleasant for a half-day winter stroll. Notwithstanding I never went far
+into it, as I have already said, I had always a profound sensation of
+remoteness; as if I might go on forever, and be no farther away.
+
+Yet even here I had more than one reminder that the world is a small
+place. I met a burly negro in a cart, and fell into talk with him about
+the Florida climate, an endless topic, out of which a cynical traveler
+may easily extract almost endless amusement. How abput the summers here?
+I inquired. Were they really as paradisaical (I did not use that word)
+as some reports would lead one to suppose? The man smiled, as if he had
+heard something like that before. He did not think the Florida summer a
+dream of delight, even on the east coast. "I'm tellin' you the truth,
+sah; the mosquiters an' sandflies is awful." Was he born here? I asked.
+No; he came from B----, Alabama. Everybody in eastern Florida came from
+somewhere, as well as I could make out.
+
+"Oh, from B----," said I. "Did you know Mr. W----, of the ---- Iron
+Works?"
+
+He smiled again. "Yes, sah; I used to work for him. He's a nice man." He
+spoke the truth that time beyond a peradventure. He was healthier here
+than in the other place, he thought, and wages were higher; but he liked
+the other place better "for pleasure." It was an odd coincidence, was it
+not, that I should meet in this solitude a man who knew the only citizen
+of Alabama with whom I was ever acquainted.
+
+At another time I fell in with an oldish colored man, who, like myself,
+had taken to the woods for a quiet Sunday stroll. _He_ was from
+Mississippi, he told me. Oh, yes, he remembered the war; he was a slave,
+twenty-one years old, when it broke out. To his mind, the present
+generation of "niggers" were a pretty poor lot, for all their
+"edication." He had seen them crowding folks off the sidewalk, and
+puffing smoke in their faces. All of which was nothing new; I had found
+that story more or less common among negroes of his age. He didn't
+believe much in "edication;" but when I asked if he thought the blacks
+were better off in slavery times, he answered quickly, "I'd rather be a
+free man, _I_ had." He wasn't married; he had plenty to do to take care
+of himself. We separated, he going one way and I the other; but he
+turned to ask, with much seriousness (the reader must remember that this
+was only three months after a national election), "Do you think they'll
+get free trade?" "Truly," said I to myself, "'the world is too much with
+us.' Even in the flat-woods there is no escaping the tariff question."
+But I answered, in what was meant to be a reassuring tone, "Not yet
+awhile. Some time." "I hope not," he said,--as if liberty to buy and
+sell would be a dreadful blow to a man living in a shanty in a Florida
+pine barren! He was taking the matter rather too much to heart, perhaps;
+but surely it was encouraging to see such a man interested in broad
+economical questions, and I realized as never before the truth of what
+the newspapers so continually tell us, that political campaigns are
+educational.
+
+
+
+
+BESIDE THE MARSH.
+
+
+I am sitting upon the upland bank of a narrow winding creek. Before me
+is a sea of grass, brown and green of many shades. To the north the
+marsh is bounded by live-oak woods,--a line with numberless
+indentations,--beyond which runs the Matanzas River, as I know by the
+passing and repassing of sails behind the trees. Eastward are
+sand-hills, dazzling white in the sun, with a ragged green fringe along
+their tops. Then comes a stretch of the open sea, and then, more to the
+south, St. Anastasia Island, with its tall black-and-white lighthouse
+and the cluster of lower buildings at its base. Small sailboats, and now
+and then a tiny steamer, pass up and down the river to and from St.
+Augustine.
+
+A delicious south wind is blowing (it is the 15th of February), and I
+sit in the shade of a cedar-tree and enjoy the air and the scene. A
+contrast, this, to the frozen world I was living in, less than a week
+ago.
+
+As I approached the creek, a single spotted sandpiper was teetering
+along the edge of the water, and the next moment a big blue heron rose
+just beyond him and went flapping away to the middle of the marsh. Now,
+an hour afterward, he is still standing there, towering above the tall
+grass. Once when I turned that way I saw, as I thought, a stake, and
+then something moved upon it,--a bird of some kind. And what an enormous
+beak! I raised my field-glass. It was the heron. His body was the post,
+and his head was the bird. Meanwhile, the sandpiper has stolen away, I
+know not when or where. He must have omitted the _tweet, tweet_, with
+which ordinarily he signalizes his flight. He is the first of his kind
+that I have seen during my brief stay in these parts.
+
+Now a multitude of crows pass over; fish crows, I think they must be,
+from their small size and their strange, ridiculous voices. And now a
+second great blue heron comes in sight, and keeps on over the marsh and
+over the live-oak wood, on his way to the San Sebastian marshes, or some
+point still more remote. A fine show he makes, with his wide expanse of
+wing, and his feet drawn up and standing out behind him. Next a marsh
+hawk in brown plumage comes skimming over the grass. This way and that
+he swerves in ever graceful lines. For one to whom ease and grace come
+by nature, even the chase of meadow mice is an act of beauty, while
+another goes awkwardly though in pursuit of a goddess.
+
+Several times I have noticed a kingfisher hovering above the grass (so
+it looks, but no doubt he is over an arm of the creek), striking the air
+with quick strokes, and keeping his head pointed downward, after the
+manner of a tern. Then he disappeared while I was looking at something
+else. Now I remark him sitting motionless upon the top of a post in the
+midst of the marsh.
+
+A third blue heron appears, and he too flies over without stopping.
+Number One still keeps his place; through the glass I can see him
+dressing his feathers with his clumsy beak. The lively strain of a
+white-eyed vireo, pertest of songsters, comes to me from somewhere on my
+right, and the soft chipping of myrtle warblers is all but incessant. I
+look up from my paper to see a turkey buzzard sailing majestically
+northward. I watch him till he fades in the distance. Not once does he
+flap his wings, but sails and sails, going with the wind, yet turning
+again and again to rise against it,--helping himself thus to its
+adverse, uplifting pressure in the place of wing-strokes, perhaps,--and
+passing onward all the while in beautiful circles. He, too, scavenger
+though he is, has a genius for being graceful. One might almost be
+willing to be a buzzard, to fly like that!
+
+The kingfisher and the heron are still at their posts. An exquisite
+yellow butterfly, of a sort strange to my Yankee eyes, flits past,
+followed by a red admiral. The marsh hawk is on the wing again, and
+while looking at him I descry a second hawk, too far away to be made
+out. Now the air behind me is dark with crows,--a hundred or two, at
+least, circling over the low cedars. Some motive they have for all their
+clamor, but it passes my owlish wisdom to guess what it can be. A fourth
+blue heron appears, and drops into the grass out of sight.
+
+Between my feet is a single blossom of the yellow oxalis, the only
+flower to be seen; and very pretty it is, each petal with an orange spot
+at the base.
+
+Another buzzard, another marsh hawk, another yellow butterfly, and then
+a smaller one, darker, almost orange. It passes too quickly over the
+creek and away. The marsh hawk comes nearer, and I see the strong yellow
+tinge of his plumage, especially underneath. He will grow handsomer as
+he grows older. A pity the same could not be true of men. Behind me are
+sharp cries of titlarks. From the direction of the river come frequent
+reports of guns. Somebody is doing his best to be happy! All at once I
+prick up my ears. From the grass just across the creek rises the brief,
+hurried song of a long-billed marsh wren. So _he_ is in Florida, is he?
+Already I have heard confused noises which I feel sure are the work of
+rails of some kind. No doubt there is abundant life concealed in those
+acres on acres of close grass.
+
+The heron and the kingfisher are still quiet. Their morning hunt was
+successful, and for to-day Fate cannot harm them. A buzzard, with
+nervous, rustling beats, goes directly above the low cedar under which I
+am resting.
+
+At last, after a siesta of two hours, the heron has changed his place. I
+looked up just in season to see him sweeping over the grass, into which
+he dropped the next instant. The tide is falling. The distant sand-hills
+are winking in the heat, but the breeze is deliciously cool, the very
+perfection of temperature, if a man is to sit still in the shade. It is
+eleven o'clock. I have a mile to go in the hot sun, and turn away. But
+first I sweep the line once more with my glass. Yonder to the south are
+two more blue herons standing in the grass. Perhaps there are more
+still. I sweep the line. Yes, far, far away I can see four heads in a
+row. Heads and necks rise above the grass. But so far away! Are they
+birds, or only posts made alive by my imagination? I look again. I
+believe I was deceived. They are nothing but stakes. See how in a row
+they stand. I smile at myself. Just then one of them moves, and another
+is pulled down suddenly into the grass. I smile again. "Ten great blue
+herons," I say to myself.
+
+All this has detained me, and meantime the kingfisher has taken wing and
+gone noisily up the creek. The marsh hawk appears once more. A
+killdeer's sharp, rasping note--a familiar sound in St. Augustine--comes
+from I know not where. A procession of more than twenty black vultures
+passes over my head. I can see their feet drawn up under them. My own I
+must use in plodding homeward.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE BEACH AT DAYTONA.
+
+
+The first eight days of my stay in Daytona were so delightful that I
+felt as if I had never before seen fine weather, even in my dreams. My
+east window looked across the Halifax River to the peninsula woods.
+Beyond them was the ocean. Immediately after breakfast, therefore, I
+made toward the north bridge, and in half an hour or less was on the
+beach. Beaches are much the same the world over, and there is no need to
+describe this one--Silver Beach, I think I heard it called--except to
+say that it is broad, hard, and, for a pleasure-seeker's purpose,
+endless. It is backed by low sand-hills covered with impenetrable
+scrub,--oak and palmetto,--beyond which is a dense growth of
+short-leaved pines. Perfect weather, a perfect beach, and no throng of
+people: here were the conditions of happiness; and here for eight days I
+found it. The ocean itself was a solitude. Day after day not a sail was
+in sight. Looking up and down the beach, I could usually see somewhere
+in the distance a carriage or two, and as many foot passengers; but I
+often walked a mile, or sat for half an hour, without being within hail
+of any one. Never were airs more gentle or colors more exquisite.
+
+As for birds, they were surprisingly scarce, but never wanting
+altogether. If everything else failed, a few fish-hawks were sure to be
+in sight. I watched them at first with eager interest. Up and down the
+beach they went, each by himself, with heads pointed downward, scanning
+the shallow water. Often they stopped in their course, and by means of
+laborious flappings held themselves poised over a certain spot. Then,
+perhaps, they set their wings and shot downward clean under water. If
+the plunge was unsuccessful, they shook their feathers dry and were
+ready to begin again. They had the fisherman's gift. The second, and
+even the third attempt might fail, but no matter; it was simply a
+question of time and patience. If the fish was caught, their first
+concern seemed to be to shift their hold upon it, till its head pointed
+to the front. That done, they shook themselves vigorously and started
+landward, the shining white victim wriggling vainly in the clutch of the
+talons. I took it for granted that they retired with their quarry to
+some secluded spot on the peninsula, till one day I happened to be
+standing upon a sand-hill as one passed overhead. Then I perceived that
+he kept on straight across the peninsula and the river. More than once,
+however, I saw one of them in no haste to go inland. On my second visit,
+a hawk came circling about my head, carrying a fish. I was surprised at
+the action, but gave it no second thought, nor once imagined that he was
+making me his protector, till suddenly a large bird dropped rather
+awkwardly upon the sand, not far before me. He stood for an instant on
+his long, ungainly legs, and then, showing a white head and a white
+tail, rose with a fish in his talons, and swept away landward out of
+sight. Here was the osprey's parasite, the bald eagle, for which I had
+been on the watch. Meantime, the hawk too had disappeared. Whether it
+was his fish which the eagle had picked up (having missed it in the air)
+I cannot say. I did not see it fall, and knew nothing of the eagle's
+presence until he fluttered to the beach.
+
+Some days later, I saw the big thief--emblem of American liberty--play
+his sharp game to the finish. I was crossing the bridge, and by accident
+turned and looked upward. (By accident, I say, but I was always doing
+it.) High in the air were two birds, one chasing the other,--a fish-hawk
+and a young eagle with dark head and tail. The hawk meant to save his
+dinner if he could. Round and round he went, ascending at every turn,
+his pursuer after him hotly. For aught I could see, he stood a good
+chance of escape, till all at once another pair of wings swept into the
+field of my glass.
+
+
+    "A third is in the race! Who is the third,
+    Speeding away swift as the eagle bird?"
+
+
+It _was_ an eagle, an adult, with head and tail white. Only once more
+the osprey circled. The odds were against him, and he let go the fish.
+As it fell, the old eagle swooped after it, missed it, swooped again,
+and this time, long before it could reach the water, had it fast in his
+claws. Then off he went, the younger one in pursuit. They passed out of
+sight behind the trees of an island, one close upon the other, and I do
+not know how the controversy ended; but I would have wagered a trifle on
+the old white-head, the bird of Washington.
+
+The scene reminded me of one I had witnessed in Georgia a fortnight
+before, on my way south. The train stopped at a backwoods station; some
+of the passengers gathered upon the steps of the car, and the usual bevy
+of young negroes came alongside. "Stand on my head for a nickel?" said
+one. A passenger put his hand into his pocket; the boy did as he had
+promised,--in no very professional style, be it said,--and with a grin
+stretched out his hand. The nickel glistened in the sun, and on the
+instant a second boy sprang forward, snatched it out of the sand, and
+made off in triumph amid the hilarious applause of his fellows. The
+acrobat's countenance indicated a sense of injustice, and I had no doubt
+that my younger eagle was similarly affected. "Where is our boasted
+honor among thieves?" I imagined him asking. The bird of freedom is a
+great bird, and the land of the free is a great country. Here, let us
+hope, the parallel ends. Whether on the banks of Newfoundland or
+elsewhere, it cannot be that the great republic would ever snatch a fish
+that did not belong to it.
+
+I admired the address of the fish-hawks until I saw the gannets. Then I
+perceived that the hawks, with all their practice, were no better than
+landlubbers. The gannets kept farther out at sea. Sometimes a scattered
+flock remained in sight for the greater part of a forenoon. With their
+long, sharp wings and their outstretched necks,--like loons, but with a
+different flight,--they were rakish-looking customers. Sometimes from a
+great height, sometimes from a lower, sometimes at an incline, and
+sometimes vertically, they plunged into the water, and after an absence
+of some seconds, as it seemed, came up and rested upon the surface. They
+were too far away to be closely observed, and for a time I did not feel
+certain what they were. The larger number were in dark plumage, and it
+was not till a white one appeared that I said with assurance, "Gannets!"
+With the bright sun on him, he was indeed a splendid bird, snowy white,
+with the tips of his wings jet black. If he would have come inshore like
+the ospreys, I think I should never have tired of his evolutions.
+
+The gannets showed themselves only now and then, but the brown pelicans
+were an every-day sight. I had found them first on the beach at St.
+Augustine. Here at Daytona they never alighted on the sand, and seldom
+in the water. They were always flying up or down the beach, and, unless
+turned from their course by the presence of some suspicious object, they
+kept straight on just above the breakers, rising and falling with the
+waves; now appearing above them, and now out of sight in the trough of
+the sea. Sometimes a single bird passed, but commonly they were in small
+flocks. Once I saw seventeen together,--a pretty long procession; for,
+whatever their number, they went always in Indian file. Evidently some
+dreadful thing would happen if two pelicans should ever travel abreast.
+It was partly this unusual order of march, I suspect, which gave such an
+air of preternatural gravity to their movements. It was impossible to
+see even two of them go by without feeling almost as if I were in
+church. First, both birds flew a rod or two with slow and stately
+flappings; then, as if at some preconcerted signal, both set their wings
+and scaled for about the same distance; then they resumed their wing
+strokes; and so on, till they passed out of sight. I never heard them
+utter a sound, or saw them make a movement of any sort (I speak of what
+I saw at Daytona) except to fly straight on, one behind another. If
+church ceremonials are still open to amendment, I would suggest, in no
+spirit of irreverence, that a study of pelican processionals would be
+certain to yield edifying results. Nothing done in any cathedral could
+be more solemn. Indeed, their solemnity was so great that I came at last
+to find it almost ridiculous; but that, of course, was only from a want
+of faith on the part of the beholder. The birds, as I say, were _brown_
+pelicans. Had they been of the other species, in churchly white and
+black, the ecclesiastical effect would perhaps have been heightened,
+though such a thing is hardly conceivable.
+
+Some beautiful little gulls, peculiarly dainty in their appearance
+("Bonaparte's gulls," they are called in books, but "surf gulls" would
+be a prettier and apter name), were also given to flying along the
+breakers, but in a manner very different from the pelicans'; as
+different, I may say, as the birds themselves. They, too, moved steadily
+onward, north or south as the case might be, but fed as they went,
+dropping into the shallow water between the incoming waves, and rising
+again to escape the next breaker. The action was characteristic and
+graceful, though often somewhat nervous and hurried. I noticed that the
+birds commonly went by twos, but that may have been nothing more than a
+coincidence. Beside these small surf gulls, never at all numerous, I
+usually saw a few terns, and now and then one or two rather large gulls,
+which, as well as I could make out, must have been the ring-billed. It
+was a strange beach, I thought, where fish-hawks invariably outnumbered
+both gulls and terns.
+
+Of beach birds, properly so called, I saw none but sanderlings. They
+were no novelty, but I always stopped to look at them; busy as ants,
+running in a body down the beach after a receding wave, and the next
+moment scampering back again with all speed before an incoming one. They
+tolerated no near approach, but were at once on the wing for a long
+flight up or down the coast, looking like a flock of snow-white birds as
+they turned their under parts to the sun in rising above the breakers.
+Their manner of feeding, with the head pitched forward, and a quick,
+eager movement, as if they had eaten nothing for days, and were fearful
+that their present bit of good fortune would not last, is strongly
+characteristic, so that they can be recognized a long way off. As I have
+said, they were the only true beach birds; but I rarely failed to see
+one or two great blue herons playing that rôle. The first one filled me
+with surprise. I had never thought of finding him in such a place; but
+there he stood, and before I was done with Florida beaches I had come to
+look upon him as one of their most constant _habitués_. In truth, this
+largest of the herons is well-nigh omnipresent in Florida. Wherever
+there is water, fresh or salt, he is certain to be met with sooner or
+later; and even in the driest place, if you stay there long enough, you
+will be likely to see him passing overhead, on his way to the water,
+which is nowhere far off. On the beach, as everywhere else, he is a
+model of patience. To the best of my recollection, I never saw him catch
+a fish there; and I really came to think it pathetic, the persistency
+with which he would stand, with the water half way to his knees, leaning
+forward expectantly toward the breakers, as if he felt that this great
+and generous ocean, which had so many fish to spare, could not fail to
+send him, at last, the morsel for which he was waiting.
+
+But indeed I was not long in perceiving that the Southern climate made
+patience a comparatively easy virtue, and fishing, by a natural
+consequence, a favorite avocation. Day after day, as I crossed the
+bridges on my way to and from the beach, the same men stood against the
+rail, holding their poles over the river. They had an air of having been
+there all winter. I came to recognize them, though I knew none of their
+names. One was peculiarly happy looking, almost radiant, with an
+educated face, and only one hand. His disability hindered him, no doubt.
+I never saw so much as a sheep-head or a drum lying at his feet. But
+inwardly, I felt sure, his luck was good. Another was older, fifty at
+least, sleek and well dressed. He spoke pleasantly enough, if I
+addressed him; otherwise he attended strictly to business. Every day he
+was there, morning and afternoon. He, I think, had better fortune than
+any of the others. Once I saw him land a large and handsome "speckled
+trout," to the unmistakable envy of his brother anglers. Still a third
+was a younger man, with a broad-brimmed straw hat and a taciturn habit;
+no less persevering than Number Two, perhaps, but far less successful. I
+marveled a little at their enthusiasm (there were many beside these),
+and they, in their turn, did not altogether conceal their amusement at
+the foibles of a man, still out of Bedlam, who walked and walked and
+walked, always with a field-glass protruding from his side pocket, which
+now and then he pulled out suddenly and leveled at nothing. It is one of
+the merciful ameliorations of this present evil world that men are thus
+mutually entertaining.
+
+These anglers were to be congratulated. Ordered South by their
+physicians,--as most of them undoubtedly were,--compelled to spend the
+winter away from friends and business, amid all the discomforts of
+Southern hotels, they were happy in having at least one thing which they
+loved to do. Blessed is the invalid who has an outdoor hobby. One man,
+whom I met more than once in my beach rambles, seemed to devote himself
+to bathing, running, and walking. He looked like an athlete; I heard him
+tell how far he could run without getting "winded;" and as he sprinted
+up and down the sand in his scanty bathing costume, I always found him a
+pleasing spectacle. Another runner there gave me a half-hour of
+amusement that turned at the last to a feeling of almost painful
+sympathy. He was not in bathing costume, nor did he look particularly
+athletic. He was teaching his young lady to ride a bicycle, and his
+pupil was at that most interesting stage of a learner's career when the
+machine is beginning to steady itself. With a very little assistance she
+went bravely, while at the same time the young man felt it necessary not
+to let go his hold upon her for more than a few moments at once. At all
+events, he must be with her at the turn. She plied the pedals with
+vigor, and he ran alongside or behind, as best he could; she excited,
+and he out of breath. Back and forth they went, and it was a relief to
+me when finally he took off his coat. I left him still panting in his
+fair one's wake, and hoped it would not turn out a case of "love's
+labor's lost." Let us hope, too, that he was not an invalid.
+
+While speaking of these my companions in idleness, I may as well mention
+an older man,--a rural philosopher, he seemed,--whom I met again and
+again, always in search of shells. He was from Indiana, he told me with
+agreeable garrulity. His grandchildren would like the shells. He had
+perhaps made a mistake in coming so far south. It was pretty warm, he
+thought, and he feared the change would be too great when he went home
+again. If a man's lungs were bad, he ought to go to a warm place, of
+course. _He_ came for his stomach, which was now pretty well,--a capital
+proof of the superior value of fresh air over "proper" food in dyspeptic
+troubles; for if there is anywhere in the world a place in which a
+delicate stomach would fare worse than in a Southern hotel,--of the
+second or third class,--may none but my enemies ever find it. Seashell
+collecting is not a panacea. For a disease like old age, for instance,
+it might prove to be an alleviation rather than a cure; but taken long
+enough, and with a sufficient mixture of enthusiasm,--a true _sine qua
+non_,--it will be found efficacious, I believe, in all ordinary cases of
+dyspepsia.
+
+My Indiana man was far from being alone in his cheerful pursuit. If
+strangers, men or women, met me on the beach and wished to say something
+more than good-morning, they were sure to ask, "Have you found any
+pretty shells?" One woman was a collector of a more businesslike turn.
+She had brought a camp-stool, and when I first saw her in the distance
+was removing her shoes, and putting on rubber boots. Then she moved her
+stool into the surf, sat upon it with a tin pail beside her, and,
+leaning forward over the water, fell to doing something,--I could not
+tell what. She was so industrious that I did not venture to disturb her,
+as I passed; but an hour or two afterward I overtook her going homeward
+across the peninsula with her invalid husband, and she showed me her
+pail full of the tiny coquina clams, which she said were very nice for
+soup, as indeed I knew. Some days later, I found a man collecting them
+for the market, with the help of a horse and a cylindrical wire roller.
+With his trousers rolled to his knees, he waded in the surf, and
+shoveled the incoming water and sand into the wire roller through an
+aperture left for that purpose. Then he closed the aperture, and drove
+the horse back and forth through the breakers till the clams were washed
+clear of the sand, after which he poured them out into a shallow tray
+like a long bread-pan, and transferred them from that to a big bag. I
+came up just in time to see them in the tray, bright with all the colors
+of the rainbow. "Will you hold the bag open?" he said. I was glad to
+help (it was perhaps the only useful ten minutes that I passed in
+Florida); and so, counting quart by quart, he dished them into it. There
+were thirty odd quarts, but he wanted a bushel and a quarter, and again
+took up the shovel. The clams themselves were not, canned and shipped,
+he said, but only the "juice."
+
+Many rudely built cottages stood on the sand-hills just behind the
+beach, especially at the points, a mile or so apart, where the two
+Daytona bridge roads come out of the scrub; and one day, while walking
+up the beach to Ormond, I saw before me a much more elaborate Queen Anne
+house. Fancifully but rather neatly painted, and with a stable to match,
+it looked like an exotic. As I drew near, its venerable owner was at
+work in front of it, shoveling a path through the sand,--just as, at
+that moment (February 24), thousands of Yankee householders were
+shoveling paths through the snow, which then was reported by the
+newspapers to be seventeen inches deep in the streets of Boston. His
+reverend air and his long black coat proclaimed him a clergyman past all
+possibility of doubt. He seemed to have got to heaven before death, the
+place was so attractive; but being still in a body terrestrial, he may
+have found the meat market rather distant, and mosquitoes and sand-flies
+sometimes a plague. As I walked up the beach, he drove by me in an open
+wagon with a hired man. They kept on till they came to a log which had
+been cast up by the sea, and evidently had been sighted from the house.
+The hired man lifted it into the wagon, and they drove back,--quite a
+stirring adventure, I imagined; an event to date from, at the very
+least.
+
+The smaller cottages were nearly all empty at that season. At different
+times I made use of many of them, when the sun was hot, or I had been
+long afoot. Once I was resting thus on a flight of front steps, when a
+three-seated carriage came down the beach and pulled up opposite. The
+driver wished to ask me a question, I thought; no doubt I looked very
+much at home. From the day I had entered Florida, every one I met had
+seemed to know me intuitively for a New Englander, and most of them--I
+could not imagine how--had divined that I came from Boston. It gratified
+me to believe that I was losing a little of my provincial manner, under
+the influence of more extended travel. But my pride had a sudden fall.
+The carriage stopped, as I said; but instead of inquiring the way, the
+driver alighted, and all the occupants of the carriage proceeded to do
+the same,--eight women, with baskets and sundries. It was time for me to
+be starting. I descended the steps, and pulled off my hat to the first
+comer, who turned out to be the proprietor of the establishment. With a
+gracious smile, she hoped they were "not frightening me away." She and
+her friends had come for a day's picnic at the cottage. Things being as
+they were (eight women), she could hardly invite me to share the
+festivities, and, with my best apology for the intrusion, I withdrew.
+
+Of one building on the sand-hills I have peculiarly pleasant
+recollections. It was not a cottage, but had evidently been put up as a
+public resort; especially, as I inferred, for Sunday-school or parish
+picnics. It was furnished with a platform for speech-making (is there
+any foolishness that men will not commit on sea beaches and mountain
+tops?), and, what was more to my purpose, was open on three sides. I
+passed a good deal of time there, first and last, and once it sheltered
+me from a drenching shower of an hour or two. The lightning was vivid,
+and the rain fell in sheets. In the midst of the blackness and
+commotion, a single tern, ghostly white, flew past, and toward the close
+a bunch of sanderlings came down the edge of the breakers, still looking
+for something to eat. The only other living things in sight were two
+young fellows, who had improved the opportunity to try a dip in the
+surf. Their color indicated that they were not yet hardened to open-air
+bathing, and from their actions it was evident that they found the ocean
+cool. They were wet enough before they were done, but it was mostly with
+fresh water. Probably they took no harm; but I am moved to remark, in
+passing, that I sometimes wondered how generally physicians who order
+patients to Florida for the winter caution them against imprudent
+exposure. To me, who am no doctor, it seemed none too safe for young
+women with consumptive tendencies to be out sailing in open boats on
+winter evenings, no matter how warm the afternoon had been, while I saw
+one case where a surf bath taken by such an invalid was followed by a
+day of prostration and fever. "We who live here," said a resident,
+"don't think the water is warm enough yet; but for these Northern folks
+it is a great thing to go into the surf in February, and you can't keep
+them out."
+
+The rows of cottages of which I have spoken were in one sense a
+detriment to the beach; but on the whole, and in their present deserted
+condition, I found them an advantage. It was easy enough to walk away
+from them, if a man wanted the feeling of utter solitude (the beach
+extends from Matanzas Inlet to Mosquito Inlet, thirty-five miles, more
+or less); while at other times they not only furnished shadow and a
+seat, but, with the paths and little clearings behind them, were an
+attraction to many birds. Here I found my first Florida jays. They sat
+on the chimney-tops and ridgepoles, and I was rejoiced to discover that
+these unique and interesting creatures, one of the special objects of my
+journey South, were not only common, but to an extraordinary degree
+approachable. Their extreme confidence in man is one of their oddest
+characteristics. I heard from more than one person how easily and "in
+almost no time" they could be tamed, if indeed they needed taming. A
+resident of Hawks Park told me that they used to come into his house and
+stand upon the corners of the dinner table waiting for their share of
+the meal. When he was hoeing in the garden, they would perch on his hat,
+and stay there by the hour, unless he drove them off. He never did
+anything to tame them except to treat them kindly. When a brood was old
+enough to leave the nest, the parents brought the youngsters up to the
+doorstep as a matter of course.
+
+The Florida jay, a bird of the scrub, is not to be confounded with the
+Florida _blue_ jay (a smaller and less conspicuously crested duplicate
+of our common Northern bird), to which it bears little resemblance
+either in personal appearance or in voice. Seen from behind, its aspect
+is peculiarly striking; the head, wings, rump, and tail being dark blue,
+with an almost rectangular patch of gray set in the midst. Its beak is
+very stout, and its tail very long; and though it would attract
+attention anywhere, it is hardly to be called handsome or graceful. Its
+notes--such of them as I heard, that is--are mostly guttural, with
+little or nothing of the screaming quality which distinguishes the blue
+jay's voice. To my ear they were often suggestive of the Northern
+shrike.
+
+On the 23d of February I was standing on the rear piazza of one of the
+cottages, when a jay flew into the oak and palmetto scrub close by. A
+second glance, and I saw that she was busy upon a nest. When she had
+gone, I moved nearer, and waited. She did not return, and I descended
+the steps and went to the edge of the thicket to inspect her work: a
+bulky affair,--nearly done, I thought,--loosely constructed of pretty
+large twigs. I had barely returned to the veranda before the bird
+appeared again. This time I was in a position to look squarely in upon
+her. She had some difficulty in edging her way through the dense bushes
+with a long, branching stick in her bill; but she accomplished the feat,
+fitted the new material into its place, readjusted the other twigs a bit
+here and there, and then, as she rose to depart, she looked me suddenly
+in the face and stopped, as much as to say, "Well, well! here's a pretty
+go! A man spying upon me!" I wondered whether she would throw up the
+work, but in another minute she was back again with another twig. The
+nest, I should have said, was about four feet from the ground, and
+perhaps twenty feet from the cottage. Four days later, I found her
+sitting upon it. She flew off as I came up, and I pushed into the scrub
+far enough to thrust my hand into the nest, which, to my disappointment,
+was empty. In fact, it was still far from completed; for on the 3d of
+March, when I paid it a farewell visit, its owner was still at work
+lining it with fine grass. At that time it was a comfortable-looking and
+really elaborate structure. Both the birds came to look at me as I stood
+on the piazza. They perched together on the top of a stake so narrow
+that there was scarcely room for their feet; and as they stood thus,
+side by side, one of them struck its beak several times against the beak
+of the other, as if in play. I wished them joy of their expected
+progeny, and was the more ready to believe they would have it for this
+little display of sportive sentimentality.
+
+It was a distinguished company that frequented that row of narrow back
+yards on the edge of the sand-hills. As a new-comer, I found the jays
+(sometimes there were ten under my eye at once) the most entertaining
+members of it, but if I had been a dweller there for the summer, I
+should perhaps have altered my opinion; for the group contained four of
+the finest of Floridian songsters,--the mocking-bird, the brown
+thrasher, the cardinal grosbeak, and the Carolina wren. Rare morning and
+evening concerts those cottagers must have. And besides these there were
+catbirds, ground doves, red-eyed chewinks, white-eyed chewinks, a song
+sparrow (one of the few that I saw in Florida), savanna sparrows, myrtle
+birds, redpoll warblers, a phoebe, and two flickers. The last-named
+birds, by the way, are never backward about displaying their tender
+feelings. A treetop flirtation is their special delight (I hope my
+readers have all seen one; few things of the sort are better worth
+looking at), and here, in the absence of trees, they had taken to the
+ridgepole of a house.
+
+More than once I remarked white-breasted swallows straggling northward
+along the line of sand-hills. They were in loose order, but the movement
+was plainly concerted, with all the look of a vernal migration. This
+swallow, the first of its family to arrive in New England, remains in
+Florida throughout the winter, but is known also to go as far south as
+Central America. The purple martins--which, so far as I am aware, do not
+winter in Florida--had already begun to make their appearance. While
+crossing the bridge, February 22, I was surprised to notice two of them
+sitting upon a bird-box over the draw, which just then stood open for
+the passage of a tug-boat. The toll-gatherer told me they had come "from
+some place" eight or ten days before. His attention had been called to
+them by his cat, who was trying to get up to the box to bid them
+welcome. He believed that she discovered them within three minutes of
+their arrival. It seemed not unlikely. In its own way a cat is a pretty
+sharp ornithologist.
+
+One or two cormorants were almost always about the river. Sometimes they
+sat upon stakes in a patriotic, spread-eagle (American eagle) attitude,
+as if drying their wings,--a curious sight till one became accustomed to
+it. Snakebirds and buzzards resort to the same device, but I cannot
+recall ever seeing any Northern bird thus engaged. From the south bridge
+I one morning saw, to my great satisfaction, a couple of white pelicans,
+the only ones that I found in Florida, though I was assured that within
+twenty years they had been common along the Halifax and Hillsborough
+rivers. My birds were flying up the river at a good height. The brown
+pelicans, on the other hand, made their daily pilgrimages just above the
+level of the water, as has been already described, and were never over
+the river, but off the beach.
+
+All in all, there are few pleasanter walks in Florida, I believe, than
+the beach-round at Daytona, out by one bridge and back by the other. An
+old hotel-keeper--a rural Yankee, if one could tell anything by his look
+and speech--said to me in a burst of confidence, "Yes, we've got a
+climate, and that's about all we have got,--climate and sand." I could
+not entirely agree with him. For myself, I found not only fine days, but
+fine prospects. But there was no denying the sand.
+
+
+
+
+ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH.
+
+
+Wherever a walker lives, he finds sooner or later one favorite road. So
+it was with me at New Smyrna, where I lived for three weeks. I had gone
+there for the sake of the river, and my first impulse was to take the
+road that runs southerly along its bank. At the time I thought it the
+most beautiful road I had found in Florida, nor have I seen any great
+cause since to alter that opinion. With many pleasant windings
+(beautiful roads are never straight, nor unnecessarily wide, which is
+perhaps the reason why our rural authorities devote themselves so madly
+to the work of straightening and widening),--with many pleasant
+windings, I say,
+
+    "The grace of God made manifest in curves,"
+
+it follows the edge of the hammock, having the river on one side, and
+the forest on the other. It was afternoon when I first saw it. Then it
+is shaded from the sun, while the river and its opposite bank have on
+them a light more beautiful than can be described or imagined; a
+light--with reverence for the poet of nature be it spoken--a light that
+never was _except_ on sea or land. The poet's dream was never equal to
+it.
+
+In a flat country stretches of water are doubly welcome. They take the
+place of hills, and give the eye what it craves,--distance; which
+softens angles, conceals details, and heightens colors,--in short,
+transfigures the world with its romancer's touch, and blesses us with
+illusion. So, as I loitered along the south road, I never tired of
+looking across the river to the long, wooded island, and over that to
+the line of sand-hills that marked the eastern rim of the East
+Peninsula, beyond which was the Atlantic. The white crests of the hills
+made the sharper points of the horizon line. Elsewhere clumps of nearer
+pine-trees intervened, while here and there a tall palmetto stood, or
+seemed to stand, on the highest and farthest ridge looking seaward. But
+particulars mattered little. The blue water, the pale, changeable
+grayish-green of the low island woods, the deeper green of the pines,
+the unnamable hues of the sky, the sunshine that flooded it all, these
+were beauty enough;--beauty all the more keenly enjoyed because for much
+of the way it was seen only by glimpses, through vistas of palmetto and
+live-oak. Sometimes the road came quite out of the woods, as it rounded
+a turn of the hammock. Then I stopped to gaze long at the scene.
+Elsewhere I pushed through the hedge at favorable points, and sat, or
+stood, looking up and down the river. A favorite seat was the prow of an
+old row-boat, which lay, falling to pieces, high and dry upon the sand.
+It had made its last cruise, but I found it still useful.
+
+The river is shallow. At low tide sandbars and oyster-beds occupy much
+of its breadth; and even when it looked full, a great blue heron would
+very likely be wading in the middle of it. That was a sight to which I
+had grown accustomed in Florida, where this bird, familiarly known as
+"the major," is apparently ubiquitous. Too big to be easily hidden, it
+is also, as a general thing, too wary to be approached within gunshot. I
+am not sure that I ever came within sight of one, no matter how suddenly
+or how far away, that it did not give evidence of having seen me first.
+Long legs, long wings, a long bill--and long sight and long patience:
+such is the tall bird's dowry. Good and useful qualities, all of them.
+Long may they avail to put off the day of their owner's extermination.
+
+The major is scarcely a bird of which you can make a pet in your mind,
+as you may of the chickadee, for instance, or the bluebird, or the
+hermit thrush. He does not lend himself naturally to such imaginary
+endearments. But it is pleasant to have him on one's daily beat. I
+should count it one compensation for having to live in Florida instead
+of in Massachusetts (but I might require a good many others) that I
+should see him a hundred times as often. In walking down the river road
+I seldom saw less than half a dozen; not together (the major, like
+fishermen in general, is of an unsocial turn), but here one and there
+one,--on a sand-bar far out in the river, or in some shallow bay, or on
+the submerged edge of an oyster-flat. Wherever he was, he always looked
+as if he might be going to do something presently; even now, perhaps,
+the matter was on his mind; but at this moment--well, there are times
+when a heron's strength is to stand still. Certainly he seemed in no
+danger of overeating. A cracker told me that the major made an excellent
+dish if killed on the full of the moon. I wondered at that
+qualification, but my informant explained himself. The bird, he said,
+feeds mostly at night, and fares best with the moon to help him. If the
+reader would dine off roast blue heron, therefore, as I hope I never
+shall, let him mind the lunar phases. But think of the gastronomic ups
+and downs of a bird that is fat and lean by turns twelve times a year!
+Possibly my informant overstated the case; but in any event I would
+trust the major to bear himself like a philosopher. If there is any one
+of God's creatures that can wait for what he wants, it must be the great
+blue heron.
+
+I have spoken of his caution. If he was patrolling a shallow on one side
+of an oyster-bar,--at the rate, let us say, of two steps a minute,--and
+took it into his head (an inappropriate phrase, as conveying an idea of
+something like suddenness) to try the water on the other side, he did
+not spread his wings, as a matter of course, and fly over. First he put
+up his head--an operation that makes another bird of him--and looked in
+all directions. How could he tell what enemy might be lying in wait? And
+having alighted on the other side (his manner of alighting is one of his
+prettiest characteristics), he did not at once draw in his neck till his
+bill protruded on a level with his body, and resume his labors, but
+first he looked once more all about him. It was a good _habit_ to do
+that, anyhow, and he meant to run no risks. If "the race of birds was
+created out of innocent, light-minded men, whose thoughts were directed
+toward heaven," according to the word of Plato, then _Ardea herodias_
+must long ago have fallen from grace. I imagine his state of mind to be
+always like that of our pilgrim fathers in times of Indian massacres.
+When they went after the cows or to hoe the corn, they took their guns
+with them, and turned no corner without a sharp lookout against ambush.
+No doubt such a condition of affairs has this advantage, that it makes
+ennui impossible. There is always something to live for, if it be only
+to avoid getting killed.
+
+After this manner did the Hillsborough River majors all behave
+themselves until my very last walk beside it. Then I found the
+exception,--the exception that is as good as inevitable in the case of
+any bird, if the observation be carried far enough. He (or she; there
+was no telling which it was) stood on the sandy beach, a splendid
+creature in full nuptial garb, two black plumes nodding jauntily from
+its crown, and masses of soft elongated feathers draping its back and
+lower neck. Nearer and nearer I approached, till I must have been within
+a hundred feet; but it stood as if on dress parade, exulting to be
+looked at. Let us hope it never carried itself thus gayly when the wrong
+man came along.
+
+Near the major--not keeping him company, but feeding in the same
+shallows and along the same oyster-bars--were constantly to be seen two
+smaller relatives of his, the little blue heron and the Louisiana. The
+former is what is called a dichromatic species; some of the birds are
+blue, and others white. On the Hillsborough, it seemed to me that white
+specimens predominated; but possibly that was because they were so much
+more conspicuous. Sunlight favors the white feather; no other color
+shows so quickly or so far. If you are on the beach and catch sight of a
+bird far out at sea,--a gull or a tern, a gannet or a loon,--it is
+invariably the white parts that are seen first. And so the little white
+heron might stand never so closely against the grass or the bushes on
+the further shore of the river, and the eye could not miss him. If he
+had been a blue one, at that distance, ten to one he would have escaped
+me. Besides, I was more on the alert for white ones, because I was
+always hoping to find one of them with black legs. In other words, I was
+looking for the little white egret, a bird concerning which, thanks to
+the murderous work of plume-hunters,--thanks, also, to those good women
+who pay for having the work done,--I must confess that I went to Florida
+and came home again without certainly seeing it.
+
+The heron with which I found myself especially taken was the Louisiana;
+a bird of about the same size as the little blue, but with an air of
+daintiness and lightness that is quite its own, and quite indescribable.
+When it rose upon the wing, indeed, it seemed almost _too_ light, almost
+unsteady, as if it lacked ballast, like a butterfly. It was the most
+numerous bird of its tribe along the river, I think, and, with one
+exception, the most approachable. That exception was the green heron,
+which frequented the flats along the village front, and might well have
+been mistaken for a domesticated bird; letting you walk across a plank
+directly over its head while it squatted upon the mud, and when
+disturbed flying into a fig-tree before the hotel piazza, just as the
+dear little ground doves were in the habit of doing. To me, who had
+hitherto seen the green heron in the wildest of places, this tameness
+was an astonishing sight. It would be hard to say which surprised me
+more, the New Smyrna green herons or the St. Augustine sparrow-hawks,
+--which latter treated me very much as I am accustomed to being treated
+by village-bred robins in Massachusetts.
+
+The Louisiana heron was my favorite, as I say, but incomparably the
+handsomest member of the family (I speak of such as I saw) was the great
+white egret. In truth, the epithet "handsome" seems almost a vulgarism
+as applied to a creature so superb, so utterly and transcendently
+splendid. I saw it--in a way to be sure of it--only once. Then, on an
+island in the Hillsborough, two birds stood in the dead tops of low
+shrubby trees, fully exposed in the most favorable of lights, their long
+dorsal trains drooping behind them and swaying gently in the wind. I had
+never seen anything so magnificent. And when I returned, two or three
+hours afterward, from a jaunt up the beach to Mosquito Inlet, there they
+still were, as if they had not stirred in all that time. The reader
+should understand that this egret is between four and five feet in
+length, and measures nearly five feet from wing tip to wing tip, and
+that its plumage throughout is of spotless white. It is pitiful to think
+how constantly a bird of that size and color must be in danger of its
+life.
+
+Happily, the lawmakers of the State have done something of recent years
+for the protection of such defenseless beauties. Happily, too, shooting
+from the river boats is no longer permitted,--on the regular lines, that
+is. I myself saw a young gentleman stand on the deck of an excursion
+steamer, with a rifle, and do his worst to kill or maim every living
+thing that came in sight, from a spotted sandpiper to a turkey buzzard!
+I call him a "gentleman;" he was in gentle company, and the fact that he
+chewed gum industriously would, I fear, hardly invalidate his claim to
+that title. The narrow river wound in and out between low, densely
+wooded banks, and the beauty of the shifting scene was enough almost to
+take one's breath away; but the crack of the rifle was not the less
+frequent on that account. Perhaps the sportsman was a Southerner, to
+whom river scenery of that enchanting kind was an old story. More likely
+he was a Northerner, one of the men who thank Heaven they are "not
+sentimental."
+
+In my rambles up and down the river road I saw few water birds beside
+the herons. Two or three solitary cormorants would be shooting back and
+forth at a furious rate, or swimming in midstream; and sometimes a few
+spotted sandpipers and killdeer plovers were feeding along the shore.
+Once in a great while a single gull or tern made its appearance,--just
+often enough to keep me wondering why they were not there oftener,--and
+one day a water turkey went suddenly over my head and dropped into the
+river on the farther side of the island. I was glad to see this
+interesting creature for once in salt water; for the Hillsborough, like
+the Halifax and the Indian rivers, is a river in name only,--a river by
+brevet,--being, in fact, a salt-water lagoon or sound between the
+mainland and the eastern peninsula.
+
+Fish-hawks were always in sight, and bald eagles were seldom absent
+altogether. Sometimes an eagle stood perched on a dead tree on an
+island. Oftener I heard a scream, and looked up to see one sailing far
+overhead, or chasing an osprey. On one such occasion, when the hawk
+seemed to be making a losing fight, a third bird suddenly intervened,
+and the eagle, as I thought, was driven away. "Good for the brotherhood
+of fish-hawks!" I exclaimed. But at that moment I put my glass on the
+new-comer; and behold, he was not a hawk, but another eagle. Meanwhile
+the hawk had disappeared with his fish, and I was left to ponder the
+mystery.
+
+As for the wood, the edge of the hammock, through which the road passes,
+there were no birds in it. It was one of those places (I fancy every
+bird-gazer must have had experience of such) where it is a waste of time
+to seek them. I could walk down the road for two miles and back again,
+and then sit in my room at the hotel for fifteen minutes, and see more
+wood birds, and more kinds of them, in one small live-oak before the
+window than I had seen in the whole four miles; and that not once and by
+accident, but again and again. In affairs of this kind it is useless to
+contend. The spot looks favorable, you say, and nobody can deny it;
+there must be birds there, plenty of them; your missing them to-day was
+a matter of chance; you will try again. And you try again--and
+again--and yet again. But in the end you have to acknowledge that, for
+some reason unknown to you, the birds have agreed to give that place the
+go-by.
+
+One bird, it is true, I found in this hammock, and not elsewhere: a
+single oven-bird, which, with one Northern water thrush and one
+Louisiana water thrush, completed my set of Florida _Seiuri_. Besides
+him I recall one hermit thrush, a few cedar-birds, a house wren,
+chattering at a great rate among the "bootjacks" (leaf-stalks) of an
+overturned palmetto-tree, with an occasional mocking-bird, cardinal
+grosbeak, prairie warbler, yellow redpoll, myrtle bird, ruby-crowned
+kinglet, phoebe, and flicker. In short, there were no birds at all,
+except now and then an accidental straggler of a kind that could be
+found almost anywhere else in indefinite numbers.
+
+And as it was not the presence of birds that made the river road
+attractive, so neither was it any unwonted display of blossoms. Beside a
+similar road along the bank of the Halifax, in Daytona, grew multitudes
+of violets, and goodly patches of purple verbena (garden plants gone
+wild, perhaps), and a fine profusion of spiderwort,--a pretty flower,
+the bluest of the blue, thrice welcome to me as having been one of the
+treasures of the very first garden of which I have any remembrance.
+"Indigo plant," we called it then. Here, however, on the way from New
+Smyrna to Hawks Park, I recall no violets, nor any verbena or
+spiderwort. Yellow wood-sorrel (oxalis) was here, of course, as it was
+everywhere. It dotted the grass in Florida very much as five-fingers do
+in Massachusetts, I sometimes thought. And the creeping, round-leaved
+houstonia was here, with a superfluity of a weedy blue sage (_Salvia
+lyrata_). Here, also, as in Daytona, I found a strikingly handsome
+tufted plant, a highly varnished evergreen, which I persisted in taking
+for a fern--the sterile fronds--in spite of repeated failures to find it
+described by Dr. Chapman under that head, until at last an excellent
+woman came to my help with the information that it was "coontie" (_Zamia
+integrifolia_), famous as a plant out of which the Southern people made
+bread in war time. This confession of botanical amateurishness and
+incompetency will be taken, I hope, as rather to my credit than
+otherwise; but it would be morally worthless if I did not add the story
+of another plant, which, in this same New Smyrna hammock, I frequently
+noticed hanging in loose bunches, like blades of flaccid deep green
+grass, from the trunks of cabbage palmettos. The tufts were always out
+of reach, and I gave them no particular thought; and it was not until I
+got home to Massachusetts, and then almost by accident, that I learned
+what they were. They, it turned out, _were_ ferns (_Vittaria
+lineata_--grass fern), and my discomfiture was complete.
+
+This comparative dearth of birds and flowers was not in all respects a
+disadvantage. On the contrary, to a naturalist blessed now and then with
+a supernaturalistic mood, it made the place, on occasion, a welcome
+retreat. Thus, one afternoon, as I remember, I had been reading Keats,
+the only book I had brought with me,--not counting manuals, of course,
+which come under another head,--and by and by started once more for the
+pine lands by the way of the cotton-shed hammock, "to see what I could
+see." But poetry had spoiled me just then for anything like scientific
+research, and as I waded through the ankle-deep sand I said to myself
+all at once, "No, no! What do I care for another new bird? I want to see
+the beauty of the world." With that I faced about, and, taking a side
+track, made as directly as possible for the river road. There I should
+have a mind at ease, with no unfamiliar, tantalizing bird note to set my
+curiosity on edge, nor any sand through which to be picking my steps.
+
+The river road is paved with oyster-shells. If any reader thinks that
+statement prosaic or unimportant, then he has never lived in southern
+Florida. In that part of the world all new-comers have to take
+walking-lessons; unless, indeed, they have already served an
+apprenticeship on Cape Cod, or in some other place equally arenarious.
+My own lesson I got at second hand, and on a Sunday. It was at New
+Smyrna, in the village. Two women were behind me, on their way home from
+church, and one of them was complaining of the sand, to which she was
+not yet used. "Yes," said the other, "I found it pretty hard walking at
+first, but I learned after a while that the best way is to set the heel
+down hard, as hard as you can; then the sand doesn't give under you so
+much, and you get along more comfortably." I wonder whether she noticed,
+just in front of her, a man who began forthwith to bury his boot heel at
+every step?
+
+In such a country (the soil is said to be good for orange-trees, but
+they do not have to walk) roads of powdered shell are veritable
+luxuries, and land agents are quite right in laying all stress upon them
+as inducements to possible settlers. If the author of the Apocalypse had
+been raised in Florida, we should never have had the streets of the New
+Jerusalem paved with gold. His idea of heaven, would have been different
+from that; more personal and home-felt, we may be certain.
+
+The river road, then, as I have said, and am glad to say again, was
+shell-paved. And well it might be; for the hammock, along the edge of
+which it meandered, seemed, in some places at least, to be little more
+than a pile of oyster-shells, on which soil had somehow been deposited,
+and over which a forest was growing. Florida Indians have left an evil
+memory. I heard a philanthropic visitor lamenting that she had talked
+with many of the people about them, and had yet to hear a single word
+said in their favor. Somebody might have been good enough to say that,
+with all their faults, they had given to eastern Florida a few hills,
+such as they are, and at present are supplying it, indirectly, with
+comfortable highways. How they must have feasted, to leave such heaps of
+shells behind them! They came to the coast on purpose, we may suppose.
+Well, the red-men are gone, but the oyster-beds remain; and if winter
+refugees continue to pour in this direction, as doubtless they will,
+they too will eat a "heap" of oysters (it is easy to see how the vulgar
+Southern use of that word may have originated), and in the course of
+time, probably, the shores of the Halifax and the Hillsborough will be a
+fine mountainous country! And then, if this ancient, nineteenth-century
+prediction is remembered, the highest peak of the range will perhaps be
+named in a way which the innate modesty of the prophet restrains him
+from specifying with greater particularity.
+
+Meanwhile it is long to wait, and tourists and residents alike must find
+what comfort they can in the lesser hills which, thanks to the good
+appetite of their predecessors, are already theirs. For my own part,
+there is one such eminence of which I cherish the most grateful
+recollections. It stands (or stood; the road-makers had begun carting it
+away) at a bend in the road just south of one of the Turnbull canals. I
+climbed it often (it can hardly be less than fifteen or twenty feet
+above the level of the sea), and spent more than one pleasant hour upon
+its grassy summit. Northward was New Smyrna, a village in the woods, and
+farther away towered the lighthouse of Mosquito Inlet. Along the eastern
+sky stretched the long line of the peninsula sand-hills, between the
+white crests of which could be seen the rude cottages of Coronado beach.
+To the south and west was the forest, and in front, at my feet, lay the
+river with its woody islands. Many times have I climbed a mountain and
+felt myself abundantly repaid by an off-look less beautiful. This was
+the spot to which I turned when I had been reading Keats, and wanted to
+see the beauty of the world. Here were a grassy seat, the shadow of
+orange-trees, and a wide prospect. In Florida, I found no better place
+in which a man who wished to be both a naturalist and a nature-lover,
+who felt himself heir to a double inheritance,
+
+    "The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part,"
+
+could for the time sit still and be happy.
+
+The orange-trees yielded other things beside shadow, though perhaps
+nothing better than that. They were resplendent with fruit, and on my
+earlier visits were also in bloom. One did not need to climb the hill to
+learn the fact. For an out-of-door sweetness it would be hard, I think,
+to improve upon the scent of orange blossoms. As for the oranges
+themselves, they seemed to be in little demand, large and handsome as
+they were. Southern people in general, I fancy, look upon wild fruit of
+this kind as not exactly edible. I remember asking two colored men in
+Tallahassee whether the oranges still hanging conspicuously from a tree
+just over the wall (a sight not so very common in that part of the
+State) were sweet or sour. I have forgotten just what they said, but I
+remember how they _looked_. I meant the inquiry as a mild bit of humor,
+but to them it was a thousandfold better than that: it was wit
+ineffable. What Shakespeare said about the prosperity of a jest was
+never more strikingly exemplified. In New Smyrna, with orange groves on
+every hand, the wild fruit went begging with natives and tourists alike;
+so that I feel a little hesitancy about confessing my own relish for it,
+lest I should be accused of affectation. Not that I devoured wild
+oranges by the dozen, or in place of sweet ones; one sour orange goes a
+good way, as the common saying is; but I ate them, nevertheless, or
+rather drank them, and found them, in a thirsty hour, decidedly
+refreshing.
+
+The unusual coldness of the past season (Florida winters, from what I
+heard about them, must have fallen of late into a queer habit of being
+regularly exceptional) had made it difficult to buy sweet oranges that
+were not dry and "punky"[1] toward the stem; but the hardier wild fruit
+had weathered the frost, and was so juicy that, as I say, you did not so
+much eat one as drink it. As for the taste, it was a wholesome
+bitter-sour, as if a lemon had been flavored with quinine; not quite so
+sour as a lemon, perhaps, nor _quite_ so bitter as Peruvian bark, but,
+as it were, an agreeable compromise between the two. When I drank one, I
+not only quenched my thirst, but felt that I had taken an infallible
+prophylactic against the malarial fever. Better still, I had surprised
+myself. For one who had felt a lifelong distaste, unsocial and almost
+unmanly, for the bitter drinks which humanity in general esteems so
+essential to its health and comfort, I was developing new and unexpected
+capabilities; than which few things can be more encouraging as years
+increase upon a man's head, and the world seems to be closing in about
+him.
+
+[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°, 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.
+
+
+
+
+ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLANTATION.
+
+
+On one of my first jaunts into the suburbs of Tallahassee I noticed not
+far from the road a bit of swamp,--shallow pools with muddy borders and
+flats. It was a likely spot for "waders," and would be worth a visit. To
+reach it, indeed, I must cross a planted field surrounded by a lofty
+barbed-wire fence and placarded against trespassers; but there was no
+one in sight, or no one who looked at all like a land-owner; and,
+besides, it could hardly be accounted a trespass--defined by Blackstone
+as an "_unwarranted_ entry on another's soil"--to step carefully over
+the cotton rows on so legitimate an errand. Ordinarily I call myself a
+simple bird-gazer, an amateur, a field naturalist, if you will; but on
+occasions like the present I assume--with myself, that is--all the
+rights and titles of an ornithologist proper, a man of science strictly
+so called. In the interest of science, then, I climbed the fence and
+picked my way across the field. True enough, about the edges of the
+water were two or three solitary sandpipers, and at least half a dozen
+of the smaller yellowlegs,--two additions to my Florida list,--not to
+speak of a little blue heron and a green heron, the latter in most
+uncommonly green plumage. It was well I had interpreted the placard a
+little generously. "The letter killeth" is a pretty good text in
+emergencies of this kind. So I said to myself. The herons, meanwhile,
+had taken French leave, but the smaller birds were less suspicious; I
+watched them at my leisure, and left them still feeding.
+
+Two days later I was there again, but it must be acknowledged that this
+time I tarried in the road till a man on horseback had disappeared round
+the next turn. It would have been manlier, without doubt, to pay no
+attention to him; but something told me that he was the cotton-planter
+himself, and, for better or worse, prudence carried the day with me.
+Finding nothing new, though the sandpipers and yellowlegs were still
+present, with a very handsome little blue heron and plenty of
+blackbirds, I took the road again and went further, and an hour or two
+afterward, on getting back to the same place, was overtaken again by the
+horseman. He pulled up his horse and bade me good-afternoon. Would I
+lend him my opera-glass, which happened to be in my hand at the moment?
+"I should like to see how my house looks from here," he said; and he
+pointed across the field to a house on the hill some distance beyond.
+"Ah," said I, glad to set myself right by a piece of frankness that
+under the circumstances could hardly work to my disadvantage; "then it
+is your land on which I have been trespassing." "How so?" he asked, with
+a smile; and I explained that I had been across his cotton-field a
+little while before. "That is no trespass," he answered (so the reader
+will perceive that I had been quite correct in my understanding of the
+law); and when I went on to explain my object in visiting his cane-swamp
+(for such it was, he said, but an unexpected freshet had ruined the crop
+when it was barely out of the ground), he assured me that I was welcome
+to visit it as often as I wished. He himself was very fond of natural
+history, and often regretted that he had not given time to it in his
+youth. As it was, he protected the birds on his plantation, and the
+place was full of them. I should find his woods interesting, he felt
+sure. Florida was extremely rich in birds; he believed there were some
+that had never been classified. "We have orioles here," he added; and so
+far, at any rate, he was right; I had seen perhaps twenty that day
+(orchard orioles, that is), and one sat in a tree before us at the
+moment. His whole manner was most kindly and hospitable,--as was that of
+every Tallahassean with whom I had occasion to speak,--and I told him
+with sincere gratitude that I should certainly avail myself of his
+courtesy and stroll through his woods.
+
+I approached them, two mornings afterward, from the opposite side,
+where, finding no other place of entrance, I climbed a six-barred,
+tightly locked gate--feeling all the while like "a thief and a
+robber"--in front of a deserted cabin. Then I had only to cross a grassy
+field, in which meadow larks were singing, and I was in the woods. I
+wandered through them without finding anything more unusual or
+interesting than summer tanagers and yellow-throated warblers, which
+were in song there, as they were in every such place, and after a while
+came out into a pleasant glade, from which different parts of the
+plantation could be seen, and through which ran a plantation road. Here
+was a wooden fence,--a most unusual thing,--and I lost no time in
+mounting it, to rest and look about me. It is one of the marks of a true
+Yankee, I suspect, to like such a perch. My own weakness in that
+direction is a frequent subject of mirth with chance fellow travelers.
+The attitude is comfortable and conducive to meditation; and now that I
+was seated and at my ease, I felt that this was one of the New England
+luxuries which, almost without knowing it, I had missed ever since I
+left home.
+
+Of my meditations on this particular occasion I remember nothing; but
+that is no sign they were valueless; as it is no sign that yesterday's
+dinner did me no good because I have forgotten what it was. In the
+latter case, indeed, and perhaps in the former as well, it would seem
+more reasonable to draw an exactly opposite inference. But, quibbles
+apart, one thing I do remember: I sat for some time on the fence, in the
+shade of a tree, with an eye upon the cane-swamp and an ear open for
+bird-voices. Yes, and it comes to me at this moment that here I heard
+the first and only bull-frog that I heard anywhere in Florida. It was
+like a voice from home, and belonged with the fence. Other frogs I had
+heard in other places. One chorus brought me out of bed in Daytona--in
+the evening--after a succession of February dog-day showers. "What is
+that noise outside?" I inquired of the landlady as I hastened
+downstairs. "That?" said she, with a look of amusement; "that's frogs."
+"It _may_ be," I thought, but I followed the sounds till they led me in
+the darkness to the edge of a swamp. No doubt the creatures were frogs,
+but of some kind new to me, with voices more lugubrious and homesick
+than I should have supposed could possibly belong to any batrachian. A
+week or two later, in the New Smyrna flat-woods, I heard in the distance
+a sound which I took for the grunting of pigs. I made a note of it,
+mentally, as a cheerful token, indicative of a probable scarcity of
+rattlesnakes; but by and by, as I drew nearer, the truth of the matter
+began to break upon me. A man was approaching, and when we met I asked
+him what was making that noise yonder. "Frogs," he said. At another
+time, in the flat-woods of Port Orange (I hope I am not taxing my
+reader's credulity too far, or making myself out a man of too
+imaginative an ear), I heard the bleating of sheep. Busy with other
+things, I did not stop to reflect that it was impossible there should be
+sheep in that quarter, and the occurrence had quite passed out of my
+mind when, one day, a cracker, talking about frogs, happened to say,
+"Yes, and we have one kind that makes a noise exactly like the bleating
+of sheep." That, without question, was what I had heard in the
+flat-woods. But this frog in the sugar-cane swamp was the same fellow
+that on summer evenings, ever and ever so many years ago, in sonorous
+bass that could be heard a quarter of a mile away, used to call from
+Reuben Loud's pond, "Pull him in! Pull him in!" or sometimes (the
+inconsistent amphibian), "Jug o' rum! Jug o' rum!"
+
+I dismounted from my perch at last, and was sauntering idly along the
+path (idleness like this is often the best of ornithological industry),
+when suddenly I had a vision! Before me, in the leafy top of an oak
+sapling, sat a blue grosbeak. I knew him on the instant. But I could see
+only his head and neck, the rest of his body being hidden by the leaves.
+It was a moment of feverish excitement. Here was a new bird, a bird
+about which I had felt fifteen years of curiosity; and, more than that,
+a bird which here and now was quite unexpected, since it was not
+included in either of the two Florida lists that I had brought with me
+from home. For perhaps five seconds I had my opera-glass on the blue
+head and the thick-set, dark bill, with its lighter-colored under
+mandible. Then I heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs, and lifted my
+eyes. My friend the owner of the plantation was coming down the road at
+a gallop, straight upon me. If I was to see the grosbeak and make sure
+of him, it must be done at once. I moved to bring him fully into view,
+and he flew into the thick of a pine-tree out of sight. But the tree was
+not far off, and if Mr. ---- would pass me with a nod, the case was
+still far from hopeless. A bright thought came to me. I ran from the
+path with a great show of eager absorption, leveled my glass upon the
+pine-tree, and stood fixed. Perhaps Mr. ---- would take the hint. Alas!
+he had too much courtesy to pass his own guest without speaking. "Still
+after the birds?" he said, as he checked his horse. I responded, as I
+hope, without any symptom of annoyance. Then, of course, he wished to
+know what I was looking at, and I told him that a blue grosbeak had just
+flown into that pine-tree, and that I was most distressingly anxious to
+see more of him. He looked at the pine-tree. "I can't see him," he said.
+No more could I. "It wasn't a blue jay, was it?" he asked. And then we
+talked of one thing and another, I have no idea what, till he rode away
+to another part of the plantation where a gang of women were at work. By
+this time the grosbeak had disappeared utterly. Possibly he had gone to
+a bit of wood on the opposite side of the cane-swamp. I scaled a
+barbed-wire fence and made in that direction, but to no purpose. The
+grosbeak was gone for good. Probably I should never see another. Could
+the planter have read my thoughts just then he would perhaps have been
+angry with himself, and pretty certainly he would have been angry with
+me. That a Yankee should accept his hospitality, and then load him with
+curses and call him all manner of names! How should he know that I was
+so insane a hobbyist as to care more for the sight of a new bird than
+for all the laws and customs of ordinary politeness? As my feelings
+cooled, I saw that I was stepping over hills or rows of some
+strange-looking plants just out of the ground. Peanuts, I guessed; but
+to make sure I called to a colored woman who was hoeing not far off.
+"What are these?" "Pinders," she answered. I knew she meant
+peanuts,--otherwise "ground-peas" and "goobers,"--and now that I once
+more have a dictionary at my elbow I learn that the word, like "goober,"
+is, or is supposed to be, of African origin.
+
+I was preparing to surmount the barbed-wire fence again, when the
+planter returned and halted for another chat. It was evident that he
+took a genuine and amiable interest in my researches. There were a great
+many kinds of sparrows in that country, he said, and also of
+woodpeckers. He knew the ivory-bill, but, like other Tallahasseans, he
+thought I should have to go into Lafayette County (all Florida people
+say La_fay_ette) to find it. "That bird calling now is a bee-bird," he
+said, referring to a kingbird; "and we have a bird that is called the
+French mocking-bird; he catches other birds." The last remark was of
+interest for its bearing upon a point about which I had felt some
+curiosity, and, I may say, some skepticism, as I had seen many
+loggerhead shrikes, but had observed no indication that other birds
+feared them or held any grudge against them. As he rode off he called my
+attention to a great blue heron just then flying over the swamp. "They
+are very shy," he said. Then, from further away, he shouted once more to
+ask if I heard the mocking-bird singing yonder, pointing with his whip
+in the direction of the singer.
+
+For some time longer I hung about the glade, vainly hoping that the
+grosbeak would again favor my eyes. Then I crossed more planted
+fields,--climbing more barbed-wire fences, and stopping on the way to
+enjoy the sweetly quaint music of a little chorus of white-crowned
+sparrows,--and skirted once more the muddy shore of the cane-swamp,
+where the yellowlegs and sandpipers were still feeding. That brought me
+to the road from which I had made my entry to the place some days
+before; but, being still unable to forego a splendid possibility, I
+recrossed the plantation, tarried again in the glade, sat again on the
+wooden fence (if that grosbeak only _would_ show himself!), and thence
+went on, picking a few heads of handsome buffalo clover, the first I had
+ever seen, and some sprays of penstemon, till I came again to the
+six-barred gate and the Quincy road. At that point, as I now remember,
+the air was full of vultures (carrion crows), a hundred or more, soaring
+over the fields in some fit of gregariousness. Along the road were
+white-crowned and white-throated sparrows (it was the 12th of April),
+orchard orioles, thrashers, summer tanagers, myrtle and paim warblers,
+cardinal grosbeaks, mocking-birds, kingbirds, logger-heads,
+yellow--throated vireos, and sundry others, but not the blue grosbeak,
+which would have been worth them all.
+
+Once back at the hotel, I opened my Coues's Key to refresh my memory as
+to the exact appearance of that bird. "Feathers around base of bill
+black," said the book. I had not noticed that. But no matter; the bird
+was a blue grosbeak, for the sufficient reason that it could not be
+anything else. A black line between the almost black beak and the
+dark-blue head would be inconspicuous at the best, and quite naturally
+would escape a glimpse so hasty as mine had been. And yet, while I
+reasoned in this way, I foresaw plainly enough that, as time passed,
+doubt would get the better of assurance, as it always does, and I should
+never be certain that I had not been the victim of some illusion. At
+best, the evidence was worth nothing for others. If only that excellent
+Mr. ----, for whose kindness I was unfeignedly thankful (and whose
+pardon I most sincerely beg if I seem to have been a bit too free in
+this rehearsal of the story),--if only Mr. ---- could have left me alone
+for ten minutes longer!
+
+The worry and the imprecations were wasted, after all, as, Heaven be
+thanked, they so often are; for within two or three days I saw other
+blue grosbeaks and heard them sing. But that was not on a cotton
+plantation, and is part of another story.
+
+
+
+
+A FLORIDA SHRINE.
+
+
+All pilgrims to Tallahassee visit the Murat place. It is one of the most
+conveniently accessible of those "points of interest" with which
+guide-books so anxiously, and with so much propriety, concern
+themselves. What a tourist prays for is something to see. If I had ever
+been a tourist in Boston, no doubt I should before now have surveyed the
+world from the top of the Bunker Hill monument. In Tallahassee, at all
+events, I went to the Murat estate. In fact, I went more than once; but
+I remember especially my first visit, which had a livelier sentimental
+interest than the others because I was then under the agreeable delusion
+that the Prince himself had lived there. The guide-book told me so,
+vouchsafing also the information that after building the house he
+"interested himself actively in local affairs, became a naturalized
+citizen, and served successively as postmaster, alderman, and mayor"--a
+model immigrant, surely, though it is rather the way of immigrants,
+perhaps, not to refuse political responsibilities.
+
+Naturally, I remembered these things as I stood in front of "the big
+house"--a story-and-a-half cottage--amid the flowering shrubs. Here
+lived once the son of the King of Naples; himself a Prince, and--worthy
+son of a worthy sire--alderman and then mayor of the city of
+Tallahassee. Thus did an uncompromising democrat pay court to the shades
+of Royalty, while a mocking-bird sang from a fringe-bush by the gate,
+and an oriole flew madly from tree to tree in pursuit of a fair creature
+of the reluctant sex.
+
+The inconsistency, if such it was, was quickly punished. For, alas! when
+I spoke of my morning's pilgrimage to an old resident of the town, he
+told me that Murat never lived in the house, nor anywhere else in
+Tallahassee, and of course was never its postmaster, alderman, or mayor.
+The Princess, he said, built the house after her husband's death, and
+lived there, a widow. I appealed to the guide-book. My informant
+sneered,--politely,--and brought me a still older Tallahassean, Judge
+----, whose venerable name I am sorry to have forgotten, and that
+indisputable citizen confirmed all that his neighbor had said. For once,
+the guide-book compiler must have been misinformed.
+
+The question, happily, was one of no great consequence. If the Prince
+had never lived in the house, the Princess had; and she, by all accounts
+(and I make certain her husband would have said the same), was the
+worthier person of the two. And even if neither of them had lived there,
+if my sentiment had been _all_ wasted (but there was no question of
+tears), the place itself was sightly, the house was old, and the way
+thither a pleasant one--first down the hill in a zigzag course to the
+vicinity of the railway station, then by a winding country road through
+the valley past a few negro cabins, and up the slope on the farther
+side. Prince Murat, or no Prince Murat, I should love to travel that
+road to-day, instead of sitting before a Massachusetts fire, with the
+ground deep under snow, and the air full of thirty or forty degrees of
+frost.
+
+In the front yard of one of the cabins opposite the car-wheel foundry,
+and near the station, as I now remember, a middle-aged negress was
+cutting up an oak log. She swung the axe with vigor and precision, and
+the chips flew; but I could not help saying, "You ought to make the man
+do that."
+
+She answered on the instant. "I would," she said, "if I had a man to
+_make_."
+
+"I'm sure you would," I thought. Her tongue was as sharp as her axe.
+
+Ought I to have ventured a word in her behalf, I wonder, when a man of
+her own color, and a pretty near neighbor, told me with admirable
+_naïveté_ the story of his bereavement and his hopes? His wife had died
+a year before, he said, and so far, though he had not let the grass grow
+under his feet, he had found no one to take her place. He still meant to
+do so, if he could. He was only seventy-four years old, and it was not
+good for a man to be alone. He seemed a gentle spirit, and I withheld
+all mention of the stalwart and manless wood-cutter. I hope he went
+farther, and fared better. So youthful as he was, surely there was no
+occasion for haste.
+
+When I had skirted a cotton-field--the crop just out of the ground--and
+a bit of wood on the right, and a swamp with a splendid display of white
+water-lilies on the left, and had begun to ascend the gentle slope, I
+met a man of considerably more than seventy-four years.
+
+"Can you tell me just where the Murat place is?" I inquired.
+
+He grinned broadly, and thought he could. He was one of the old Murat
+servants, as his father had been before him. "I was borned on to him,"
+he said, speaking of the Prince. Murat was "a gentleman, sah." That was
+a statement which it seemed impossible for him to repeat often enough.
+He spoke from a slave's point of view. Murat was a good master. The old
+man had heard him say that he kept servants "for the like of the thing."
+He didn't abuse them. He "never was for barbarizing a poor colored
+person at all." Whipping? Oh, yes. "He didn't miss your fault. No, sah,
+he didn't miss your fault." But his servants never were "ironed." He
+"didn't believe in barbarousment."
+
+The old man was thankful to be free; but to his mind emancipation had
+not made everything heavenly. The younger set of negroes ("my people"
+was his word) were on the wrong road. They had "sold their birthright,"
+though exactly what he meant by that remark I did not gather. "They
+ain't got no sense," he declared, "and what sense they has got don't do
+'em no good."
+
+I told him finally that I was from the North. "Oh, I knows it," he
+exclaimed, "I knows it;" and he beamed with delight. How did he know, I
+inquired. "Oh, I knows it. I can see it _in_ you. Anybody would know it
+that had any jedgment at all. You's a perfect gentleman, sah." He was
+too old to be quarreled with, and I swallowed the compliment.
+
+I tore myself away, or he might have run on till night--about his old
+master and mistress, the division of the estate, an abusive overseer
+("he was a perfect dog, sah!"), and sundry other things. He had lived a
+long time, and had nothing to do now but to recall the past and tell it
+over. So it will be with us, if we live so long. May we find once in a
+while a patient listener.
+
+This patriarch's unfavorable opinion as to the prospects of the colored
+people was shared by my hopeful young widower before mentioned, who
+expressed himself quite as emphatically. He was brought up among white
+people ("I's been taughted a heap," he said), and believed that the
+salvation of the blacks lay in their recognition of white supremacy. But
+he was less perspicacious than the older man. He was one of the very few
+persons whom I met at the South who did not recognize me at sight as a
+Yankee. "Are you a legislator-man?" he asked, at the end of our talk.
+The legislature was in session on the hill. But perhaps, after all, he
+only meant to flatter me.
+
+If I am long on the way, it is because, as I love always to have it, the
+going and coming were the better part of the pilgrimage. The estate
+itself is beautifully situated, with far-away horizons; but it has
+fallen into great neglect, while the house, almost in ruins, and
+occupied by colored people, is to Northern eyes hardly more than a
+larger cabin. It put me in mind of the question of a Western gentleman
+whom I met at St. Augustine. He had come to Florida against his will,
+the weather and the doctor having combined against him, and was looking
+at everything through very blue spectacles. "Have you seen any of those
+fine old country mansions," he asked, "about which we read so often in
+descriptions of Southern, life?" He had been on the lookout for them, he
+averred, ever since he left home, and had yet to find the first one; and
+from his tone it was evident that he thought the Southern idea of a
+"fine old mansion" must be different from his.
+
+The Murat house, certainly, was never a palace, except as love may have
+made it so. But it was old; people had lived in it, and died in it;
+those who once owned it, whose name and memory still clung to it, were
+now in narrower houses; and it was easy for the visitor--for one
+visitor, at least--to fall into pensive meditation. I strolled about the
+grounds; stood between the last year's cotton-rows, while a Carolina
+wren poured out his soul from an oleander bush near by; admired the
+confidence of a pair of shrikes, who had made a nest in a honeysuckle
+vine in the front yard; listened to the sweet music of mocking-birds,
+cardinals, and orchard orioles; watched the martins circling above the
+trees; thought of the Princess, and smiled at the black children who
+thrust their heads out of the windows of her "big house;" and then, with
+a sprig of honeysuckle for a keepsake, I started slowly homeward.
+
+The sun by this time was straight overhead, but my umbrella saved me
+from absolute discomfort, while birds furnished here and there an
+agreeable diversion. I recall in particular some white-crowned sparrows,
+the first ones I had seen in Florida. At a bend in the road opposite the
+water-lily swamp, while I was cooling myself in the shade of a friendly
+pine-tree,--enjoying at the same time a fence overrun with Cherokee
+roses,--a man and his little boy came along in a wagon. The man seemed
+really disappointed when I told him that I was going into town, instead
+of coming from it. It was pretty warm weather for walking, and he had
+meant to offer me a lift. He was a Scandinavian, who had been for some
+years in Florida. He owned a good farm not far from the Murat estate,
+which latter he had been urged to buy; but he thought a man wasn't any
+better off for owning too much land. He talked of his crops, his
+children, the climate, and so on, all in a cheerful strain, pleasant to
+hear. If the pessimists are right,--which may I be kept from
+believing,--the optimists are certainly more comfortable to live with,
+though it be only for ten minutes under a roadside shade-tree.
+
+When I reached the street-car track at the foot of the hill, the one car
+which plies back and forth through the city was in its place, with the
+driver beside it, but no mules.
+
+"Are you going to start directly?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, sah," he answered; and then, looking toward the stable, he shouted
+in a peremptory voice, "Do about, there! Do about!"
+
+"What does that mean?" said I. "Hurry up?"
+
+"Yes, sah, that's it. 'Tain't everybody that wants to be hurried up; so
+we tells 'em, 'Do about!'"
+
+Half a minute afterwards two very neatly dressed little colored boys
+stepped upon the rear platform.
+
+"Where you goin'?" said the driver. "Uptown?"
+
+They said they were.
+
+"Well, come inside. Stay out there, and you'll git hurt and cost this
+dried-up company more money than you's wuth."
+
+They dropped into seats by the rear door. He motioned them to the front
+corner. "Sit down there," he said, "right there." They obeyed, and as he
+turned away he added, what I found more and more to be true, as I saw
+more of him, "I ain't de boss, but I's got right smart to say."
+
+Then, he whistled to the mules, flourished his whip, and to a persistent
+accompaniment of whacks and whistles we went crawling up the hill.
+
+
+
+
+WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE.
+
+
+I arrived at Tallahassee, from Jacksonville, late in the afternoon,
+after a hot and dusty ride of more than eight hours. The distance is
+only a hundred and sixty odd miles, I believe; but with some bright
+exceptions, Southern railroads, like Southern men, seem to be under the
+climate, and schedule time is more or less a formality.
+
+For the first two thirds of the way the country is flat and barren.
+Happily, I sat within earshot of an amateur political economist, who,
+like myself, was journeying to the State capital. By birth and education
+he was a New York State man, I heard him say; an old abolitionist, who
+had voted for Birney, Fremont, and all their successors down to
+Hayes--the only vote he was ever ashamed of. Now he was a "greenbacker."
+The country was going to the dogs, and all because the government did
+not furnish money enough. The people would find it out some time, he
+guessed. He talked as a bird sings--for his own pleasure. But I was
+pleased, too. His was an amiable enthusiasm, quite exempt, as it seemed,
+from all that bitterness, which an exclusive possession of the truth so
+commonly engenders. He was greatly in earnest; he knew he was right; but
+he could still see the comical side of things; he still had a sense of
+the ludicrous; and in that lay his salvation. For a sense of the
+ludicrous is the best of mental antiseptics; it, if anything, will keep
+our perishable human nature sweet, and save it from the madhouse. His
+discourse was punctuated throughout with quiet laughter. Thus, when he
+said, "_I_ call it the _late_ Republican party," it was with a chuckle
+so good-natured, so free from acidity and self-conceit, that only a
+pretty stiff partisan could have taken offense. Even his predictions of
+impending national ruin were delivered with numberless merry quips and
+twinkles. Many good Republicans and good Democrats (the adjective is
+used in its political sense) might have envied him his sunny temper,
+joined, as it was, to a good stock of native shrewdness. For something
+in his eye made it plain that, with all his other qualities, our merry
+greenbacker was a reasonably competent hand at a bargain; so that I was
+not in the least surprised when his seat-mate told me afterward, in a
+tone of much respect, that the "Colonel" owned a very comfortable
+property at St. Augustine. But his best possession, I still thought, was
+his humor and his own generous appreciation of it. To enjoy one's own
+jokes is to have a pretty safe insurance against inward adversity.
+
+Happily, I say, this good-humored talker sat within hearing. Happily,
+too, it was now--April 4--the height of the season for flowering
+dogwood, pink azalea, fringe-bushes, Cherokee roses, and water lilies.
+All these had blossomed abundantly, and mile after mile the wilderness
+and the solitary place were glad for them. Here and there, also, I
+caught flying glimpses of some unknown plant bearing a long upright
+raceme of creamy-white flowers. It might be a white lupine, I thought,
+till at one of our stops between stations it happened to be growing
+within reach. Then I guessed it to be a _Baptisia_, which guess was
+afterward confirmed--to my regret; for the flowers lost at once all
+their attractiveness. So ineffaceable (oftenest for good, but this time
+for ill) is an early impression upon the least honorably esteemed of the
+five senses! As a boy, it was one of my tasks to keep down with a scythe
+the weeds and bushes in a rocky, thin-soiled cattle pasture. In that
+task,--which, at the best, was a little too much like work--my most
+troublesome enemy was the common wild indigo (_Baptisia tinctoria_),
+partly from the wicked pertinacity with which it sprang up again after
+every mowing, but especially from the fact that the cut or bruised stalk
+exhaled what in my nostrils was a most abominable odor. Other people do
+not find it so offensive, I suspect, but to me it was, and is, ten times
+worse than the more pungent but comparatively salubrious perfume which a
+certain handsome little black-and-white quadruped--handsome, but
+impolite--is given to scattering upon the nocturnal breeze in moments of
+extreme perturbation.
+
+Somewhere beyond the Suwanee River (at which I looked as long as it
+remained in sight--and thought of Christine Nilsson) there came a sudden
+change in the aspect of the country, coincident with a change in the
+nature of the soil, from white sand to red clay; a change indescribably
+exhilarating to a New Englander who had been living, if only for two
+months, in a country without hills. How good it was to see the land
+rising, though never so gently, as it stretched away toward the horizon!
+My spirits rose with it. By and by we passed extensive hillside
+plantations, on which little groups of negroes, men and women, were at
+work. I seemed to see the old South of which I had read and dreamed, a
+South not in the least like anything to be found in the wilds of
+southern and eastern Florida; a land of cotton, and, better still, a
+land of Southern people, instead of Northern tourists and settlers. And
+when we stopped at a thrifty-looking village, with neat, homelike
+houses, open grounds, and lordly shade-trees, I found myself saying
+under my breath, "Now, then, we are getting back into God's country."
+
+As for Tallahassee itself, it was exactly what I had hoped to find it: a
+typical Southern town; not a camp in the woods, nor an old city
+metamorphosed into a fashionable winter resort; a place untainted by
+"Northern enterprise," whose inhabitants were unmistakably at home, and
+whose houses, many of them, at least, had no appearance of being for
+sale. It is compactly built on a hill,--the state capitol crowning the
+top,--down the pretty steep sides of which run roads into the open
+country all about. The roads, too, are not so sandy but that it is
+comparatively comfortable to walk in them--a blessing which the
+pedestrian sorely misses in the towns of lower Florida: at St.
+Augustine, for example, where, as soon as one leaves the streets of the
+city itself, walking and carriage-riding alike become burdensome and,
+for any considerable distance, all but impossible. Here at Tallahassee,
+it was plain, I should not be kept indoors for want of invitations from
+without.
+
+I arrived, as I have said, rather late in the afternoon; so late that I
+did nothing more than ramble a little about the city, noting by the way
+the advent of the chimney swifts, which I had not found elsewhere, and
+returning to my lodgings with a handful of "banana-shrub"
+blossoms,--smelling wonderfully like their name,--which a good woman had
+insisted upon giving me when I stopped beside the fence to ask her the
+name of the bush. It was my first, but by no means my last, experience
+of the floral generosity of Tallahassee people.
+
+The next morning I woke betimes, and to my astonishment found the city
+enveloped in a dense fog. The hotel clerk, an old resident, to whom I
+went in my perplexity, was as much surprised as his questioner. He did
+not know what it could mean, he was sure; it was very unusual; but he
+thought it did not indicate foul weather. For a man so slightly
+acquainted with such phenomena, he proved to be a remarkably good
+prophet; for though, during my fortnight's stay, there must have been at
+least eight foggy mornings, every day was sunny, and not a drop of rain
+fell.
+
+That first bright forenoon is still a bright memory. For one thing, the
+mocking-birds outsang themselves till I felt, and wrote, that I had
+never heard mocking-birds before. That they really did surpass their
+brethren of St. Augustine and Sanford would perhaps be too much to
+assert, but so it seemed; and I was pleased, some months afterward, to
+come upon a confirmatory judgment by Mr. Maurice Thompson, who, if any
+one, must be competent to speak.
+
+"If I were going to risk the reputation of our country on the singing of
+a mocking-bird against a European nightingale," says Mr. Thompson,[1] "I
+should choose my champion from the hill-country in the neighborhood of
+Tallahassee, or from the environs of Mobile.... I have found no birds
+elsewhere to compare with those in that belt of country about thirty
+miles wide, stretching from Live Oak in Florida, by way of Tallahassee,
+to some miles west of Mobile."
+
+[Footnote 1: _By-Ways and Bird-Notes_, p. 20.]
+
+I had gone down the hill past some negro cabins, into a small,
+straggling wood, and through the wood to a gate which let me into a
+plantation lane. It was the fairest of summer forenoons (to me, I mean;
+by the almanac it was only the 5th of April), and one of the fairest of
+quiet landscapes: broad fields rising gently to the horizon, and before
+me, winding upward, a grassy lane open on one side, and bordered on the
+other by a deep red gulch and a zigzag fence, along which grew vines,
+shrubs, and tall trees. The tender and varied tints of the new leaves,
+the lively green of the young grain, the dark ploughed fields, the red
+earth of the wayside--I can see them yet, with all that Florida sunshine
+on them. In the bushes by the fence-row were a pair of cardinal
+grosbeaks, the male whistling divinely, quite unabashed by the
+volubility of a mocking-bird who balanced himself on the treetop
+overhead,
+
+    "Superb and sole, upon a pluméd spray,"
+
+and seemed determined to show a Yankee stranger what mocking-birds could
+really do when they set out. He did his work well; the love notes of the
+flicker could not have been improved by the flicker himself; but, right
+or wrong, I could not help feeling that the cardinal struck a truer and
+deeper note; while both together did not hinder me from hearing the
+faint songs of grasshopper sparrows rising from the ground on either
+side of the lane. It was a fine contrast: the mocker flooding the air
+from the topmost bough, and the sparrows whispering their few almost
+inaudible notes out of the grass. Yes, and at the self-same moment the
+eye also had its contrast; for a marsh hawk was skimming over the field,
+while up in the sky soared a pair of hen-hawks.
+
+In the wood, composed of large trees, both hard wood and pine, I had
+found a group of three summer tanagers, two males and one female,--the
+usual proportion with birds generally, one may almost say, in the
+pairing season. The female was the first of her sex that I had seen, and
+I remarked with pleasure the comparative brightness of her dress. Among
+tanagers, as among negroes, red and yellow are esteemed a pretty good
+match. At this point, too, in a cluster of pines, I caught a new
+song--faint and listless, like the indigo-bird's, I thought; and at the
+word I started forward eagerly. Here, doubtless, was the indigo-bird's
+southern congener, the nonpareil, or painted bunting, a beauty which I
+had begun to fear I was to miss. I had recognized my first tanager from
+afar, ten days before, his voice and theme were so like his Northern
+relative's; but this time I was too hasty. My listless singer was not
+the nonpareil, nor even a finch of any kind, but a yellow-throated
+warbler. For a month I had seen birds of his species almost daily, but
+always in hard wood trees, and silent. Henceforth, as long as I remained
+in Florida, they were invariably in pines,--their summer quarters,--and
+in free song. Their plumage is of the neatest and most exquisite; few,
+even among warblers, surpass them in that regard: black and white
+(reminding one of the black-and-white creeper, which they resemble also
+in their feeding habits), with a splendid yellow gorget. Myrtle warblers
+(yellow-rumps) were still here (the peninsula is alive with them in the
+winter), and a ruby-crowned kinglet mingled its lovely voice with the
+simple trills of pine warblers, while out of a dense low treetop some
+invisible singer was pouring a stream of fine-spun melody. It should
+have been a house wren, I thought (another was singing close by), only
+its tune was several times too long.
+
+At least four of my longer excursions into the surrounding country
+(long, not intrinsically, but by reason of the heat) were made with a
+view to possible ivory-billed woodpeckers. Just out of the town
+northward, beyond what appeared to be the court end of Marion Street,
+the principal business street of the city, I had accosted a gentleman in
+a dooryard in front of a long, low, vine-covered, romantic-looking
+house. He was evidently at home, and not so busy as to make an
+interruption probably intrusive. I inquired the name of a tree, I
+believe. At all events, I engaged him in conversation, and found him
+most agreeable--an Ohio gentleman, a man of science, who had been in the
+South long enough to have acquired large measures of Southern
+_insouciance_ (there are times when a French word has a politer sound
+than any English equivalent), which takes life as made for something
+better than worry and pleasanter than hard work. He had seen
+ivory-bills, he said, and thought I might be equally fortunate if I
+would visit a certain swamp, about which he would tell me, or, better
+still, if I would go out to Lake Bradford.
+
+First, because it was nearer, I went to the swamp, taking an early
+breakfast and setting forth in a fog that was almost a mist, to make as
+much of the distance as possible before the sun came out. My course lay
+westward, some four miles, along the railway track, which, thanks to
+somebody, is provided with a comfortable footpath of hard clay covering
+the sleepers midway between the rails. If all railroads were thus
+furnished they might be recommended as among the best of routes for
+walking naturalists, since they go straight through the wild country.
+This one carried me by turns through woodland and cultivated field,
+upland and swamp, pine land and hammock; and, happily, my expectations
+of the ivory-bill were not lively enough to quicken my steps or render
+me heedless of things along the way.
+
+Here I was equally surprised and delighted by the sight of yellow
+jessamine still in flower more than a month after I had seen the end of
+its brief season, only a hundred miles further south. So great,
+apparently, is the difference between the peninsula and this Tallahassee
+hill-country, which by its physical geography seems rather to be a part
+of Georgia than of Florida. Here, too, the pink azalea was at its
+prettiest, and the flowering dogwood, also, true queen of the woods in
+Florida as in Massachusetts. The fringe-bush, likewise, stood here and
+there in solitary state, and thorn-bushes flourished in bewildering
+variety.
+
+Nearer the track were the omnipresent blackberry vines, some patches of
+which are especially remembered for their bright rosy flowers.
+
+Out of the dense vegetation of a swamp came the cries of Florida
+gallinules, and then, of a sudden, I caught, or seemed to catch, the
+sweet _kurwee_ whistle of a Carolina rail. Instinctively I turned my ear
+for its repetition, and by so doing admitted to myself that I was not
+certain of what I had heard, although the sora's call is familiar, and
+the bird was reasonably near. I had been taken unawares, and every
+ornithologist knows how hard it is to be sure of one's self in such a
+case. He knows, too, how uncertain he feels of any brother observer who
+in a similar case seems troubled by no distrust of his own senses. The
+whistle, whatever it had been, was not repeated, and I lost my only
+opportunity of adding the sora's name to my Florida catalogue--a loss,
+fortunately, of no consequence to any but myself, since the bird is well
+known as a winter visitor to the State.
+
+Further along, a great blue heron was stalking about the edge of a
+marshy pool, and further still, in a woody swamp, stood three little
+blue herons, one of them in white plumage. In the drier and more open
+parts of the way cardinals, mocking-birds, and thrashers were singing,
+ground doves were cooing, quails were prophesying, and loggerhead
+shrikes sat, trim and silent, on the telegraph wire. In the pine lands
+were plenty of brown-headed nuthatches, full, as always, of friendly
+gossip; two red-shouldered hawks, for whom life seemed to wear a more
+serious aspect; three Maryland yellow throats; a pair of bluebirds, rare
+enough now to be twice welcome; a black-and-white creeper, and a yellow
+redpoll warbler. In the same pine woods, too, there was much good music:
+house wrens, Carolina wrens, red-eyed and white-eyed vireos, pine
+warblers, yellow-throated warblers, blue yellowbacks, red-eyed chewinks,
+and, twice welcome, like the bluebirds, a Carolina chickadee.
+
+A little beyond this point, in a cut through a low sand bank, I found
+two pairs of rough-winged swallows, and stopped for some time to stare
+at them, being myself, meanwhile, a gazing-stock for two or three
+negroes lounging about the door of a cabin not far away. It is a happy
+chance when a man's time is _doubly_ improved. Two of the birds--the
+first ones I had ever seen, to be sure of them--perched directly before
+me on the wire, one facing me, the other with his back turned. It was
+kindly done; and then, as if still further to gratify my curiosity, they
+visited a hole in the bank. A second hole was doubtless the property of
+the other pair. Living alternately in heaven and in a hole in the
+ground, they wore the livery of the earth.
+
+    "They are not fair to outward view
+    As many swallows be,"
+
+I said to myself. But I was not the less glad to see them.
+
+I should have been gladder for a sight of the big woodpecker, whose
+reputed dwelling-place lay not far ahead. But, though I waited and
+listened, and went through the swamp, and beyond it, I heard no strange
+shout, nor saw any strange bird; and toward noon, just as the sun
+brushed away the fog, I left the railway track for a carriage by-way
+which, I felt sure, must somehow bring me back to the city. And so it
+did, past here and there a house, till I came to the main road, and then
+to the Murat estate, and was again on familiar ground.
+
+Two mornings afterward I made another early and foggy start, this time
+for Lake Bradford. My instructions were to follow the railway for a mile
+or so beyond the station, and then take a road bearing away sharply to
+the left. This I did, making sure I was on the right road by inquiring
+of the first man I saw--a negro at work before his cabin. I had gone
+perhaps half a mile further when a white man, on his way after a load of
+wood, as I judged, drove up behind me. "Won't you ride?" he asked. "You
+are going to Lake Bradford, I believe, and I am going a piece in the
+same direction." I jumped up behind (the wagon consisting of two long
+planks fastened to the two axles), thankful, but not without a little
+bewilderment. The good-hearted negro, it appeared, had asked the man to
+look out for me; and he, on his part, seemed glad to do a kindness as
+well as to find company. We jolted along, chatting at arm's length, as
+it were, about this and that. He knew nothing of the ivory-bill; but
+wild turkeys--oh, yes, he had seen a flock of eight, as well as he could
+count, not long before, crossing the road in the very woods through
+which I was going. As for snakes, they were plenty enough, he guessed.
+One of his horses was bitten while ploughing, and died in half an hour.
+(A Florida man who cannot tell at least one snake story may be set down
+as having land to sell.) He thought it a pretty good jaunt to the lake,
+and the road wasn't any too plain, though no doubt I should get there;
+but I began to perceive that a white man who traveled such distances on
+foot in that country was more of a _rara avis_ than any woodpecker.
+
+Our roads diverged after a while, and my own soon ran into a wood with
+an undergrowth of saw palmetto. This was the place for the ivory-bill,
+and as at the swamp two days before, so now I stopped and listened, and
+then stopped and listened again. The Fates were still against me. There
+was neither woodpecker nor turkey, and I pushed on, mostly through pine
+woods--full of birds, but nothing new--till I came out at the lake.
+Here, beside an idle sawmill and heaps of sawdust, I was greeted by a
+solitary negro, well along in years, who demanded, in a tone of almost
+comical astonishment, where in the world I had come from. I told him
+from Tallahassee, and he seemed so taken aback that I began to think I
+must look uncommonly like an invalid, a "Northern consumptive," perhaps.
+Otherwise, why should a walk of six miles, or something less, be treated
+as such a marvel? However, the negro and I were soon on the friendliest
+of terms, talking of the old times, the war, the prospects of the
+colored people (the younger ones were fast going to the bad, he
+thought), while I stood looking out over the lake, a pretty sheet of
+water, surrounded mostly by cypress woods, but disfigured for the
+present by the doings of lumbermen. What interested me most (such is the
+fate of the devotee) was a single barn swallow, the first and only one
+that I saw on my Southern trip.
+
+On my way back to the city, after much fatherly advice about the road on
+the part of the negro, who seemed to feel that I ran the greatest risk
+of getting lost, I made two more additions to my Florida catalogue--the
+wood duck and the yellow-billed cuckoo, the latter unexpectedly early
+(April 11), since Mr. Chapman had recorded it as arriving at Gainesville
+at a date sixteen days later than this.
+
+I did not repeat my visit to Lake Bradford; but, not to give up the
+ivory-bill too easily,--and because I must walk somewhere,--I went
+again as far as the palmetto scrub. This time, though I still missed the
+woodpecker, I was fortunate enough to come upon a turkey. In the
+thickest part of the wood, as I turned a corner, there she stood before
+me in the middle of the road. She ran along the horse-track for perhaps
+a rod, and then disappeared among the palmetto leaves.
+
+Meanwhile, two or three days before, while returning from St. Mark's,
+whither I had gone for a day on the river, I had noticed from the car
+window a swamp, or baygall, which looked so promising that I went the
+very next morning to see what it would yield. I had taken it for a
+cypress swamp, but it proved to be composed mainly of oaks; very tall
+but rather slender trees, heavily draped with hanging moss and standing
+in black water. Among them were the swollen stumps, three or four feet
+high, of larger trees which had been felled. I pushed in through the
+surrounding shrubbery and bay-trees, and waited for some time, leaning
+against one of the larger trunks and listening to the noises, of which
+the air of the swamp was full. Great-crested flycatchers, two Acadian
+flycatchers, a multitude of blue yellow-backed warblers, and what I
+supposed to be some loud-voiced frogs were especially conspicuous in the
+concert; but a Carolina wren, a cardinal, a red-eyed vireo, and a
+blue-gray gnatcatcher, the last with the merest thread of a voice,
+contributed their share to the medley, and once a chickadee struck up
+his sweet and gentle strain in the very depths of the swamp--like an
+angel singing in hell.
+
+My walk on the railway, that wonderful St. Mark's branch (I could never
+have imagined the possibility of running trains over so crazy a track),
+took me through the choicest of bird country. The bushes were alive, and
+the air rang with music. In the midst of the chorus I suddenly caught
+somewhere before me what I had no doubt was the song of a purple finch,
+a bird that I had not yet seen in Florida. I quickened my steps, and to
+my delight the singer proved to be a blue grosbeak. I had caught a
+glimpse of one two days before, as I have described in another chapter,
+but with no opportunity for a final identification. Here, as it soon
+turned out, there were at least four birds, all males, and all singing;
+chasing each other about after the most persistent fashion, in a piece
+of close shrubbery with tall trees interspersed, and acting--the four
+of them--just as two birds are often seen to do when contending for the
+possession of a building site. At a first hearing the song seems not so
+long sustained as the purple finch's commonly is, but exceedingly like
+it in voice and manner, though not equal to it, I should be inclined to
+say, in either respect. The birds made frequent use of a monosyllabic
+call, corresponding to the calls of the purple finch and the
+rose-breasted grosbeak, but readily distinguishable from both. I was
+greatly pleased to see them, and thought them extremely handsome, with
+their dark blue plumage set off by wing patches of rich chestnut.
+
+A little farther, and I was saluted by the saucy cry of my first Florida
+chat. The fellow had chosen just such a tangled thicket as he favors in
+Massachusetts, and whistled and kept out of sight after the most
+approved manner of his kind. On the other side of the track a white-eyed
+vireo was asserting himself, as he had been doing since the day I
+reached St. Augustine; but though he seems a pretty clever substitute
+for the chat in the chat's absence, his light is quickly put out when
+the clown himself steps into the ring. Ground doves cooed, cardinals
+whistled, and mocking-birds sang and mocked by turns. Orchard orioles,
+no unworthy companions of mocking-birds and cardinals, sang here and
+there from a low treetop, especially in the vicinity of houses. To judge
+from what I saw, they are among the most characteristic of Tallahassee
+birds,--as numerous as Baltimore orioles are in Massachusetts towns,
+and frequenting much the same kind of places. In one day's walk I
+counted twenty-five. Elegantly dressed as they are,--and elegance is
+better than brilliancy, perhaps, even in a bird,--they seem to be
+thoroughly democratic. It was a pleasure to see them so fond of cabin
+door-yards.
+
+Of the other birds along the St. Mark's railway, let it be enough to
+mention white-throated and white-crowned sparrows, red-eyed chewinks
+(the white-eye was not found in the Tallahassee region), a red-bellied
+woodpecker, two red-shouldered hawks, shrikes, kingbirds,
+yellow-throated warblers, Maryland yellow-throats, pine warblers, palm
+warblers,--which in spite of their name seek their summer homes north of
+the United States,--myrtle warblers, now grown scarce, house wrens,
+summer tanagers, and quails. The last-named birds, by the way, I had
+expected to find known as "partridges" at the South, but as a matter of
+fact I heard that name applied to them only once. On the St. Augustine
+road, before breakfast, I met an old negro setting out for his day's
+work behind a pair of oxen. "Taking some good exercise?" he asked, by
+way of a neighborly greeting; and, not to be less neighborly than he, I
+responded with some remark about a big shot-gun which occupied a
+conspicuous place in his cart. "Oh," he said, "game is plenty out where
+we are going, about eight miles, and I take the gun along." "What kind
+of game?" "Well, sir, we may sometimes find a partridge." I smiled at
+the anti-climax, but was glad to hear Bob White honored for once with
+his Southern title.
+
+A good many of my jaunts took me past the gallinule swamp before
+mentioned, and almost always I stopped and went near. It was worth while
+to hear the poultry cries of the gallinules if nothing more; and often
+several of the birds would be seen swimming about among the big white
+lilies and the green tussocks. Once I discovered one of them sitting
+upright on a stake,--a precarious seat, off which he soon tumbled
+awkwardly into the water. At another time, on the same stake, sat some
+dark, strange-looking object. The opera-glass showed it at once to be a
+large bird sitting with its back toward me, and holding its wings
+uplifted in the familiar heraldic, _e-pluribus-unum_ attitude of our
+American spread-eagle; but even then it was some seconds before I
+recognized it as an anhinga,--water turkey,--though it was a male in
+full nuptial garb. I drew nearer and nearer, and meanwhile it turned
+squarely about,--a slow and ticklish operation,--so that its back was
+presented to the sun; as if it had dried one side of its wings and
+tail,--for the latter, too, was fully spread,--and now would dry the
+other. There for some time it sat preening its feathers, with monstrous
+twistings and untwistings of its snaky neck. If the chat is a clown, the
+water turkey would make its fortune as a contortionist. Finally it rose,
+circled about till it got well aloft, and then, setting its wings,
+sailed away southward and vanished, leaving me in a state of wonder as
+to where it had come from, and whether it was often to be seen in such a
+place--perfectly open, close beside the highway, and not far from
+houses. I did not expect ever to see another, but the next morning, on
+my way up the railroad to pay a second visit to the ivory-bill's swamp,
+I looked up by chance,--a brown thrush was singing on the telegraph
+wire,--and saw two anhingas soaring overhead, their silvery wings
+glistening in the sun as they wheeled. I kept my glass on them till the
+distance swallowed them up.
+
+Of one long forenoon's ramble I retain particular remembrance, not on
+account of any birds, but for a half hour of pleasant human intercourse.
+I went out of the city by an untried road, hoping to find some trace of
+migrating birds, especially of certain warblers, the prospect of whose
+acquaintance was one of the lesser considerations which had brought me
+so far from home. No such trace appeared, however, nor, in my
+fortnight's stay in Tallahassee, in almost the height of the migratory
+season, did I, so far as I could tell, see a single passenger bird of
+any sort. Some species arrived from the South--cuckoos and orioles, for
+example; others, no doubt, took their departure for the North; but to
+the best of my knowledge not one passed through. It was a strange
+contrast to what is witnessed everywhere in New England. By some other
+route swarms of birds must at that moment have been entering the United
+States from Mexico and beyond; but unless my observation was at fault,--
+and I am assured that sharper eyes than mine have had a similar
+experience,--their line of march did not bring them into the Florida
+hill-country. My morning's road not only showed me no birds, but led me
+nowhere, and, growing discouraged, I turned back till I came to a lane
+leading off to the left at right angles. This I followed so far that it
+seemed wise, if possible, to make my way back to the city without
+retracing my steps. Not to spend my strength for naught, however (the
+noonday sun having always to be treated with respect), I made for a
+solitary house in the distance. Another lane ran past it. That, perhaps,
+would answer my purpose. I entered the yard, all ablaze with roses, and
+in response to my knock a gentleman appeared upon the doorstep. Yes, he
+said, the lane would carry me straight to the Meridian road (so I think
+he called it), and thence into the city. "Past Dr. H.'s?" I asked.
+"Yes." And then I knew where I was.
+
+First, however, I must let my new acquaintance show me his garden. His
+name was G., he said. Most likely I had heard of him, for the
+legislature was just then having a good deal to say about his sheep, in
+connection with some proposed dog-law. Did I like roses? As he talked he
+cut one after another, naming each as he put it into my hand. Then I
+must look at his Japanese persimmon trees, and many other things. Here
+was a pretty shrub. Perhaps I could tell what it was by crushing and
+smelling a leaf? No; it was something familiar; I sniffed, and looked
+foolish, and after all he had to tell me its name--camphor. So we went
+the rounds of the garden,--frightening a mocking-bird off her nest in an
+orange-tree,--till my hands were full. It is too bad I have forgotten
+how many pecan-trees he had planted, and how many sheep he kept. A
+well-regulated memory would have held fast to such figures: mine is
+certain only that there were four eggs in the mocking-bird's nest. Mr.
+G. was a man of enterprise, at any rate; a match for any Yankee,
+although he had come to Florida not from Yankeeland, but from northern
+Georgia. I hope all his crops are still thriving, especially his white
+roses and his Marshal Niels.
+
+In the lane, after skirting some pleasant woods, which I meant to visit
+again, but found no opportunity, I was suddenly assaulted by a pair of
+brown thrashers, half beside themselves after their manner because of my
+approach to their nest. How close my approach was I cannot say; but it
+must be confessed that I played upon their fears to the utmost of my
+ability, wishing to see as many of their neighbors as the disturbance
+would bring together. Several other thrashers, a catbird, and two house
+wrens appeared (all these, since "blood is thicker than water," may have
+felt some special cousinly solicitude, for aught I know), with a
+ruby-crowned kinglet and a field sparrow.
+
+In the valley, near a little pond, as I came out into the Meridian road,
+a solitary vireo was singing, in the very spot where one had been heard
+six days before. Was it the same bird? I asked myself. And was it
+settled for the summer? Such an explanation seemed the more likely
+because I had found no solitary vireo anywhere else about the city,
+though the species had been common earlier in the season in eastern and
+southern Florida, where I had seen my last one--at New Smyrna--March 26.
+
+At this same dip in the Meridian road, on a previous visit, I had
+experienced one of the pleasantest of my Tallahassee sensations. The
+morning was one of those when every bird is in tune. By the road side I
+had just passed Carolina wrens, house wrens, a chipper, a field sparrow,
+two thrashers, an abundance of chewinks, two orchard orioles, several
+tanagers, a flock of quail, and mocking-birds and cardinals uncounted.
+In a pine wood near by, a wood pewee, a pine warbler, a yellow-throated
+warbler, and a pine-wood sparrow were singing--a most peculiarly select
+and modest chorus. Just at the lowest point in the valley I stopped to
+listen to a song which I did not recognize, but which, by and by, I
+settled upon as probably the work of a freakish prairie warbler. At that
+moment, as if to confirm my conjecture,--which in the retrospect becomes
+almost ridiculous,--a prairie warbler hopped into sight on an outer twig
+of the water-oak out of which the music had proceeded. Still something
+said, "Are you sure?" and I stepped inside the fence. There on the
+ground were two or three white-crowned sparrows, and in an instant the
+truth of the case flashed upon me. I remembered the saying of a friend,
+that the song of the white-crown had reminded him of the vesper sparrow
+and the black-throated green warbler. That was my bird; and I listened
+again, though I could no longer be said to feel in doubt. A long time I
+waited. Again and again the birds sang, and at last I discovered one of
+them perched at the top of the oak, tossing back his head and warbling
+--a white-crowned sparrow: the one regular Massachusetts migrant which I
+had often seen, but had never heard utter a sound.
+
+The strain opens with smooth, sweet notes almost exactly like the
+introductory syllables of the vesper sparrow. Then the tone changes, and
+the remainder of the song is in something like the pleasingly hoarse
+voice of a prairie warbler, or a black-throated green. It is soft and
+very pretty; not so perfect a piece of art as the vesper sparrow's
+tune,--few bird-songs are,--but taking for its very oddity, and at the
+same time tender and sweet. More than one writer has described it as
+resembling the song of the white-throat. Even Minot, who in general was
+the most painstaking and accurate of observers, as he is one of the most
+interesting of our systematic writers, says that the two songs are
+"almost exactly" alike. There could be no better example of the
+fallibility which attaches, and in the nature of the case must attach,
+to all writing upon such subjects. The two songs have about as much in
+common as those of the hermit thrush and the brown thrasher, or those of
+the song sparrow and the chipper. In other words, they have nothing in
+common. Probably in Minot's case, as in so many others of a similar
+nature, the simple explanation is that when he thought he was listening
+to one bird he was really listening to another.
+
+The Tallahassee road to which I had oftenest resorted, to which, now,
+from far Massachusetts, I oftenest look back, the St. Augustine road, so
+called, I have spoken of elsewhere. Thither, after packing my trunk on
+the morning of the 18th, I betook myself for a farewell stroll. My
+holiday was done. For the last time, perhaps, I listened to the
+mocking-bird and the cardinal, as by and by, when the grand holiday is
+over, I shall listen to my last wood thrush and my last bluebird. But
+what then? Florida fields are still bright, and neither mocking-bird nor
+cardinal knows aught of my absence. And so it _will_ be.
+
+    "When you and I behind the Veil are past,
+    Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last."
+
+None the less, it is good to have lived our day and taken our peep at
+the mighty show. Ten thousand things we may have fretted ourselves
+about, uselessly or worse. But to have lived in the sun, to have loved
+natural beauty, to have felt the majesty of trees, to have enjoyed the
+sweetness of flowers and the music of birds,--so much, at least, is not
+vanity nor vexation of spirit.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+Air-plants,
+Alligator,
+Azalea,
+
+Baptisia,
+Beggar's-ticks,
+Blackberry,
+Blackbird, red--wing,
+Bladderwort,
+Bluebird,
+Blue-eyed Grass,
+Butterworts,
+Buzzard, turkey,
+
+Calopogon,
+Carrion Crow (Black Vulture),
+Catbird,
+Cedar-bird,
+Cedar, red,
+Chat, yellow-breasted,
+Cherokee Rose,
+Cherry, wild,
+Chewink (Towhee):--
+  red-eyed,
+  white--eyed,
+Chickadee, Carolina,
+Chimney Swift,
+Chuck-will's-widow,
+Clematis Baldwinii,
+Clover, buffalo,
+Cloudberry,
+Coot (Fulica americana),
+Coquina Clam,
+Coreopsis,
+Cormorant,
+Crab-apple,
+Creeper, black-and-white,
+Cross-vine,
+Crow,
+Cuckoo, yellow-billed,
+Cypress-tree,
+
+Dabchick,
+Dove:--
+  Carolina,
+  ground,
+Duck, wood,
+
+Eagle, bald,
+Egret:--
+  great white,
+  little white,
+
+Fish-hawk,
+Flicker (Golden-winged Woodpecker),
+Flowering Dogwood,
+Flycatchers:--
+  Acadian,
+  crested,
+  kingbird,
+  phoebe,
+  wood pewee,
+Fringe-bush,
+Frogs,
+
+Gallinule:--
+  Florida,
+  purple,
+Gannet,
+Gnatcatcher, blue-gray,
+Golden club,
+Goldenrod,
+Grackle, boat-tailed,
+Grebe, pied-billed,
+Grosbeak:--
+  cardinal,
+  blue,
+Gull:--
+  Bonaparte's,
+  ring-billed,
+
+Hawk:--
+  fish,
+  marsh,
+  red-shouldered,
+  sparrow,
+  swallow-tailed,
+Heron:--
+  great blue,
+  great white (_or_ Egret),
+  green,
+  little blue,
+  Louisiana,
+  night (black-crowned),
+Honeysuckle:--
+  scarlet,
+  white,
+Houstonia, round-leaved,
+Humming-bird, ruby-throated,
+Hypoxis,
+
+Iris versicolor,
+
+Jay:--
+  Florida,
+  Florida blue,
+Judas-tree,
+
+Killdeer Plover,
+Kingbird,
+Kingfisher,
+Kinglet, ruby--crowned,
+Kite, fork-tailed,
+Krigia,
+
+Lantana,
+Lark, meadow,
+Leptopoda,
+Live-oak,
+Lizards,
+Lobelia Feayana,
+Loggerhead Shrike,
+Lygodesmia,
+
+Martin, purple,
+Maryland Yellow-throat,
+Mocking-bird,
+
+Mullein,
+Myrtle Bird. _See_ Warbler.
+
+Night-hawk,
+Nuthatch, brown-headed,
+
+Orange, wild,
+Oriole, orchard,
+Osprey. _See_ Fish-Hawk.
+Oven-bird,
+Oxalis, yellow,
+
+Papaw,
+Paroquet,
+Partridge-berry,
+Pelican:--
+  brown,
+  white,
+Persimmon,
+Phoebe,
+Pipewort,
+Poison Ivy,
+Poppy, Mexican,
+
+Quail,
+
+Rail:--
+  Carolina,
+  clapper,
+  king,
+Redbird (Cardinal Grosbeak),
+
+"Ricebird".
+Robin,
+
+Salvia lyrata,
+Sanderling,
+Sandpiper:--
+  solitary,
+  spotted,
+Sassafras,
+Schrankia,
+Senecio,
+Shrike, loggerhead,
+Sow Thistle,
+Snakebird (Water Turkey),
+Sparrow:--
+  chipping,
+  field,
+  grasshopper (yellow-winged),
+  pine-wood,
+  savanna,
+  song,
+  white-crowned,
+  white-throated,
+Spiderwort,
+St. Peter's-wort,
+Strawberry,
+Swallow:--
+  barn,
+  rough-winged,
+  tree (white-bellied),
+Swift, chimney,
+
+Tanager, summer,
+Tern,
+Thorns,
+Thrasher (Brown Thrush),
+Thrush:--
+  hermit,
+  Northern water,
+  Louisiana water,
+Titlark,
+Titmouse:--
+  Carolina,
+  tufted,
+Towhee. _See_ Chewink.
+Turkey,
+
+Vaccinium, arboreum,
+Venus's Looking-glass (Specularia),
+Verbena,
+Violets,
+Vireo:--
+   red-eyed,
+   solitary,
+   white-eyed,
+   yellow-throated,
+Virginia creeper,
+Vulture (Carrion Crow),
+
+Warbler:--
+  black-throated green,
+  blue yellow-backed,
+  myrtle (yellow-rumped),
+  palm (yellow redpoll),
+  pine,
+  prairie,
+  yellow-throated (Dendroica dominica),
+
+Water Lily,
+Water Thrush:--
+  Louisiana,
+  Northern,
+Water Turkey (Snakebird),
+Wood Pewee,
+Woodpecker:--
+  downy,
+  golden-winged (flicker),
+  ivory-billed,
+  pileated,
+  red-bellied,
+  red-cockaded,
+  red-headed,
+Wren:--
+  Carolina (mocking),
+  house,
+  long-billed marsh,
+  winter,
+
+Yellow Jessamine,
+Yellow-legs (Totanus flavipes),
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Florida Sketch-Book, by Bradford Torrey
+
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