Front matter (continued 3)

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, half-way 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 land-lady 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 I 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?” “Finders,” 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 Lafayette) 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 palm warblers, cardinal grosbeaks, mocking-birds, kingbirds, loggerheads, 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 zig-zag 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 näiveté 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. ‘T ain’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 band 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,[11] “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.”

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 zig-zag 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,

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 yellow-backs, 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 bole in the bank. A second bole 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.

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 beard no strange about, nor saw any strange bird; and toward noon, just as the sun brushed away the fog, I left the railway track for a carriage byway 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 dooryards.

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 roadside 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.

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.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T V W Y

Air-plants, 104. Alligator, 131, 146. Azalea, 172, 206, 216. Baptisia, 206. Beggar’s-ticks, 27. Blackberry, 27, 29, 117, 152, 163, 217. Blackbird, red-wing, 97, 106, 134, 145, 147, 161, 167. Bladderwort, 29. Bluebird, 4, 115, 147, 170, 218. Blue-eyed Grass, 30. Butterworts, 27, 28, 29, 173. Buzzard, turkey, 20, 36, 38, 66, 126, 128, 145. Calopogon, 125. Carrion Crow (Black Vulture), 40, 134, 191. Catbird, 65, 233. Cedar-bird, 80. Cedar, red, 90. Chat, yellow-breasted, 226. Cherokee Rose, 125, 165, 172, 201, 206. Cherry, wild, 175. Chewink (Towhee):— red-eyed, 65, 167, 218, 227, 234. white-eyed, 5, 65, 115, 227. Chickadee, Carolina, 21, 97, 218, 224. Chimney Swift, 209. Chuck-will’s-widow, 96. Clematis Baldwinii, 125. Clover, buffalo, 191. Cloudberry, 29. Coot (Fulica americana), 134. Coquina Clam, 55. Coreopsis, 30. Cormorant, 66, 78, 124, 134, 145. Crab-apple, 172. Creeper, black-and-white, 97, 218. Cross-vine, 172. Crow, 5, 35, 37, 100, 114, 124. Cuckoo, yellow-billed, 176, 222. Cypress-tree, 127. Dabchick, 124, 128, 134, 145. Dove:— Carolina, 147. ground, 65, 147, 218, 226. Duck, wood, 222. Eagle, bald, 43, 79, 143, 145. Egret:— great white, 76. little white, 75. Fish-hawk, 42, 44, 79, 116, 127, 143, 147. Flicker (Golden-winged Woodpecker), 4, 65, 81, 106. Flowering Dogwood, 172, 206, 216. Flycatchers:— Acadian, 224. crested, 153, 224. kingbird, 176, 190, 191, 227. phœbe, 8, 65, 81. wood pewee, 170, 234. Fringe-bush, 206, 216. Frogs, 185. Gallinule:— Florida, 132, 217, 228. purple, 137, 139. Gannet, 46. Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, 224. Golden club, 27. Goldenrod, 26. Grackle, boat-tailed, 107, 124, 145. Grebe, pied-billed, 124, 128, 134, 145. Grosbeak:— cardinal, 64, 81, 114, 118, 166, 176, 191, 212, 218, 226, 234. blue, 187, 191, 224. Gull:— Bonaparte’s, 48. ring-billed, 49. Hawk:— fish, 42, 44, 79, 116, 127, 143, 147. marsh, 36, 38, 176, 213. red-shouldered, 106, 115, 218, 227. sparrow, 76, 169. swallow-tailed, 138. Heron:— great blue, 35, 36, 39, 50, 70, 107, 134, 145, 190, 217. great white (or Egret), 76. green, 76, 107, 133, 181. little blue, 74, 107, 134, 145, 181, 218. Louisiana, 74, 75, 107, 145. night (black-crowned), 133, 145. Honeysuckle:— scarlet, 172. white, 151, 172. Houstonia, round-leaved, 26, 82, 105, 116. Humming-bird, ruby-throated, 114, 118, 153. Hypoxis, 27. Iris versicolor, 29, 112, 139. Jay:— Florida, 61. Florida blue, 62, 153. Judas-tree, 27. Killdeer Plover, 39, 78. Kingbird, 176, 190, 191, 227. Kingfisher, 6, 36, 39, 145, 147. Kinglet, ruby-crowned, 81, 153, 170, 214, 233. Kite, fork-tailed, 138. Krigia, 27. Lantana, 151, 172. Lark, meadow, 6, 145, 183. Leptopoda, 30. Live-oak, 96, 104. Lizards, 115. Lobelia Feayana, 30. Loggerhead Shrike, 5, 111, 123, 177, 190, 191, 200, 218. Lygodesmia, 125. Martin, purple, 65, 124, 145, 147, 158, 176. Maryland Yellow-throat, 116, 218, 227. Mocking-bird, 4, 64, 81, 123, 167, 170, 176, 191, 210, 212, 218, 232, 234. Mullein, 27. Myrtle Bird. See Warbler. Night-hawk, 176. Nuthatch, brown-headed, 6, 106, 218. Orange, wild, 87, 105. Oriole, orchard, 177, 183, 191, 194, 200, 226, 234. Osprey. See Fish-Hawk. Oven-bird, 80. Oxalis, yellow, 26, 37, 81, 152. Papaw, 125. Paroquet, 147. Partridge-berry, 105. Pelican:— brown, 47. white, 66. Persimmon, 175. Phœbe, 8, 65, 81. Pipewort, 30. Poison Ivy, 116. Poppy, Mexican, 152. Quail, 115, 118, 167, 176, 218, 227, 234. Rail:— Carolina, 217. clapper, 98. king, 138. Redbird (Cardinal Grosbeak), 64, 81, 114, 118, 166, 176, 191, 212, 218, 224, 226, 234. “Ricebird,” 161. Robin, 4. Salvia lyrata, 82. Sanderling, 49, 59. Sandpiper:— solitary, 181, 191. spotted, 35, 78. Sassafras, 175. Schrankia, 125. Senecio, 139. Shrike, loggerhead, 5, 111, 177, 190, 191, 200, 218, 227. Sow Thistle, 26. Snakebird (Water-Turkey), 66, 79, 141, 228. Sparrow:— chipping, 234. field, 15, 233, 234. grasshopper (yellow-winged), 212. pine-wood, 6, 13, 106, 118, 234. savanna, 65, 145. song, 65. white-crowned, 190, 191, 201, 227, 234. white-throated, 153, 191, 227. Spiderwort, 81. St. Peter’s-wort, 27, 28. Strawberry, 173. Swallow:— barn, 222. rough-winged, 218. tree (white-bellied), 8, 65, 124, 145, 147. Swift, chimney, 209. Tanager, summer, 96, 153, 184, 191, 213, 227, 234. Tern, 49, 59, 78. Thorns, 172, 216. Thrasher (Brown Thrush), 17, 64, 168, 191, 218, 229, 232. Thrush:— hermit, 80, 170. Northern water, 80. Louisiana water, 80. Titlark, 38. Titmouse:— Carolina, 21, 97. tufted, 96. Towhee. See Chewink. Turkey, 147, 220, 223. Vaccinium, arboreum, 172. Venus’s Looking-glass (Specularia), 152. Verbena, 81. Violets, 27, 81, 116, 173. Vireo:— red-eyed, 218, 224. solitary, 97, 233. white-eyed, 36, 115, 170, 218, 226. yellow-throated, 191. Virginia creeper, 116. Vulture (Carrion Crow), 40, 134, 191. Warbler:— black-throated green, 21. blue yellow-backed, 96, 124, 147, 218, 224. myrtle (yellow-rumped), 36, 65, 97, 124, 145, 191, 214. palm (yellow redpoll), 65, 81, 145, 191, 218, 227. pine, 4, 106, 115, 214, 218, 227, 234. prairie, 81, 97, 124, 234. yellow-throated (Dendroica dominica), 21, 97, 153, 184, 213, 218, 227, 234. Water Lily, 206, 228. Water Thrush:— Louisiana, 80. Northern, 80. Water-Turkey (Snakebird), 66, 79, 141, 228. Wood Pewee, 170, 234. Woodpecker:— downy, 4. golden-winged (flicker), 4, 65, 81, 106. ivory-billed, 190, 214. pileated, 25. red-bellied, 106, 169, 227. red-cockaded, 6, 24. red-headed, 177. Wren:— Carolina (mocking), 64, 116, 153, 200, 218, 224, 234. house, 81, 166, 214, 218, 227, 233, 234. long-billed marsh, 38, 100. winter, 17. Yellow Jessamine, 105, 216. Yellow-legs (Totanus flavipes), 181, 191.