FLORIDA

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MIAMI

It is Sunday, the 19th of January. A week ago I was sitting before a fire, watching the snow fall outside, in winter-bound Massachusetts. This forenoon I am reclining in the shade of a cocoanut palm, looking across the smooth blue waters of Biscayne Bay to a line of woods, I know not how many miles distant, broken in the midst by a narrow cut or inlet (Norris Cut, a passer-by tells me it is called), through which is to be seen the open Atlantic. The air is motionless, the sky cloudless, the temperature ideal. “This is the day the Lord hath made,” I repeat to myself. He has seldom done better.

I left Boston Monday morning, spent that night and the next day in Washington, slept in St. Augustine Wednesday night, and on Thursday took the long, all-day ride down the east coast of Florida, past miles on miles of orange groves and pineapple plantations, to the terminus of the railroad, the new and flourishing city of Miami.

My visit, it must be owned, began rather inauspiciously. It was nobody’s fault, of course, but the “magic city” did not put its best foot forward. Friday morning the mercury stood at forty-five, and although the day was abundantly warm out of doors,—so warm that a walker naturally took off his coat,—an oil stove proved a comfort at nightfall. In short, the day was exactly like a White Mountain day in late September, hot in the middle and cool at both ends. Yesterday, however, was a piece of Massachusetts June, while this morning is so perfect that every one, visitor or resident, passes comments upon it. Perfection of any kind is a rare and precious thing,—in this world, at least,—and though it be merely a bit of weather, it should never go unspoken of. So I say to myself as I lie in the shade, and look and breathe.

In truth, I can hardly feel it credible that I was in the midst of snowstorms less than a week ago. For a long two days winter has seemed a thing utterly past and forgotten. Only now and then it comes upon me, with the shock of unexpected news, that this is not summer, but January.

The bay, for some reason to me unknown, is almost without birds. The only one just now in sight is a cormorant pretty far offshore, diving and swimming by turns. I imagine him to be a loon till suddenly he takes wing, with outstretched neck, and after a long flight comes to rest, not in the water, but at the top of a stake. Somewhere behind me a flicker is shouting as in springtime, and on one side a mockingbird is calling (“smacking” is the word that comes of itself to my pencil), and a blue-gray gnatcatcher utters now and then a fine, thread-like ejaculation.

The stillness is really a relief, even to my ornithological ears; for though they had been starved for two or three months in Massachusetts, they have been so dinned with bird voices for the last two days that a brief period of silence is grateful. The centre of the town, where I have taken up my abode, literally swarms with fish crows and boat-tailed grackles, every one trying, as it seems, to outdo its rivals in noisiness. I remember the day, eight or nine years ago, when in the flatwoods of New Smyrna I spent an hour of almost painful excitement in taking observations upon the first boat-tail I had ever seen. It would have been hard at that moment for me to imagine that so clever and interesting a bird could ever become a nuisance. Fortunately, both crow and grackle retire to roost early and are comparatively late risers; otherwise the people of Miami might be driven to violent measures, as against a plague. As things are, the birds have no fears. They alight in the shade trees before the windows, or gather about the kitchen door, crows and blackbirds alike (and the male blackbirds, with their overgrown tails, are almost or quite as large as the crows), as fearless as so many English sparrows.

After them the abundant birds hereabout, so far as I have yet discovered, are buzzards, carrion crows (black vultures), blue jays, catbirds (which I have never seen half so plentiful), palm warblers, myrtle warblers, and blue-gray gnatcatchers. Less numerous, but still decidedly common, are flickers, red-bellied woodpeckers, mockingbirds, Florida yellow-throats, hummingbirds, ground doves, and phœbes. Day before yesterday a long procession of tree swallows straggled past me as I wandered along the bay shore, and in the same place a flock of masculine red-winged blackbirds were holding a vociferous mid-winter convention in a thicket of tall reeds. White-eyed vireos are well distributed, and sing as saucily as if the month were May instead of January. Solitary vireos are present likewise, but I have seen only one, and he was not yet in tune.

Out in the pine lands I came upon a single group of pine warblers and half a dozen bluebirds, both singing freely. What a voice the bluebird has! It does a Yankee’s heart good to hear it. I have yet to see a robin or a chickadee.

All in all, notwithstanding the woods are alive with wings, there is surprisingly little music. The season of song is not yet come. Phœbes, for some reason, form a bright exception to the rule, and now and then a cardinal grosbeak whistles with a sweetness that beggars words. Twice, I think, I have heard a distant mockingbird singing, and yesterday, in front of the hotel, I stopped to watch a pair that seemed to be in what I should call a decidedly lyrical mood, though they were silent as dead men. They stood on the pavement a foot or so apart, and took turns in a very original and pretty kind of dance. One and then the other suddenly hopped straight upward for an inch or two, both feet at once. Between whiles they stood motionless, or sometimes one (always the same) moved a little away from its partner. Plainly they were much in earnest, and without question the ceremony, simple, and almost laughable, as it looked, had some deep and perfectly understood significance. Ritualism is not confined to churches. Everywhere the heart speaks by attitude and gesticulation.

A noble concert it will be when all these thousands of song-birds recover their voices. May I be here to enjoy it. For the present I am contented to wait. It is sufficient just now to be in so strange a land in so lovely a season, with acres of morning-glories and moon-flowers all about, roses and marigolds in the gardens, birds in every bush (not an English sparrow among them), airs gratefully cool from the sea, and bright summer weather. For a winter-killed Yankee, this is what old Omar would have called “Paradise enow.”

A FROSTY MORNING

There is nothing like weather. It is man’s comfort and his misery; more important still, perhaps, it is his prosperity and his ruin. Indeed, it has almost divine prerogatives. It wounds and it heals; it kills and it makes alive. And this, which in good degree is true everywhere, is especially true in a country like southern Florida, the Mecca at once of pleasure-seeking winter vacationers, health-seeking tourists, and livelihood-seeking settlers. For all these, Florida is what it is because of its climate, that is to say, its weather. Speak with whom you will, weather is the topic that naturally comes uppermost.

Yesterday (January 22) was one of the most delightful days imaginable; for a pedestrian, I mean to say. I know an insect collector, a gentle soul, little used to complaining against the order of the world, who pronounced it “horrid.” For the successful prosecution of her industry there lacked a few degrees of warmth. Florida insects, it appears, are much less hardy than their Northern cousins, keeping indoors, and so out of the net, in temperature such as a Yankee butterfly or beetle, thicker-skinned or thicker-blooded, would scorn to be afraid of. But if yesterday was perfect, to-day, by my reckoning, at least, has been finer still—perfection heaped upon perfection. Yet every one hereabout is more or less unhappy, and with more or less reason. In the night between these two perfect days an air from the North descended suddenly upon us, and the temperature took an alarming drop, some say to 38°, some to 31°—a drop which meant discomfort to all, and disaster to many. When I put my head out of doors at seven o’clock this morning, on my way to the post office, I was startled. My first thought was to run back for an overcoat. Instead of that I put on steam.

Breakfast over, I betook myself to the pine lands, my rule being to improve cool days in that sunny region, leaving the shady hammock woods for hotter weather. It was cold enough for overcoat and mittens. In Massachusetts, with anything like the same temperature, I should certainly have worn them. Here, however, it was not so plain a case. I was to be on foot till noon, and I felt sure that long before that time the lightest outer garment would become intolerable. So I buttoned my one coat tightly about me, stuffed my hands into my pockets, and hastened my steps. For a mile, perhaps, I kept up the pace. By that time the sun had begun to make itself felt. At the end of the second mile the temperature was nothing less than summer-like, and before the third mile was finished my coat was on my arm; and as I came down one of the city streets, on my return at noon, and met two Seminole Indians walking abroad dressed, after their airy fashion, in nothing but waistcoat and shirt, the sight of their comfortable uncivilized legs was calculated to make a perspiring man envious.

By nine o’clock, indeed, the weather was superb; but presently I came to an opening in the woods. Here was a field of tomato plants in front of a new, unpainted house. Some recent settler had cleared a piece of ground and established a home in this land of perpetual summer. And to support himself and his family he had “gone into early tomatoes.” So much was to be seen at a glance. And yes, there stood the man himself in the midst of his plantation. I went near and accosted him, expressing my hope that the frost (for by this time it was plain there had been one) had not damaged his crop. He had been badly frightened in the night, he confessed, but thought he had mostly escaped harm. “I was glad,” he said, dwelling upon the verb with a pleasant foreign accent, “when I saw the thermometer” (pronounced etymologically, with the accent on the penult). I fear he was worse hit than he knew. At all events there were many acres of wilting tomato plants only a mile away on the same road. One man, whom I saw looking over his field, was calling the attention of a solicitous neighbor to the fact that a certain part of the plantation had fared better than the rest. A few burning stumps had happened to be left smouldering on one edge of the field overnight, and the wind had drifted a light blanket of smoke across that corner.

But even in unprotected gardens the different parts had not fared alike. Here the tender plants were wilting as the sun shone on them, and yonder, only five or ten yards away, there was no symptom of blight. So true is it of tomato vines, as of nobler creations, that one shall be taken and the other left. The frost is like the wind, it striketh where it listeth, and thou seest the effect thereof; and the poor man suffereth with the rich.

Such are the cruel uncertainties of truck farming in this sub-tropical region, far down toward the very tip of Florida. Like the speculator in copper or in oil, the farmer goes to bed rich and gets up poor. But, like the dabbler in “shares,” the farmer is not easily discouraged. Though he has moved from one point to another, farther and farther down the peninsula, the frost pursuing him, he will still try again. There is one thing to be depended upon (let us be thankful to say it)—a sanguine man’s hope.

So much for tillers of the soil. For the rest of us, mere idlers and wayfarers, concerned only with questions of sight-seeing and momentary comfort, a day like the present needs no bettering. My own course, as I have said, lay through the pine woods—sunny, spacious, not in the least like anything that a New Englander would call a forest. At short intervals the road, white and hard, ran past a small clearing, generally with a house upon it. Here would be orange trees, mango trees (just now in bloom), splendid hibiscus shrubs, pineapples, perhaps, with other novelties pleasant for Northern eyes to look upon, or, quite as likely, a field of tomatoes (the fruit nearly grown), or a sweet-potato patch.

Near one of the houses the loud cries of some strange bird troubled my curiosity. The opera-glass showed me nothing, and I was none the wiser till beside a second house I heard the same voice again. This time I put aside my scruples and made a set attempt to solve the mystery. A woman before the door was inquisitive about the stranger, but the stranger was still more inquisitive about the bird; and by and by, on a lower perch than I had thought, there the fellow stood at the top of a shrub, directly before my eyes, a Florida jay. It was nine years since I had seen a bird of his kind, and the sight was welcome accordingly. Perhaps he knew it. At any rate, whether for my pleasure or his own, he held his ground and kept up his harsh, shrikely vociferations.

The Florida jay (a crestless bird, not at all the same as the Florida blue jay, which abounds everywhere and is everywhere noisy, especially in the villages) is strictly a bird of the peninsula, being found nowhere else—a remarkable instance of extreme localization. I ran upon still another individual before reaching the end of my jaunt,—on the outskirts of Lemon City,—and all three were in dooryards. Oak scrub (where you may look out for rattlesnakes) and human neighborhood, these, as I read the signs, are the Florida jay’s desiderata.

In general, as compared with the hammock woods, the pine lands are nearly birdless. An occasional sparrow hawk (another strangely trustful creature, very common in this country[5]), an occasional mockingbird (more than once in splendid song), a shrike now and then, a flock of myrtle-birds, and another of palm warblers, a good many white-breasted swallows and turkey buzzards overhead, with a bunch of silent sparrows skulking beneath the dwarf palmettoes,—these are what I now remember.

Birds or no birds, flowers or no flowers, I should have enjoyed the eight miles. The bright sunshine, the temperate, genial warmth, the endless, widely spaced woods, the blue sky, and on one side the blue expanse of Biscayne Bay,—summer in winter,—I am not so long from snowy Massachusetts but that these things are enough to make for me a kind of perpetual fiesta. As I said to begin with (and it is as true of thoughts and feelings as of the tenderest of garden crops), there is nothing like weather.

BEWILDERMENT

If any untraveled Northern botanist wishes to be puzzled, hopelessly confused, clean put out of his reckoning, let him come to Miami. His knowledge will drop away from him till not a rag is left. Let him arrive, as I did, after dark, and in the morning take the road southward to Cocoanut Grove. The distance is only five miles, and the walking excellent. I should like to go with him, and listen to his exclamations and comments.

The cocoanut palms before the hotel, as he leaves the piazza, he has no need to inquire about; such things he has at least seen in pictures. And the parti-colored crotons, likewise, are nothing new; he has seen the like in hot-houses, if nowhere else. And the scores of big, round hibiscus bushes, each with its score or two of regal scarlet blossoms,—these, or poverty-stricken imitations of them, he has admired before now in the Boston Public Garden and elsewhere. The acalypha shrubs, also, he will perhaps recognize upon a second look, though he has never before seen them growing as a hedge, carefully squared, three or four feet high, and as many feet thick. Yonder euphorbia bush, too (Poinsettia), with its flaring, flaming rosettes of scarlet floral leaves at the tips of the stems—this, like the crotons, he is more or less familiar with under glass. All these are cultivated plants, pleasant to look upon out of doors in mid-winter, but of themselves not especially interesting, perhaps, to a botanist.

But now, at the foot of Thirteenth or Fourteenth Street, less than a quarter of a mile from the hotel, we come to some vacant lots. Here are a few dingy live-oaks (still with last year’s leaves on), and in their shadow, sprawling over the tangled undergrowth, a wilderness of gadding morning-glory vines. How lovely the flowers are—pink and blue! Unless it be the ubiquitous fish crow, there is nothing else so common in this Miami country as the morning-glory; and the vines, acres on acres, hold in bloom, one kind and another, so I am given to understand, almost or quite the whole year round.

Now we leave the sidewalk and are in the pine woods. The trees—long-leaved pines—our botanist knows well enough, the train having brought him past a thousand miles of such, on his way hither; though, even so, he might be puzzled to tell to which of two related species (Palustris and Elliottii) they belong. From the rude bridge, as we cross the Miami River, he admires the myriad-footed, glossy-leaved mangrove thickets that line the banks, especially as he looks up the stream. Just beyond are ancient live-oaks, the huge spreading branches of which support a profusion of air-plants (poor relations of the pineapple), with here and there an orchid. I should like to show him an Epidendrum such as I secured ten days ago—an open spray of a dozen blooms, handsome enough to grace the finest of hothouse collections; but I have not been able to find a second specimen, with all my searching. However, a smaller, one-flowered species is common enough, and if he is sufficiently enterprising he will climb one of the trees for it, or—as I did—cut a stick by means of which, with more or less hard work, he can pry the bulbous root from its foothold.

“What is this yellow flower?” he asks, as we go on.

“I don’t know,” is my answer. “Some member of the pulse family.”

My companion knew as much as that already.

“And this bush, with its strangely contorted pods?”

Here I am more at home, and proud to show it. The plant is Pithecolobium Unguis-Cati, I tell him. Small wonder the pods are twisted.

With this we come to more live-oaks, on which are more air-plants and orchids, and just beyond is a confusion of thick-leaved trees and shrubs.

“What is this?” he asks; “and this? and this?”

I have no idea, I am obliged to answer. But the tall tree a little farther on is Ficus aurea, I hasten to remark, with a show of extreme erudition.

“A fig-tree?” he answers, in a tone of surprise; for, being a botanist, he knows, of course, that ficus is fig.

Yes, I assure him, it is a kind of fig (rubber tree, it is otherwise called), though the leaf is small and, as botanists say, “entire,” not in the least resembling the modest fig-leaf of convention. I know the tree’s name, as I know that of the shrub before mentioned, because I was told it yesterday. One’s knowledge (of names) increases rapidly under favorable circumstances, in a country like this.

Yonder very noticeable shrub, bearing large globular bunches of small bright-purplish berries (no eye could miss them), is the French mulberry, so called (Callicarpa Americana); and the larger and leafier bush near it, set along the branches with more loosely disposed orange-colored berries, is Trema micrantha, a plant which Chapman’s Flora credits to but one place in the United States,—“Shellmounds in Lastero Bay, South Florida,”—though hereabout it is one of the commonest of the common. Both it and the French mulberry are prime favorites with various kinds of birds. Mockingbirds and catbirds are feasting on the berries at this moment.

And yes, here is a tree that I knew would excite my companion’s curiosity. No stranger ever drove over this road (and the first drive of every newcomer to Miami is taken this way) without asking his driver about it: a large tree, all its leafy branches far above the ground, with a strangely conspicuous mahogany-colored bark, the outermost layers of which peel off in loose papery flakes, after the manner of the canoe birch. On my first jaunt into the hammock I heard more than one driver pronounce its eloquent name—gumbo-limbo. The two or three men of whom I made inquiries could tell me nothing more, till my host, who professed no botany, modestly suggested a reference to the dictionary. There, sure enough, I found the clue I was seeking. The tree is Bursera gummifera, or Jamaica birch, one of two Florida representatives of the tropical torch-wood family. It is among the chief of my South Florida admirations, especially for its color. It and the Seminoles should be of kindred stock. In the lobby of the hotel, the other evening, I heard one man rallying another (who had been fishing and playing golf bareheaded) upon the magnificent complexion he had put on. “Your face reminds me of the gumbo-limbo,” the joker said. The comparison was obvious. I had been thinking the same thing.

Our course takes us through a brief tract of pine land largely occupied by bayberry bushes, about which there are always many myrtle warblers (which is the same as to say bayberry warblers); and presently we are in a dense tropical forest. This is the place I have desired my companion to see; and here, after a few minutes of silent wonderment, his curiosity begins to play. “What is this? What is this? What is this?” His interrogations come in crowds; and to every one my answer is ready—“I don’t know.” I am in the case of the poor fellow whose sarcastic French instructor promised to teach him in one sentence how to answer correctly every question he might be asked. Like him I have only to respond, “Je ne sais pas.” Trees, shrubs, and vines are all far out of my range. During the fortnight that I have been here, to be sure, I have begun to distinguish differences among them, and even to recognize individuality; but as to what they are, and what their names are, I know absolutely nothing.

It is a strange sensation, so delightfully, tantalizingly strange that I can hardly keep away from the place. Day after day, in spite of the dust and (sometimes) the scorching heat, my steps turn in this direction. “Where have you been?” my new acquaintances say to me at the dinner table; and I answer, almost of course, “Down in the hammock.”

Here and there, wherever there is a favorable opening, I venture a few steps into the jungle; but sometimes I cannot stay. A feeling of something like superstitious terror comes over me, the wood is so dense and dark and strange. I am glad to get back into the dusty road. My supposititious companion will be braver than I, I dare say, but he will be with me in confessing how confusingly alike all the trees look, and how utterly unavailable all his previous knowledge proves to be. On this point I have talked with two botanists, and they have both assured me that, although they had lived much in upper Florida, they found themselves here in a world they knew nothing about. With me, who am not a botanist, or only the sheerest dabbler in the science, it is literally true that in this sub-tropical forest I cannot guess at so much as the family relationship of one plant in twenty.

WAITING FOR THE MUSIC

I am impatient for the concert to begin. It is the 7th of February. For three weeks I have been in Miami; birds are plentiful; the country, one may almost say, is full of them; the weather, mostly a few shades too warm for a pedestrian’s comfort, seems to be all that birds could wish; but thus far there has been scarcely a sign of the grand vernal awakening. Warm or cold, for the birds it is still winter. Phœbes, to be sure, have sung ever since my arrival, I cannot help wondering why; and the same is true of white-eyed vireos. It is impossible to walk through the hammock woods without getting somewhat more than one’s fill of their saucily emphatic deliverances. For aught I can see, they are quite as loquacious now as they will be two or three months hence. Once in a while, hardly oftener than once a week, I should say, I have heard a mockingbird letting himself loose, and rather more frequently, especially during the last few days, cardinal grosbeaks have sweetened the air with their whistle; but for much the greater part the birds are dumb. On the morning of February 1, as I stepped out upon the piazza, a house wren sang from a live-oak by the kitchen door. I remembered the date. “Good!” said I to myself, “the time of the singing of birds is come.” But I was too much in haste. Since then I have heard plenty of wren chattering, but not another note of wren music.

Still the opening of the annual concert cannot be much longer delayed. When I was in Florida nine years ago, mockingbirds were in free song at St. Augustine, before the middle of February; and at this point, three hundred miles and more farther south, the season must be earlier rather than later.

Some of the more distinctively Southern of the birds about me I am especially desirous of hearing—the Florida yellow-throats, for example, a local race of the Maryland yellow-throat, so called. They are everywhere in sight (the dark brown of the flanks distinguishing them readily), and as their music is said to be very unlike that of their familiar Northern relative, I am naturally desirous of adding it to my (memorized) collection. It will be nothing great, presumably, but it will be something new.

Still more interesting will be the song of the painted bunting, or nonpareil, a beauty of beauties that I had never seen (a wild one, I mean) until this winter. About Miami it is decidedly common, though the green females show themselves ten times as often as the red, blue, and yellow-green males. What a superbly dressed creature the masculine nonpareil is! And he carries himself as if he knew it. “Dear me,” he seems always to be saying; “this Joseph’s coat of mine makes me so conspicuous! Some day it will be my undoing.” My readers will most likely have seen the gorgeous little creature in cages (I found one many years ago in the Boston Public Garden, I remember), though the chances are that they have never seen him in anything like his brightest and liveliest feather. A bird, like a butterfly, was born to be looked at out of doors with the sunlight on him. So far I have heard no note from the nonpareil except his rather soft chip. The birds frequent weedy tangles in open grounds, showing special fondness for patches of the white bur-marigold, and seem to be well scattered over the country.

Day after day I walk down through the hammock (I have spoken of it before, and most likely shall do so again) between Miami and Cocoanut Grove. Indeed, so constant are my peregrinations thither that I begin to find my innocent self treated as a kind of mysterious personage—one of the “features” of the place, so to speak, an “object of interest,” like the gumbo-limbos, the air-plants, and the blossoming lime trees. Three times, at least, I have overheard a driver describing me to his fares as “the man who comes down through this hammock every day”—with strong emphasis on the last two words. One passenger was good enough to surmise, quite audibly, that I might be a botanist, while another loudly proclaimed his belief that I must be “a sort of a bird fiend.” So much for being useful in one’s day and generation. The tourist mind—like the tourist stomach—abhors a vacuum. It must have something to browse upon. And the drivers know it. It is a bad day for the cow when she loses her cud.

In sober truth the hammock is well worth a daily visit; and almost as often as I am here it comes over me what a glorious concert hall it will be when all these thousands of birds find their voices, if they ever do; for it may be, I know, that the great majority will start on their journey northward before that happy day arrives. Here—to name only some of the more common species—here are mockingbirds, catbirds, cardinals, house wrens, Carolina wrens, ruby-crowned kinglets, palm warblers, myrtle warblers, parula warblers, prairie warblers, black-and-white warblers, Florida yellow-throats, oven-birds, blue-gray gnatcatchers (a host), white-eyed vireos (another host), solitary vireos, chewinks, painted buntings, phœbes, crested flycatchers, and blue jays. What a chorus there would be if the spring should get into all their throats at once! Might I be here to listen! Then, indeed, I could make a list, with the hearing to help the eyesight. Now I follow the road, and find only such birds as happen to be near it at the moment when I pass. Then it would be another story. I should need a stenographer. The names would crowd upon the pencil.

It is really an astonishing, unnatural-seeming thing—this multitude of birds, in this cloudless summer weather, with mating-time so close at hand, and no impulse to sing. Yet that expression is a trifle too strong, or at least too sweeping. This forenoon I heard a gnatcatcher warbling softly, as if to himself, tuning his instrument, it may be, or, more likely, dreaming. The cardinals, too, are certainly growing amorous. I see the bright males quarreling among themselves here and there (they are constantly in the road), and not infrequently, as I have said, they whistle with all sweetness. At that work there is no bird to excel them. How any female heart can resist such appeals is more than any bachelor’s heart can imagine. I rejoice in their numbers. I should love to walk through the hammock and hear them all whistling together, a chorus a good mile in length and no rod without a bird.

Loggerhead shrikes are paired or pairing. The other day I saw one fly up from the ground and feed another perched on a telegraph wire. He was doing no more than was meet, her cool-appearing, unresponsive manner seemed to say. Mockingbirds, also, though singing little, are beginning to manifest symptoms of jealousy. If all the mockers and all the cardinals should break into voice at once, the air itself would hardly contain the music.

Two pileated woodpeckers that I see every few days at a particular spot in the hammock have already come to an understanding, or so I fancy from certain bits of conduct that I have been privileged to witness. This morning I stood watching the female as she hammered to pieces a decayed branch close by me, when all at once her mate called in the distance. Instantly she held up her head, as much as to say, “Hark! Was that he?” and the next moment she was gone. Then I heard low conversational notes, followed presently by loud drumming on a resonant stub or branch. I thought of what I have heard preachers say, that Heaven is a state, not a place.

Pileated woodpeckers are birds good to look at, and, wild as they look, it is pleasant to find them so approachable. But in fact, this is most productive woodpecker country. Here are flickers in abundance, red-bellies almost as many, and along with them the red-headed, the red-cockaded (in the pine lands), the yellow-bellied (least common of all), the downy, and the hairy; all, in short, that could be expected, with the exception of the ivory-billed; and (such is human nature) I would give more to see him than all the rest together.

Well, I will not wish time away, as the saying is. I begin to perceive that I have none to spare. But I shall rejoice when some morning I go out and find the conductor’s arm lifted, and the chorus minding the beat.

PERIPATETIC BOTANY

When I called upon my friend the entomologist, a few evenings ago, she informed me that she had passed a very exciting day. While out on her usual insect-collecting expedition, along the bay shore, she had come suddenly upon an unknown plant growing among the mangrove bushes. A glance at the blossom showed that it must belong to the mallow family, and on getting back to the hotel and consulting the manual, she determined it at once as Pavonia racemosa,—“Miami and Key Biscayne.” Every collector knows the pleasure of discovering a plant or other specimen, the known habitat of which is entitled to this kind of exact specification.

“Very good,” said I, when she had finished the story, “I shall go down to-morrow and look at Pavonia racemosa for myself.”

The next afternoon, therefore, saw me at the place; but it appeared that I had not sufficiently attended to my friend’s instructions. At all events, I could find nothing that looked like a Malva. In a country so richly and strangely furnished as this, however, a visitor cannot turn his eyes in any direction without putting them upon something he never saw before; and so it happened that while I hunted vainly for one thing I found another and better; or if it was not better in itself, it was more unexpected and interesting. This was a shrub, or small tree, bearing large, glossy, coriaceous leaves, clustered near the ends of the branches, from which depended long, smooth, pear-shaped or gourd-shaped buds. More careful search revealed a few faded flowers and a large pendent green fruit. And then, ten minutes afterward, as I was starting away, my eyes fell upon a clump of the rare Pavonia.

With that, of course, there was no room for difficulty. I had only to compare the specimen with the printed description, and check the name. But as for the strange shrub, of which I had bud, blossom, fruit, and leaf (what more could a man desire?), with that I was fairly beaten. Even a methodical, schoolboyish use of the “key” was without result. The signs brought me, or seemed to bring me, to the Bignonia family, and there came to nothing.

Happily a professor of botany in one of our great universities had arrived in town within the last twenty-four hours, and after supper I invited him to my room to help me with the puzzle. He set about the work just as I had done, only after a more workmanlike fashion, and him also the key led to the Bignoniaceæ, but no farther. As the common saying is, the trail had “run up a tree.” In short, with all the facts before us,—leaves, buds, blossom, fruit,—we were stumped. “It is some representative of the Bignonia family not included in Chapman’s Flora,” was the professor’s final verdict.

The next forenoon we had agreed to spend together in the big hammock, through which I had been sauntering by myself for the past five weeks. We should pass the Agricultural Experiment Station on the way, and I determined to carry the troublesome specimen along and submit it to the professor in charge. So said, so done; but as we stopped at the post office, there stood the man himself at the door. “What is this?” I asked, scarcely waiting to bid him good-morning. “Crescentia,” he answered promptly, “a plant of the Bignonia family.” So the other professor had been exactly right.

And now for the more dramatic part of the story. The day before—at noon of the day on which I found the plant in question—I received a letter from a Boston friend, himself a university professor of botany, to whom I had written, begging him to quit his desk, like a reasonable man, and join me in this botanical paradise. He replied that he could not come, and furthermore, that he wasn’t so very sorry. New England winter is to him a constant refreshment and exhilaration, it appears. Happy New Englander! “To-day is simply perfect,” he wrote, “and you can’t beat it in Miami.” As to that point I reserve my opinion. “How changed the place must be from what it was when I was there in the ’80’s,” he continued. “No railroad then within hundreds of miles, and none of your modern improvements. It is a great place for plants. I shan’t forget how delighted I was to find Crescentia cucurbitina in flower. I had searched the whole range of Keys for it in vain.”

This very plant, of the existence of which I had never before heard, I had found, without knowing it, within two hours after receiving my friend’s letter.[6]

Winter botanizing by newcomers, in a country so foreign as this, where much the greater part of the shrubs and trees are West Indian, with no better help than Chapman’s Flora, is carried on under almost discouraging difficulties. “If we only had the blossoms!” the professor is continually exclaiming. And his pupil responds, “Yes, if we only had!” As it is, we content ourselves with finding out a few things daily, guessing at characters and relationships (no very bad practice, by the way), running down all sorts of clues, real or imaginary, like detectives on the hunt for a murderer, and even asking questions freely of chance passers-by, especially of the numerous class known by the white people hereabout as “Bahama niggers.” They, rather than their pale-faced superiors, seem to be observant of natural things. It is likely, too, that they or their forbears may have brought some traditionary knowledge of such matters from the islands where the plants are more at home. At all events, it is pleasant to notice how ready even the black children are, not only to answer questions, but to ask them as well, about any flowers that one happens to be carrying.

The other day I came suddenly upon a bush, the like of which I had seen and wondered over a hundred times since my arrival in Miami, remarking especially the highly peculiar, almost perpendicular carriage of its innumerable thick, brightly varnished leaves, a device, as the professor had suggested, for protecting them against the vertical rays of the sun. I had never seen either fruit or blossom, but here, on this particular plant, my eye fell upon a few scattered purplish drupes. Now, then, here was something to go upon. Now, possibly, with a sprinkling more of good luck, I might find the name of the bush. I was a mile or two from town, on the road to Alapattah Prairie, where there are many truck farms. A white man came along, one of the “truckers,” driving homeward from the city.

“Do you know what this is?” I inquired, showing him the specimen.

“No, sir,” he answered.

Soon I met another man, and proposed to him the same question, with the same result. A third attempt was no more successful. Then I overtook two colored men talking beside a quarry.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but can you tell me the name of this plant?”

“Yes, sir, it is cocoa plum,” answered one of them; and the other said, “Yes, cocoa plum.”

And so it was; for on referring to the manual I found the bush fully described under that name.

Another experiment in this kind of putting myself to school, it is fair to add, was less in the Bahama colored man’s favor. A tourist whom I happened upon resting beside the hammock road held in his hand two or three twigs, from each of which depended a large, stony, pear-shaped fruit, and seeing me curious about the novelty, he kindly offered me one. This, also, I forthwith carried into the city, stopping passengers by the way—like a natural-historical Socrates—to ask them about it. No one, white or black, could tell me anything till in a fruit shop I questioned a white boy. “It’s a seven-year apple,” he said. “Some foolish local name,” I thought. At all events it could do me no good, since it was not to be found in Chapman’s index. But that evening, on my showing the specimen to the entomologist, and telling her what the boy had said, she replied, “Certainly, that is right. The plant is Genipa, or seven-year apple.” And under the word “Genipa” I found it so spoken of in the Standard Dictionary. There the fruit is said to be edible, which seems to disprove the conjecture of another lady to whom I had shown it, that it derives its name from the fact that it would take an eater seven years to digest it. Apples, like men, are not fairly to be judged in the green state.

I have said that this guessing at characters and relationships is not a bad discipline. And no more is it the worst of fun. Of this I had only two days ago a strikingly happy proof. Everywhere in the hammock there grows a tall tree, noticeable for the peculiar color of its bark and its channeled and often fantastically contorted trunk. The leafy branches are always far overhead (a necessity in so crowded a place), and I had seen the purplish, globular drupes only as they had dropped one by one to the ground. At every opportunity I had made inquiries about the tree, but had received no light, nor, after much searching, had either the professor or myself been able to hit upon so much as a plausible conjecture as to its identity. Well, two days ago, as I say, we were walking together on the outskirts of the city, when we came to a tree of this kind growing in the open, the fruit-bearing branches of which hung within reach. We pulled one of them down, and I exclaimed at once, “Why, this should be related to the sea-grape!”—a most curious West Indian tree (Coccoloba uvifera, a member of the buckwheat family!) which grows freely along the shore of Biscayne Bay. “See the fruit,” said I, “for all the world like a bunch of grapes.” With that we began a detailed examination, and, to make a long story short, the tree proved to be another species of Coccoloba—C. Floridana.

That was pretty good guessing, based as it was on nothing better than an “external character,” as the professor rather slightingly called it. For five weeks my curiosity had been exercised over the puzzle, and in five seconds I had found the needed clue. Who will say that this was not better and more interesting, and withal more instructive, than to have been told the tree’s name on the first day I saw it?

A PEEP AT THE EVERGLADES

My first stroll in Miami was taken under the pilotage of a lady who had already spent several winters here. In the course of it we came suddenly upon a colored man lying face downward in the grass, under a blazing sun, fast asleep. It was no uncommon happening, my friend remarked; she was always stumbling over such dusky sleepers. But in this Southern clime the luxury of physical inactivity is not appreciated by black people alone. I was walking away from the city at a rather brisk pace, one morning, when I passed a lonesome shanty. A white man sat upon the rude piazza, and another man and a boy stood near.

“Are you going to work to-day?” asked the boy of the occupant of the piazza.

“No,” was the answer, quick and pithy.

“Why not?”

“I ain’t got time.”

I laid the words up as a treasure; I do not expect to hear the philosophy of indolence more succinctly and pointedly stated if I live a thousand years.

But though we Northern visitors may sometimes envy our Southern brethren their gift of happy insouciance, it is not for our possessing. We were born under another star. Our lack is the precise opposite of theirs; even in our vacation hours we have seldom time to sit still.

So it happened that on a sultry, dog-day morning, with a south wind blowing, the sky partly clouded,—a comfort to the eyes,—the professor and the bird-gazer, after an early breakfast, set forth upon a reconnoissance of the Everglades. We took each a boat and an oarsman, planning to go up the Miami River, or rather its south branch, till we were among the “islands”—small pieces of hammock woods scattered amid the wilderness of saw-grass.

As each of us had his own boat, so each had his own errand, one botanical, the other lazily ornithological. The professor expected to see and learn much—especially about the adaptation of plants to their surroundings; his associate expected to see and learn little—little or nothing; and according to each man’s faith, so it was unto him.

For the first mile or so—as far as the tide runs, perhaps—the river is densely beset on either side by a shining green hedge of mangrove bushes, every branch sending down “aerial roots” of its own, till landing among them is an adventure hardly to be thought of. After the mangroves come taller hedges of the cocoa plum, leafier still, and equally shining.

“Aren’t you glad you know what this bush is?” I shouted downstream to the professor.

“Indeed I am,” he shouted back.

Without this knowledge, which we had acquired within a few days, by a kind of accident, as before related, our present state of mind would have been pitiable. We were surprised to find the plant so fond of water, having noticed it heretofore in comparatively dry situations. Another example of the extreme adaptability of tropical plants, the professor remarked.

By and by we came to the first cypress trees, the only ones I have seen in this all but swampless Miami neighborhood; beautiful in their new dress of living green. I rejoiced at the sight. Under one of them we landed, admiring the “knees” that its roots had sent up till the ground was studded with them. These, the professor tells me (it is nothing new, by his account of the matter, but it is new to me), are believed to serve as breathing or aerating organs, supplying to the tree the oxygen for lack of which, standing in water, as it mostly does, it would otherwise drown. All visitors to Florida are impressed by the beauty and majesty of the cypress, and many have no doubt puzzled themselves over the meaning of these strange, apparently useless protuberances—as if nature had attempted something and failed—that are so constantly found underneath. “They never do grow to be trees,” my boatman said.

It was at this point, as nearly as I remember, that the stream grew narrow and shallow at once, till behold, we were laboring up what might fairly be called rapids. Here, between the awkward crowding of the banks and the swiftness of the current (it was good, I said to myself, to see water actually running in Florida), the men were certainly earning their money. Fortunately, both proved equal to the task. Then a bend in the stream took us away from the neighborhood of the trees (not until, in one of the cypresses, I had remarked my first Miami nuthatch—a white-breast), and into the very midst of the saw-grass. This densely growing, sharp-edged, appropriately named grass, higher than a man’s head, standing to-day in two or three feet of water, is said to cover the Everglades. It must render them a frightful place in which to lose one’s way. “I should rather be lost at sea in a rowboat,” my oarsman declared.

All this while, of course, I had kept a lookout for birds, but, as I had expected, to comparatively little purpose. No doubt there were many about us, but not for our finding. The shallower and quieter edges of the river were covered here and there with broad leaves of the yellow lily, among which should have been at least a chance gallinule, it seemed to me; but neither gallinule nor rail showed itself. Here, as everywhere, buzzards and vultures were sailing overhead. Many white-breasted swallows, too, went hawking over the grass, and once a purple martin passed near me. Better still, he allowed me, in one brief note, to hear his welcome voice. Like the new leaves of the cypress, it prophesied of spring.

At intervals a heron of one kind or another started up far in advance. One was snow-white, but whether I was to call it an immature little blue heron or a white egret was more than could be made sure of at my distance. I recall, too, a flock of ducks, a cormorant or two, speeding through the air after their usual headlong manner, a solitary red-winged blackbird, astray from the flock, and the cries of killdeer plovers. Kingfishers were not infrequent, two or three ospreys came into sight, and once, at least, I made sure of a Louisiana heron. A lean showing, certainly, for what might have been thought so promising a place.

And now, as the grass grew shorter, so that we could survey the world about us, the water of a sudden turned shallow. The professor’s flat-bottomed boat still floated prosperously, but my own heavier, keeled craft speedily touched bottom. The rower put down the oars, took off his shoes and stockings, rolled up his trousers, and proceeded to lighten the boat of his weight, and drag it forward. This expedient answered for a rod or two. Then we stuck fast again, and the passenger followed his boatman’s example and took to the water. So we followed along, the water now deeper, now shallower, the bottom hard and slimy, till after a little we were at the end of our rope. If we were to go farther we must leave the boat behind us.

This was hardly worth while, especially as even in that way we could not hope to proceed far enough to see anything different from what we had seen already. “We will go back,” I said, “drifting with the current and stopping by the way.” And so we did, my boatman and I, leaving the professor—who, as it turned out, went but a few rods beyond us—to pursue his investigations unhindered.

After all, in spite of our indolent intentions, the return was faster than the upward journey, as almost of necessity happens, whether one is descending a river or a mountain. The time for loitering is in going up. One good thing we saw, nevertheless, though it was only for an instant.

“What’s that?” my man suddenly exclaimed, in the eagerest of tones. “Look! Right there!”

“Oh, yes,” I said; “a least bittern.”

It stood crosswise, so to speak, halfway up a tall reed, for all the world like a marsh wren. Then away it went on the wing, and was lost in the grass. It was a good bird to see, besides counting as “No. 91” in my Miami list.

“I never did see a bird like that,”[7] the boatman said. “Such a little fellow!” he called it. It was a pleasure to find him so enthusiastic.

The best thing of the whole trip, notwithstanding, was not the sight of any bird, but our lazy, careless, albeit too rapid gliding down the stream, with the world so bright and calm about us and above. Here and there, for our delight, was a tuft of fragrant white “lilies” (Crinum) standing amid a tuft of handsome upright green leaves. More than once, also, we passed boatloads of fishermen (and fisherwomen), white and black. One elderly and carefully dressed, city-coated gentleman I especially remember. He sat in the stern of the boat (his African boatman with a line out, also), watching the fluctuations of his bob as earnestly, I thought, as ever he could have watched the fluctuations of the stock market. His whole soul was centred upon that bit of cork and the possible fish below. He actually had a nibble as we passed! What cared he then for “coppers” or “industrials”? He must at some time or other have been a boy. The lucky man! By the look on his face he was happy. And happiness, if I am to judge by what I see, is one of the main things, in Florida. At all events, it was the main thing that I found in the Everglades.

THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING

Manifold are the perils of journalism. A few weeks ago I filled a letter with the praise, most sincerely felt, of a certain tropical hammock on the road from Miami to Cocoanut Grove, a place full of birds, and destined, so I hoped, to be equally full of music. This eulogy, it transpires, was read by a bird-loving enthusiast from New England, sojourning for the winter at the Hotel Ormond; and what should he do but send me word, a stranger, that he had packed his trunk and was coming down straightway (two hundred and fifty miles or more) to inspect the wonder.

In due course he arrived, and as soon as possible I led him out of the city, across the river, through a stretch of blazing sunshine, and at last into the heart of the hammock. It was a long jaunt, much longer than he was prepared for, the afternoon was hot, and to make matters worse the hammock showed almost no sign of that profusion of avian existence, with the anticipation of which my glowing periods had filled him.

Fortunately for my reputation, I had forewarned him that such would be the case. The birds, I explained, either because the season had advanced, or for some other reason, had pretty nearly deserted the jungle of West Indian trees, shrubs, and vines,—for such this particular hammock is,—and had betaken themselves to the more open country, especially to certain groves of newly clad live-oaks, whose sturdy, wide-spreading, rival-killing, trust-creating, monopolistic arms, by the time the trees are of middle age, have made for themselves a relatively sunny clearing.

I had been growing aware of this change in the face of things for a week or two, and now, when the newcomer has been three or four days in Miami, the reality of it is conclusively established. On two mornings of the present week, for example, I found in a few minutes’ stroll before breakfast a highly interesting flock of perhaps twenty kinds of birds in the live-oaks and other scattered trees on the very edge of the city, within a hundred rods of my own doorstep: fish crows, boat-tailed grackles, crow blackbirds, red-headed woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers, flickers, catbirds, mockingbirds, house wrens, cardinals, palm warblers, myrtle warblers, parula warblers, prairie warblers, black-and-white warblers, yellow-throated warblers, solitary vireos, yellow-throated vireos, blue jays, phœbes, ground doves, blue-gray gnatcatchers, ruby-crowned kinglets, a male nonpareil, a Baltimore oriole, a crested flycatcher, a hummingbird, and a hermit thrush. A varied bunch of feathers, and no mistake.

In the tropical hammock, on the other hand, during the same forenoons, I saw, as well as I remember, nothing but white-eyed vireos, phœbes, catbirds, cardinals, palm and myrtle warblers, crested flycatchers, nonpareils, and gnatcatchers. So completely has the condition of things been reversed with the change of season.

Other signs are not lacking that March has brought the spring. Mockingbirds are daily becoming more rhapsodical. The other afternoon, out among the cabins of the black suburb, I stood still while three sang at once on different sides. They are friends of the poor, as well as of the rich. This morning two yellow-throated vireos sang, chattered, and whistled; and a most delicious trilled whistle theirs is, soft, musical, full of sweet and happy feeling. Better still, almost (because more of a novelty), a yellow-throated warbler sang his dreamy tune over and over. This is one of the most exquisite birds ever made; of quiet, modest colors, bluish-black and white, with a single bright jewel to set them off—a gorget of brilliant yellow. To-day I have seen as many as ten such beauties, I think. Their feeding habits and their movements, as well as their black-and-white stripes, are surprisingly like those of the black-and-white creeper,—to which they ought to be more nearly related than the systematists allow,—while their song is in the manner of the indigo-bird.

Now, if the nonpareil buntings would only fall into line! Thus far they have not favored me with a note, and indifferent musicians as I know them to be, I believe there is no other bird in Miami that I am so desirous of hearing. Such feathers as they wear! Once in a while, of late, a male has been good enough to take a somewhat lofty perch and display himself. If there is a more gorgeous bird in the United States I should like to see him. Just now there are at least three enthusiasts in Miami—a Kentucky lady, a Rhode Island man, and a Massachusetts man—who are doing their best daily to get their fill of his loveliness.

Phœbes have sung much less of late than they did in January. Then they seemed to find existence a perpetual jubilee. Red-bellied woodpeckers, too, are far less talkative than they were a month ago. Most likely they are busier. And by the by, the Kentucky enthusiast above mentioned pleased me by calling this woodpecker the “checkerback,” a felicitous name, in common use in Kentucky, it appears, and perhaps elsewhere. I am happy to adopt it and pass it on.

If there were words wherewith to describe the indescribable, I should like to tell of a bluebird that I saw a week ago about one of the vegetable gardens out on the prairie. The blue of that creature’s back and wings is not to be imagined. The bluest sky never matched it. I would wager that he was Florida born. No Northern bird ever owned such a coat. In my recollection he will stand as one of the sights of the country, along with the “banyan trees,” the snaky green vanilla vines, and the tropical jungle.

These letters are of necessity written piecemeal. In this hospitable Southern country, where the weather and so many things beside are continually calling, “Come forth and enjoy us,” one cannot stay indoors very long at once. So it happened that at the conclusion of the last paragraph I put down my pencil and started out for another few minutes among the live-oaks. As I approached them I descried a man sitting upon a heap of coal-ashes dumped along the railway. He might have been Job himself, to look at him, but at a second glance I perceived that he was not actually sitting in the ashes, but on a board, and instead of bewailing his afflictions or his sins, was peacefully minding the New Testament injunction, “Behold the fowls of the air.” In short, he was the gentleman from Ormond, with his glass, as it happened, focused upon a handsome prairie warbler.

We passed the time of day, after the bird had flown,—for the field has its courtesies, and we respect them,—and he told me that in spite of the unfavorable north wind (one of our periodical cold spells is upon us, with the mercury in the forties) he had ventured out, and had been liberally rewarded. He had seen yellow-throated warblers, a parula, a prairie, and I forget what else, and, to take his word for it, was living in clover.

Presently a hawk swooped among the trees, and every small bird became invisible as if by magic. Then my companion proposed taking a turn beyond the fence. This we did, and just as we came suddenly upon a huge watch-dog (a great Dane, I suppose he would be called), formidable-looking and chained, but fawning upon us so eagerly that there was nothing for it but to pat him on the head and call him a good fellow—just as we approached him, I say, I nudged the second man to stop. There, straight before us, side by side on the rim of an iron kettle of water set under the trees for the dog’s benefit, stood a male cardinal and a male nonpareil. Perhaps they were not a glorious pair! Them also I shall remember, along with the miraculous bluebird.

Less brilliant, but even more memorable, was my one Bachman’s warbler. I had stopped under a live-oak,—on a return from the big hammock,—and was putting my glass upon one bird after another feeding among its blossoms (parulas, yellow-throats, ruby-crowns, gnatcatchers, and myrtle-birds), when in the very topmost spray I sighted a spot of coal-black set in bright yellow. Here was something new. From twig to twig the stranger went,—rather deliberately, for a warbler,—the glass following, till after submitting for perhaps ten minutes to my eager inspection he slipped away, as birds have a knack of doing, without my seeing him go. However, he had shown himself perfectly—the jet breastplate, the yellow forehead, the black crown, the lustrous olive of the upper parts, and the yellow patch upon the wing. He was a bird that I had never expected to see. Comparatively few ornithologists have been so happy.

This was on March 7. For two days we had noticed indications of a migratory movement, especially among parulas and yellow-throated warblers. Probably the Bachman had come from farther south. My thanks to him for treating me so handsomely, though he might have doubled the obligation, at no cost to himself, by singing me a tune.

FAIR ORMOND

After nearly two months in the extreme south of Florida I have turned my face northward, and here I am at Ormond, fair Ormond-on-the-Halifax. No more bewildering jungles of nameless West Indian trees and climbers, no more cocoanut palms, no more acres of wild morning-glory vines. It gave me a start of pleasurable surprise when, somewhere on this side of Palm Beach, I do not remember where, I saw from the car window a stately sweet-gum tree all freshly green. It had not occurred to me till then that I had found nothing at Miami of this handsome and characteristic Southerner, always one of my favorites.

Indeed, I have come to a different world. I am no longer in a foreign country. Here are lordly magnolias, not yet in blossom, to be sure, but proudly beautiful in the leaf. Here, too, are Cherokee roses, loveliest of all flowers, just coming into their kingdom. At sight of the first glossy-leaved bush, which happened to stand near a house, I made up to the door, not stopping twice to consider, and asked the privilege of picking a flower and a bud. The householder was generous, and the bush even more so. “Take another, and another,” it seemed to say, catching me again and again by the sleeve; “I have enough and to spare.” It was hard work for me to get away. Here, also, is the yellow jessamine, only less beautiful than the rose, hanging the tall forest trees full of golden, fragrant bells. And here, sprinkled along the wayside, are stores of blue violets. None of these things are to be seen on the shores of Biscayne Bay. Yes, I am glad to be here.

And the phlox, likewise, the pretty Drummond’s phlox of our Northern gardens, dear to me of old, let me not forget that. It is not indigenous to the country, I suppose, but, like the garden verbena, being here it makes itself most comfortably at home, delighting to overrun forsaken orange groves and similar unoccupied waste places. How sweetly it looks up at us with its innocent child’s face! Just now one of the guests of the hotel came in with a broad market-basket loaded with it, a good half-bushel, at the very least. “I have counted twenty-six varieties,” he said (he was thinking of diversities of color), and there must be somewhere near that number in the crowded vase that he has sent down to brighten my writing-table.

Here, too, is the Atlantic beach. In ten minutes I cross the peninsula and am on the sands; or, if I stroll up or down the river shore,—on the western side of the peninsula,—I can hear all the while the pounding of the surf.

I have been in Ormond two days,—two perfect days of temperate summer weather,—and have walked hither and thither, up the river, down the river, across the river, and on the beach, seeing comparatively little of the country as yet, but enough to be able to say that I have never found any place in Florida where a walking man should be better contented. There are paths and roads everywhere,—a convenience not to be taken for granted in this Southern country,—and be his states of mind never so variable, he may here suit the jaunt to the mood.

A visit to Ormond was not in my plans for the winter, and I left Miami with regret. Migratory birds were arriving, and I seemed to be running away just when there was most to detain me; those tropical plants, too, were certain to become more and more interesting as the season grew older; but, like the verbena and the phlox, being here I am thankful. If I have taken leave of some splendid birds (those painted buntings are in my eye as I write), I have found some old friends in their place. It is good to see brown thrashers again, with song sparrows, white-throats, and chickadees. One of a bird-loving man’s strangest sensations at Miami is the absence of chickadees and tufted titmice. I had never been in such a place before. (For eight weeks, let me say in passing, I have seen no English sparrows. Unfortunately I have not yet forgotten how they look.)

In my two days here I have counted but fifty kinds of birds. A goodly number that I know to be present, and even common, I have so far happened to miss. But in the middle of March even fifty birds make something like a festival. Mockers, cardinals, and Carolina wrens—the great Southern trio—are tuneful, of course. Even as I write, a wren is whistling an accompaniment to my pencil. If I could only put the music on the paper! If it would only “modulate my periods!” as Charles Lamb said. When I sit in the shade of a moss-hung live-oak, letting the sea breeze fan me, and listen to an assembly of red-winged blackbirds rehearsing their breezy conkaree among the reeds along the Halifax (though it is not a simple conkaree, either, but conkaree-dah, the old tune with a new coda), I think of swamps in far Massachusetts where on this very 12th of March other redwings are opening the musical season in a very different atmosphere.

Chewinks of both kinds (red-eyes and white-eyes, Northerners and Southerners) are calling and singing. Blue yellow-backed warblers are musical after their manner (they hardly need to be singers, being so exquisite in color, form, and motion), and white-eyed vireos are numerous enough, though nothing like so plentiful as at Miami. Here, as there, they have no thought of hiding their light under a bushel.

It is like old times to see Florida jays sitting on the chimney-tops of the summer cottages along the dunes behind the beach. Thus it was that I saw them first, at Daytona, nine years ago. As a friend and I stopped this morning to rest in the shade of a piazza, one came and stood upon the railing and eyed us long and curiously. “Have you nothing edible about you?” he seemed to say. If we had had anything to offer the beggar, I am confident he would have hopped upon our knees.[8] As it was, he approached within five or six feet while we chirped and talked to him. Florida jays are strange creatures for tameness, and if it were thought worth while could readily be domesticated.

It seemed natural, also, to see pelicans flying in small flocks up the beach, just over the breakers, so that half the time they were invisible, lost in the trough of the sea; moving always in Indian file, flapping their wings and scaling by turns. And still another remembrancer of my previous visit to this part of Florida was the sight of a bald eagle robbing a fishhawk. The hawk made a stubborn defense, dodging this way and that, rising and falling, but in the end the eagle, an old white-headed fellow, was more than a match for his victim; for though they were far away, the motions of the contestants showed plainly enough how the struggle terminated.

On the beach, halfway to his knees in water, stood a great blue heron, leaning seaward, waiting for a fish. He might have been standing there for nine years. At all events I left him in the same position that length of time ago. “Ay, and you,” he might rejoin, “you haven’t changed, either. You have still nothing better to do than to go wandering up and down the earth, shooting birds with an opera-glass?” True enough. Heron and man, after nine years each is the same old sixpence. “The thing that hath been it is that which shall be, and there is nothing new under the sun.” Well, so be it. Only let me find new pleasure in the old places and the old pursuits.

A DAY IN THE WOODS

I was well within the truth when I said, a week ago, that there could not be many places in Florida where a walking man would find his wants so generously provided for as at Ormond. Here he may spend a half-day in idling over a round of a mile or two,—sea beach, river bank, and woodland,—or he may foot it as industriously as he pleases from morning till night; and the next day and the day after he will have plenty of invitations to “fresh woods,” though hardly to “pastures new.” Pastures, whether new or old, he may look for elsewhere.

But at Ormond a man may not only walk, he may drive; and this forenoon (March 19) a pair of horses have taken me over such a road as I do not expect soon to find the like of, either in Florida or anywhere else; a course of twelve or fifteen miles, the whole of it (as soon as the bridge over the Halifax was crossed) through most beautiful forest. The road was wide enough for the carriage and no more; soft as a carpet, so that the wheels made no noise, with big trunks of pines, palmettoes, oaks, sweet-gums, magnolias, and what not crowding upon the track so closely that we could almost put out our hands and touch them as we passed. In the whole distance, to the best of my recollection, we met neither carriage nor foot-passenger.

We drove as we pleased, stopped as we pleased, talked or kept silence, listened to the birds, admired the flowers and the new leafage (there are no words wherewith to intimate its freshness and beauty), and withal dreamed of the time when all the land about us was the scene of busy labors, when sugar and rice and cotton were cultivated here by hundreds of slaves, and those who owned the land, as they imagined, had no thought of a day when the forest should again claim all their fair possessions. We drove to Mount Oswald, so called, near the mouth of the Tomoka River, thence over the famous old causeway, set with palmettoes, to Buckhead Bluff, at which point the King’s road to St. Augustine is supposed (or known) to have crossed the river a hundred years ago. I was glad to see the river (I shall see more of it, if I live a day or two longer), but the great thing was the forest, with its present beauty and its whisperings of past romance.

Now it is afternoon, and I am in the same woods. No lover of wild life ever drove over a beautiful country road for the first time without saying to himself again and again, “I must come this way on foot.” A carriage is well enough in its place, but really to see things a man must be on his own legs. Immediately after luncheon, therefore, with a merry company of golfers (a flourishing sect in Florida), I took the little one-horse street-car to the railway station, and now, having crossed a narrow field and left the golfers at their afternoon devotions, I am in the Volusia road, in the noblest of hammock woods.

The first half-mile of the way I have walked over more than once already, and having in mind the shortness of the afternoon I quicken my steps. The doing so is no hardship. For the last forty-eight hours the wind has blown from the north; during the night the mercury settled to 38°; and though it is considerably warmer than that now, a pretty brisk movement is still not uncomfortable.

Here I pass a mournful sight—an old orange grove, of which nothing remains but the sandy soil and a few blackened stumps. The “great freeze” of six or seven years ago killed the trees to the roots. Nearly opposite, to add to the forlornness of the impression, stands a deserted house; and not far along is another, that looks only less unthrifty and disconsolate, with an old woman smoking a pipe on the piazza. It would be a strict moralist who should grudge her that one comfort.

Now I have left the last human habitation behind me, and in front stretches the narrow road arched with greenness, running away and away till it runs out of sight. What lofty oaks and sweet-gums! And what beautiful lichens cover them with wise-looking hieroglyphics! If we could only decipher their meaning! I note especially the ribbed, muscular-seeming trunks of the hornbeams, one of which, the largest, is riddled with uncountable perforations, the work of some sap-loving woodpecker; and I turn about more than once to admire the proportions of a magnificent magnolia, one of the largest I have ever seen. My thanks to the highway surveyor who went a few feet out of his way to leave it standing. A rod or two more, and I stop to look up at some exceptionally tall pines and live-oaks, a noticeable group, in the altitude of which I have before found a pleasure.

How they soar, as if to see which shall go highest! And as high as the oak branches go, so high the gray moss follows.

Now I am at the fork of the road. My course is to the right. “Old Stage Road to Buckhead Bluff on the Tomoka River at the crossing of the ‘old King’s road’ to St. Augustine.” So the guideboard reads, with commendable particularity. “Old” is the word. Even the wind in the tree-tops seems to be whispering stories of things that happened long, long ago. And the trees answer, “Yes, so the fathers have told us.” To think of all those busy people! And every one of them dead!

Here is a bit of clearing where the sun strikes in. It feels good. This is the right kind of outdoor weather—shade not uncomfortable and the sun’s heat welcome. A white-eyed chewink, happy Floridian, is whistling from the brush. Holly trees are common, and the sweet-bay is everywhere. Its shining leaves are of a most salubrious odor, as if they might be for the healing of the nations. I am continually plucking them and rolling them in my fingers.

And yonder is the maker of the clearing—a colored man, standing beside a woodpile. I hail him to remark that it is a fine day, and he answers, “Yes, very nice.” Strange that when two men meet for the only time in their lives they should find nothing more important to communicate than that it rains, or that the sun is shining. But weather is the thing, after all, especially in Florida. Perhaps it deserves all that is said about it. Anyhow, the woodcutter and the stroller have expressed a feeling of neighborliness and have told each other no lies.

With every rod the wood changes from glory to glory. I remark with special joy a grove of tall, slender, smooth-barked water-oaks, every one in new leaf. Height rather than girth is their aim. “We must have the sun,” they say, “and we climb to get it.” How good the sun is, let their leaves testify; those millions on millions of shining leaves, every one new. Yes, every one new. I cannot write the word too often. And many times as I write it, the Northern reader will have but an insufficient sense of its meaning. Such freshness and greenness! Neither memory nor imagination can body it forth. Happy are the eyes that behold the miracle twice in a single spring. It is like doubling one’s year.

A Carolina wren whistles, near at hand, but invisible (invisibility is the wren’s trick), and a red-eyed vireo, farther away, has begun his reiterative, summer-long exhortation. I was taken by surprise, two or three days ago, when I heard the first of his kind in this same hammock; I was not looking for him so early. His irrepressible cousin, the white-eye, has been abundantly vocal for at least two months. At this very minute one is rehearsing a strain with a pretty and decidedly original quirk at the end. And, by the by, I notice that many white-eyes hereabout practice a deceptive imitation of the crested flycatcher’s loud whistle, while others, or perhaps the same ones, sometimes begin with a broken measure, such as I think I never heard from a Massachusetts white-eye, strongly suggestive of the summer tanager. Call him pert, saucy, a chatter-box, Old Volubility, what you will, the white-eye is indisputably a genius.

But for to-day, and for me, none of the birds sing quite so feelingly or so well as the wind in the tree-tops. I stop again and again to listen to it, and would stop oftener still but for the brevity of the afternoon and the uncertainty I am in as to the length of the walk before me.

Hickory nuts, split in halves and lying blackened in the sand, lead me to look upward. Yes, there are the trees, still with bare boughs. Their tender leafage does well to be late in sprouting, even in this Southern country. There is no tree but knows a thing or two. Every kind has a wisdom of its own. Experientia docet is true of them as of us.

And now I suddenly find myself nearing the railroad, and having consulted my watch conclude to go back over the sleepers. It will be my shortest course, and will have the further advantage of taking me past a swamp, on the edge of which I caught glimpses of sora rails a few days ago. This time I will be more cautious in my approaches.

A cardinal is whistling, a checkerback is chattering, many warblers are in the sunny tree-tops, and from somewhere in the depths of the forest comes the deep, oracular voice of an owl, though the sun is at least half an hour high. Whoo, whoo, who-who, he calls. I love to hear him. On the wire fence is a yellow jessamine vine, still sporting a few last blossoms, and for rods together the sandy railway embankment is draped with exquisite white “bramble roses,” the flowers of the creeping blackberry. Later comers will find berries on the vines, but perhaps I have the better part of the crop.

I am well satisfied, at all events, and am still feasting upon the sight when out of the tall grass on my left hand comes a rail’s voice—the voice of one crying in the wilderness. I am drawing near the swamp, and make haste to cover with my field-glass the spaces of open water among the dead flags. Yes, there are birds—one, two, three, four. But they are not rails. I see as much as that before I have finished my count. Three of them are swimming. They are gallinules; and when one of them turns, and the sunlight strikes him, I see the red plate on his forehead. They are Florida gallinules, my first ones for nine years. My glass follows their movements jealously till the thunder of an approaching train startles them and they fly to the shelter of the tall grass. I shall come this way again, and not only see but hear them. Their language is various and interesting, though most of it has the accent of the barnyard.

A pileated woodpecker crosses the track just before me, with all his colors flying, a pair of bluebirds sit in their accustomed place upon the telegraph wire, and from the neighboring pines I catch the finch-like twitters of a brown-headed nuthatch. This is close upon the railway station and the golf links. My afternoon is done, but the golf players are still making the most of daylight. I blush to confess it, but there are some enthusiasms with which even that of a strolling naturalist will hardly endure comparison.

PICTURE AND SONG

What seek we in Florida? The same that we seek everywhere—sensations. Life is made of them. In proportion as they are lively and pleasurable we find it good. The higher their quality, the nobler the part that feels them, the less physical they are, the less they have to do with eating and drinking and being clothed, the more truly we are alive and not dead.

Most of the people that we meet in Florida are vacationers like ourselves. At home they may be in the wool business, in shoes, or in dyestuffs; here they have no occupation but to amuse themselves. In the daytime they fish, play golf, drive, or lounge upon the hotel piazza. In the evening they sit in the lobby, listen (possibly) to the music, admire (or not) the gowns and jewels of the ladies (the self-sacrificing creatures are all on parade, like so many Queens of Sheba), take a hand at cards, or gossip about something or nothing with a traveling companion or a chance acquaintance. At the worst they dawdle over a newspaper or a novel, and consume the hour in smoke. To judge by appearances their sensations are not poignant, though the anglers and the golfers, and even the shuffle-board players, no doubt have their exciting moments; but on the whole the winter passes rather quickly. When there is nothing else to do, and the time drags, one can always cheer one’s self by thinking how intemperate the season is at home. The most refreshing parts of the Northern newspapers are their reports of snowstorms and blizzards.

For my own part, I admire the ladies’ gowns (in one sense or other of the word, who could help it?), but what my untutored mind is most taken with is the beauty of the natural world, the world as God made it, rather than as man, even the man-milliner, has improved it. I love to look up or down the moss-hung vista of the river road (I am still at Ormond), or, turning my head, to gaze across the smooth water at the freshly green, happy-looking oak woods and the overtopping pines. These are pictures that I hope never to forget.

The other day an old friend, a settler in these parts, rowed me down the river a few miles. There we took an untraveled road through the forest, and by and by came suddenly to a clearing, in the middle of which stood an abandoned house. The place had once been an orange orchard, I suppose; and even now, although there was hardly so much as a stump left to tell the tale, it remained in its own way a paradise of beauty. From end to end the five or six sandy acres were thickly overgrown with Drummond’s phlox, all in fullest bloom, a rosy wilderness.

It was a pretty show. We exclaimed over it, and gathered handfuls of the lovely flowers, but as we rowed homeward we were favored with a spectacle to which it would be a profanation to apply such epithets. The afternoon, which began doubtfully, had turned out a marvel of perfection. The wind had gone down, the river was like glass, and the level rays of the sun touched all the shore woods to an almost unearthly beauty. And withal, the sky was full of the softest, most exquisitely shaded, finely broken clouds. It was an hour such as comes once and is never repeated. In my mind the memory of it has already taken its place beside the memory of a sunset seen many years ago from a Massachusetts mountain-top. These are some of the “sensations” of which I spoke. They are the sufficient rewards of travel, though now and then, the Fates favoring, we may have them at home also, without money and without price.

The next day, or the next but one, I strolled about two miles up the river northward, to the house where, on my first day at Ormond, I had seen a Cherokee rosebush just breaking into flower. This time it was at the top of its glory, such a glory as I have no hope of describing. At a moderate calculation the mound of leafy stems must have borne four or five thousand roses, every one the very image of purity and sweetness. Those who are familiar with the Cherokee rose will perhaps be able to imagine the picture of loveliness here presented; and such readers will be glad to know that a lover of beauty (not an idle, time-killing tourist, but a man at home and at work), having heard my report of the bush, walked four or five miles on purpose to see it, and declared himself amply repaid for his labor. “The poetry of earth is never dead;” and there is never wanting some poet’s soul to enjoy it, and so to make it twice alive.

Though it is near the end of March there is comparatively little sign of bird migration. Chuck-will’s-widows—Southern whippoorwills, if one chooses to call them so—have arrived and are abundantly in voice. The nights are scarcely long enough for all they have to say. I hear of a cottager who is awakened by one so persistently and so early in the morning that he is devising means to kill it. I hope he will not succeed, although if the bird is close to his open window and begins to unburden himself at half-past two, as one does within hearing from my bed, I cannot very seriously blame him for the attempt. He goes out in his night-clothes, I am told, and tries to “shoo” it away; but the bird has a message, as truly as Poe’s raven, and is bound to deliver it, whether men will hear or forbear.

On the morning of March 26, in an ante-breakfast stroll, I found among the pines immediately in the rear of the hotel the first summer tanager of the season. The splendid creature, bright red throughout, was flitting from tree to tree, singing a measure or two from each. He acted as if he were happy to be back in Ormond, and I did not wonder. A red-eyed vireo was singing on the 15th, and since then birds of the same kind have become moderately common. Considering that the red-eye is not supposed to winter anywhere in the United States (I saw nothing of it at Miami), and arrives so late in New England, it seems to have reached Ormond surprisingly early.

For some time the woods have been alive in spots with busy crowds of warblers. Parulas especially have been present in enormous force, and have sung literally in chorus. I have seen many yellow-throated warblers also, and many myrtles, with a fair sprinkling of prairies and black-and-white creepers. But the birds that have sung best—after the mocker and the thrasher, perhaps—are not spring comers, but our faithful winter friends, the cardinal grosbeak and the Carolina wren. Indeed, of all Southern songsters I believe that the cardinal stands first in my affections. Sweetness, tenderness, affectionateness, and variety, these are his gifts, and they are good ones, even if they are not the highest.

Out in the flatwoods, a few days ago, we suddenly heard, coming from a thicket of dwarf palmetto on the edge of water, a quite unexpected strain, a loud, short trill. “What was that?” asked my companions, as we looked at one another; for there were three pairs of field-glasses in the carriage. “It sounded like a swamp sparrow,” said I, with doubt in my voice. At that moment the measure was given out again, prefaced this time by a peculiar indrawn whistle. Then the truth flashed upon me. It was the song of a pine-wood sparrow. I had not heard it for many years. In the same place meadow larks were in tune, bluebirds warbled, and pine warblers and brown-headed nuthatches were in voice among the pine trees. Here, too, I was glad to hear, for the first time in Florida, the caw of a real crow, a bird with a roof to his mouth and a voice that sounded like home.

Such are some of a bird-loving man’s early spring pleasures in this Southern country. I do not mean to praise the season unduly. New England can beat it when the time comes; at least, I know one New Englander who thinks so; but not in March.