 CHAPTER 4 Along the Hills, Bro. Wherever a walker lives he finds sooner or later one favorite road. So it was with me at Nusmerna, 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 was 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 curbs. 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 unnameable 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. There 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 rowboat, 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 the 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 Fisherman 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 oister-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 can 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 drawn his neck till his bill protruded on a level with his body, to 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 Artia 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 unwee 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 knotting 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 gaily when the wrong man came along. Near the Major, not keeping him company, but feeding in the same shallows and along the same oyster-bores, 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 hills, bro, 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 turn, 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 plumoners, 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 that 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 squattered 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 Nus-Mirna green herons, or the St. Augustine sparrow-hawks, which later treated me very much as I am accustomed to being treated by a village-bred Robbins in Massachusetts. The Louisiana heron was my favorite, as I say, but, incomparably, the Hansomus member of the family, I speak of such, as I saw, was the great white egret. In truth the epithet, Hansom, seems almost a vulgarism as applied to a creature so suburb, 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 dead. I had never seen anything so magnificent. And when I returned, two or three hours afterward, from a jot up the beach to mosquito inlet, there they still were, as if they had not stirred, and all that time. The raider should understand that the egret is between four and five feet and 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 they came in sight, from a spotted sand-piper 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 mid-stream. And sometimes a few spotted sand-pipers and kill-deer plovers were feeding along the shore. Once in a great while a single gull or turn 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 saltwater. For the Hillsborough, like the Halifax and the Indian rivers, is a river in name only, a river by Bravet, being in fact a saltwater lagoon or sound between the mainland and the eastern peninsula. Fish-hawks were always in sight, and bald eagles were seldom absent together. But 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 newcomer, and, behold, it was not a hawk, but another eagle. Meanwhile, the hawk had disappeared with his fish, and I was left upon her 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, and one small life 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. You're missing them today 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, Solari. Besides him, I recall one hermit-thrush, a few cedar-birds, a house-run, chattering at a great rate among the boot-jacks, leaf-stocks, of an overturned palmetto tree, with an occasional mocking-bird, cardinal gross-beak, prairie warbler, yellow-red-pull, myrtle-bird, ruby-crown king-glit, 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 unwanted 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 spider-wort, 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 Nusmirna to Hawks Park, I recall no violets, nor any verbena or spider-wort. No 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 Hustonia was here, with the superfluity of a weedy blue sage, Salvia derrata. 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 a cunti, Zamiya, into Gryphfolia, famous as a plant out of which the southern people made bread in wartime. 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 the same Nusmirna pammock, I frequently noticed hanging endless 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, Laniata, grass fern, and my discomforture 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 I started once more for the pine lands by way of the cotton-shed hammock to see what I could see. The 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 newcomers have to take walking lessons, unless indeed they have already served an apprenticeship on Cape Cod, or in some other place equally erinarius. My own lesson I got at second hand, and on a Sunday. It was at Nusmerna, 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 it first, but I learned, after a while, that the best way is to set the hill 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 hill at every step. In such a country the soil is said to be good for orange trees, but they do not have to walk. The 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 Hillsboro 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 Nusmerna, a village in the woods, and farther away towered the lighthouse of Mosquito Enlid. Along the eastern sky stretched the long line of the peninsula's 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 was 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 error to a double inheritance. The clear eyes, moiety, and the deer-heart's part, could for the time sit still and be happy. The orange trees yielded other things besides 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 thousand-fold better than that. It was wit ineffable. What Shakespeare said about the prosperity of a just was never more strikingly exemplified. In Nusmirna, with orange grows 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 by sweet oranges that were not dry and punky 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 flavoured with quinine. Not quite so sour as a lemon, perhaps, nor quite so better 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 malaria fever. Better still, I had surprised myself, for one who had felt a life-long 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. Then 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. 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 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 this set cone-shaped toy-tree pattern on which I had been used to seeing red cedars built. And yet, when at last a study of the flora compelled me to admit their identity, 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. 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 administrations. What they were therefore 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 campfire, that is to say, as we all do, so that the burning of a brush heap in our neighbor's yard will draw us to the window. The feeling is but part of an ancestral inheritance. We have come by it honestly, and 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 Nusmirna. 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 adjunctive 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. But 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, and 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-bremmed hats, with big spurs at their heels, accosting passers-by with hearty familiarity, first names and handshakes, while their horses stood hitched to the ranches of red-side trees. A typical southern picture. Here on a Sunday afternoon were two young fellows who had brought to town a mother-cune 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 humor dickering, bought the entire lot, box and all, for a dollar-and-a-half. Just 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 vendors 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 this, he said, and we won't tell him a damn 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 tannager. 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 chat of the Chuckwills' widow, a name which the owner himself pronounces with arrest 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 tit-mouse, the very soul of monotony, piped and piped and piped, as if his diapasons stopped, 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-threaded warblers, silent as yet, were commonly in the live oaks. And innumerable myrtle-birds, also silent, with prairie warblers, black-and-white creepers, solitary veros, and an occasional chickadee, and many more. It was a birdie spot, and just across the way on the shrubby island were red-winged blackbirds, who peaked my curiosity by adding to the familiar conchery 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. Agileus phonicius, 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. 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 folly, and then instantly all would be silent again. There is an apt name, Raylus crepitans. Once I watched two of them in the act of crepitating, and after that when the sudden uproar burst forth I seemed to see the reeds full of birds, each with his bill pointed 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 rail's island barely showed above the breakers. The street was deep underwater, 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 managed it was beyond my ken. Another island farther out than that of the rails, but the rails, like the long-billed marsh rinds, 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 lens in larger and smaller squads, and with but a moderate amount of noise most 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 gathering 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 in-gathering 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 noosemare and alive 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 a land. End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 of a Florida sketchbook. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ewan Baylis. A Florida sketchbook by Bradford Torrey. Chapter 5. A Morning at the Old Sugar Mill. Footnote. 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, once 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 Dunlaughton Hammock behind Port Orange. Given 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. End of footnote. 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 turn-ball 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, palmettoes, sweet gums, maples and hickories, with here and there a long-leaf pine overtopping all the rest. The palmettoes, most distinctively southern of them all, had been badly used by their hardier neighbours. 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 widespreading, 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, tilanciae, 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 are 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 practice die, the cotton rows were still visible. Undergrove of wild orange trees, the handsome fruit glowing like lamps amid the deep green foliage. There was little of the 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 twitted in the leafy treetops, and butterflies of several kinds, notably one gorgeous creature in yellow and black, like a larger and more resplendent ternus, 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 travelled 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. Pinewood 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, Brown-headed nut-hatches were gossiping in the distance, and suddenly I heard what I never thought to hear in a pioneering, 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 be taken himself to a sunnier climb. 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, shrike-ish 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 fervour. 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 winged-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 Quisculus Gilmoreius, Gilmore's grackle? That the sounds whirlwing-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 confirmed the other. Two days afterward, nevertheless, I began to doubt. I heard a grackle sing in the manner just described, winged beats and all, while flying from one tree to another, and later still in a country where boats hailed grackles were an everyday sight near the heart of the village, I more than once saw them produce the sounds in question without any perceptible movements 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 winged 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, see footnote, says of the boat-tailed grackle, quiscallous 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 quiscallous major. Footnote, The Orc, Volume 5, Page 273. End of footnote. 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-honoured 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 the 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 logger head strike, 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, raining 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 am so deaf I can't hear you, he said, and drove on. Goodbye, I remarked, in a needless undertone. You're a good man, I have no doubt, but deaf people shouldn't be inquisitive at long range. The advice was sounding off 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 favours 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, bad 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 exclaimed. 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 grapple, all the strike 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 scumpered 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 holes 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 red bird was whistling. Cardinal Grossby, 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 felt 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 hummingbird 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 bumblebee, 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, car, car, in a meditative voice, as if he too were thinking of days past, and not even the scream of a hen-hawk, often 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 chi-wink, he is not a Yankee, whistles and sings by turns. The blue-bell's wobble and the pine-wobbler's trill could never be disturbing to the quietest mood. Only one voice seems out of tune. The white-eyed Virio, even today, cannot forget his saucy accent. But he soon falls silent. Perhaps after all, he fills himself an intruder. The morning is cloudless and warm, till suddenly, as if a door had been opened eastward, the sea breeze strikes me. Once forth 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-coloured stripes and a bluish tail, is seen travelling over the crumbling wall. Moving 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. His throat is white, but when it is inflated, as happens every few seconds, it turns to the loveliest rose-collar. This inflated membrane should be a vocal sack, 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 palmettoes, hammock I suppose it is called. In all other directions are the pine woods with their undergrowth of sore palmetto. The cardinal sings from the hammock, and so does the Carolina Wren. The chiwinks, the blackbirds, a grackle just now flies over and a fish-hawk also. With the bluebirds and the pine warblers are in the pioneering. 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 Houstonian. These thinly covered with fresh leaves straddle over the walls. The ginia 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 in 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 with all, 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 scripture 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 parts 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 enclosure. Here and there the graceful palm-like tassel of a young long-leafed 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 red bird whistles and the shrubbering. 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 and venturous man who built these walls and dug these canals. His life was full of action, full of journeyings and fighting. Now he is at peace, and his works do follow him, into the land of forgetfulness. Without the dead, blessed to 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 today 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 kind. 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 eighty degrees, 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. Moons 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, nonetheless, 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. End of Chapter 6 of a Florida Sketchbook This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Designed by Linda Dodge A Florida Sketchbook by Bradford Torrey Chapter 6 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 tourists 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. From five miles in width, with Sanford on one side and Enterprise on the other, or, as a waggish traveller 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 on a sandlot 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 their pick their way painfully about in the outlying saw Palmetto Scrug, till they found it. I had never seen our national game played under a condition 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 Quote plums, unquote, is the technical term, I believe, for men so deserving. The first basemen, certainly, who had, often as to wait into the shrub, should have received a consulate, at the very least. And yet they were a merry crew, those national game-sters. Their patriotism was of the noblest type, the unconscious. They had no thought of being heroes, nor dreamed of bounties or pensions. They crawled with the empire, 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 mockingbirds in free song. They are the 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 wood-side trees, all freshly planted, like the city, were myrtle warblers, prairie warblers, and blue yellowbacks, the latter two 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 sulfur 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 melodorous as it seems unscriptural. Noisy, boat-tailed grackles, or, quote, jackdolls, unquote, were plentiful about the lakeside, monstrously long in the tail, and almost as large as a fish-crows, which were often there with them. Over the broad lakes swept purple martins and white-breasted swallows, and nearer the shore fed peacefully a few pied-bill greens, or dab chicks, 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 the orange groves, large, well-kept, thrifty-looking, the fruit still on the trees, march the 20th 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 rose bushes, a full quarter of a mile of white blossoms. My best botanical stroll was along one of the railroads. Sanford is a quote railway center, unquote 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 leaf plant, shrankia, densely beset throughout with curved prickles, and bearing globes of tiny pink-purple flowers. A calipagun, quite as pretty as our northern Purcellus. A clematis, bald winy, which looked more like a bluebell than a clematis till I commenced pulling it to pieces, and a great perfusion of one of the smaller pawpaws, 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 don't know, sir. Isn't it pawpaw? No, sir, that ain't pawpaw. And then, as if he had remembered something, he added, that's a dog banana. Often, or 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 to 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 imagine them saying, among themselves. No one comes here for anything else. Wait a little, and we will pick his bones. They perched nearby, 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 they were becoming impatient. He is long about it, one said to the other, 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, quote, bird or devil, unquote, came from the depths of the wood. A flock of crackles 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 further down the lake. I had seen him the day before, standing on the rim of his huge nest in the top of the 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 funerial streamers of dark Spanish moss hung thickly from every bow. 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 underwoods and 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 dab chicks 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 mine'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 it 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 are 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 palmettoes. Haven't got that rabbit yet, said I. I had passed him there on my way out and he told me what he was after. No sir, he answered. I don't believe there's any rabbit there. Oh 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 ask? 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 ore 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 kill them. I think that he had never before seen a customer of that breed. First he rode me up the creek under promise to show me alligators, moccasins, and no lack of birds, including the especially desired purple gallenule. The snakes were somehow missing, a loss not irreparable, and so were the purple gallenules. 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 called suddenly HIST, an alligator lay on the bank just before us. The boy turned his head and instantly was all excitement. It was a big fella, 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 gallenules and I, being no sportsman and having never seen an alligator before, was some shade less confident. But it was his game and I left him to his way. He pulled the boat noiselessly along the bank in the shelter of the tall reeds, put down the oars with which he could have almost 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 quote bonnets, unquote, huge leaves of the common yellow pond lily but found nothing that I had not seen before. Here and there a Florida gallenule 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 done. One bird as it dashed into the rushes uttered two or three cries that sounded familiar. The Florida gallenule is in general pretty silent I think, but he has a noisy season and then he is indeed noisy enough. A swamp containing a single pair might be supposed to be populous with barnyard fowls. The fellow keeps up such a clatter, now loud and terror-stricken, quote, like a hen whose head is just going to be cut off, unquote, 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 facilitating herself upon that achievement. It was vexatious that here, in the very home of Florida gallenules, 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 has seldom the best rewarded. At one point the boatman pulled up to a thicket of small willows, bidding me to 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 gallenule. 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, Fulika 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 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 his 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 ought 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 aspired just ahead a snake lying and 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 and 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 a 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, but it made no offer to move. Only darting out its tongue as the boat slipped past. I spoke to the boy, who it 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 poisonous 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 gallenule. But where were the purples? about which we kept talking, the royal purples concerning Hugh's beauty. My boy was so eloquent. Oh, they are not coming yet, he would say. Bye-bye, they will be as thick as Florida's are now. But don't they stay here all winter? Oh, no, sir, not the purples. Are you certain about that? Oh, yes, sir, I've hunted this river too much. They couldn't be here in the winter without my know in it. I wondered whether he could be right, or partly right, notwithstanding the book statements to the contrary. I noticed that Mr. Chapman, writing of his experiences with this bird at Gainesville says, none were seen until May 25th, when, in 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 bet I 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 knew to both of us. We had gone a little farther and were passing a prairie on which there were pools of water, where the boy said he had often seen large flocks of white ibises feeding. There were none there now, alas, that we crept up with all cautiousness to peep over the bank. When all at once I described 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 forked tailed kite. And purple galleals were for the time forgotten. It was performing the most graceful evolutions, swooping halfway to the earth from a great height and then sweeping upward again. Another minute, I saw a second bird farther away. I watched the nearer one till it faded from sight, soaring and swooping by turns, its long, scissor 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 site one of my chief rewards of my southern winter. At noon we rested and ate our luncheon in the shade of three or four tall pometo trees, standing by themselves on a broad prairie, a place brightened by beds of blue iris and stretches of golden senesio, home-like as well as pretty, both of them. Then we set out again. The day was intensely hot, March 24th, and my oarsman was more than half sick with a sudden cold. I begged him to take things easily, but he soon experienced an enormous 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 gallanule as the bird flies from you. The bill red-tipped with pale green, and the shield, on the forehead like the 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 that 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 the 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 60 feet of the bird. Then it took wing, but instead of flying away it went sweeping about us. On getting around to the willows again, it made as if it were a light, 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 it got there I have no idea. Our first bird kept his bill parted, as if in distress. A peculiar action, which probably had some connection with the other bird's presence, although the two paid no attention to each other so far as we could make out. When we had watched them as long as we pleased, I told the boy to pull the boat forward till they rose. We got within thirty feet, I think. At that point they took flight and side by side went soaring into the air, now flapping their wings, now scaling in unison. It was beautiful to see. As they sat in the willows and gazed about, their long necks were sometimes twisted like cork screws, or so they looked at all events. The water turkey is one of the very oddest of birds. I am not likely to forget the impression made upon me by the first one I saw. It was standing on a pro-state log, but rose as I drew near, and to my surprise, mounted to a prodigious elevation, where for a long time it remained, sailing round and round with all the grace of a hen-hawk or an eagle. Its neck and head were tenuous, almost beyond belief, like a knitting needle I kept repeating to myself. Its tail, 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 laudering 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 the 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 its 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, waiting 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 particular in his notion about the osprey scream. Someone 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 would be so much fun just to look at birds 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 knew to me. We had seen great blue herons, little blue herons, Louisiana herons, night herons, cormorants, pied-bill grebes, kingfishers, red-winged blackbirds, boat-tailed grackles, red pole and myrtle warblers, savannah sparrows, tree swallows, purple martins, a few meadow larks, and the ubiquitous turkey buzzard. The boat tails abounded along the riverbanks and with their tameness and the 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 savannah 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-bottom rowboat, 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 30 miles, on my way back to New Smyrna, to a place where there were accessible woods, a beach, and not the 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 13 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 and 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 brushy 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 parriquettes 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 Lou Heron. But he had never seen one thus engaged, nor, so far as I can learn, has anyone ever else done so. Its upper parts seem 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 deckhands 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 ceased to think about it. Finally a negro, one of several who were fishing thereabouts, advised me to, quote, go up to the house, unquote, 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, quote, junction, unquote, 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 effervescence, beatific, what shall I say, quite beyond veiling or restraint. At first I bestowed upon them sideways and corner-wise glances only, hiding bashfully behind my spectacles, as it were, and pretending to see nothing, but soon I 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 less confined by that disastrous knowledge of good and evil which is so commonly understood to have resulted from eating of the 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. End of chapter 6 on the Upper St. John's