Chapter 2

One fine morning,--it was the 18th of February,--I had gone down the railroad a little farther than usual, attracted by the encouraging appearance of a swampy patch of rather large deciduous trees. Some of them, I remember, were red maples, already full of handsome, high-colored fruit. As I drew near, I heard indistinctly from among them what might have been the song of a black-throated green warbler, a bird that would have made a valued addition to my Florida list, especially at that early date.[1] No sooner was the song repeated, however, than I saw that I had been deceived; it was something I had never heard before. But it certainly had much of the black-throated green's quality, and without question was the note of a warbler of some kind. What a shame if the bird should give me the slip! Meanwhile, it kept on singing at brief intervals, and was not so far away but that, with my glass, I should be well able to make it out, if only I could once get my eyes on it. That was the difficulty. Something stirred among the branches. Yes, a yellow-throated warbler (_Dendroica dominica_), a bird of which I had seen my first specimens, all of them silent, during the last eight days. Probably he was the singer. I hoped so, at any rate. That would be an ideal case of a beautiful bird with a song to match. I kept him under my glass, and presently the strain was repeated, but not by him. Then it ceased, and I was none the wiser. Perhaps I never should be. It was indeed a shame. Such a _taking_ song; so simple, and yet so pretty, and so thoroughly distinctive. I wrote it down thus: _tee-koi, tee-koo_,--two couplets, the first syllable of each a little emphasized and dwelt upon, not drawled, and a little higher in pitch than its fellow. Perhaps it might be expressed thus:--

I cannot profess to be sure of that, however, nor have I unqualified confidence in the adequacy of musical notation, no matter how skillfully employed, to convey a truthful idea of any bird song.

[Footnote 1: As it was, I did not find _Dendroica virens_ in Florida. On my way home, in Atlanta, April 20, I saw one bird in a dooryard shade-tree.]

The affair remained a mystery till, in Daytona, nine days afterward, the same notes were heard again, this time in lower trees that did not stand in deep water. Then it transpired that my mysterious warbler was not a warbler at all, but the Carolina chickadee. That was an outcome quite unexpected, although I now remembered that chickadees were in or near the St. Augustine swamp; and what was more to the purpose, I could now discern some relationship between the _tee-koi, tee-koo_ (or, as I now wrote it, _see-toi, see-too_), and the familiar so-called phoebe whistle of the black-capped titmouse. The Southern bird, I am bound to acknowledge, is much the more accomplished singer of the two. Sometimes he repeats the second dissyllable, making six notes in all. At other times he breaks out with a characteristic volley of fine chickadee notes, and runs without a break into the _see-toi, see-too_, with a highly pleasing effect. Then if, on the top of this, he doubles the _see-too_, we have a really prolonged and elaborate musical effort, quite putting into the shade our New England bird's _hear, hear me_, sweet and welcome as that always is.

The Southern chickadee, it should be said, is not to be distinguished from its Northern relative--in the bush, I mean--except by its notes. It is slightly smaller, like Southern birds in general, but is practically identical in plumage. Apart from its song, what most impressed me was its scarcity. It was found, sooner or later, wherever I went, I believe, but always in surprisingly small numbers, and I saw only one nest. That was built in a roadside china-tree in Tallahassee, and contained young ones (April 17), as was clear from the conduct of its owners.

It must not be supposed that I left St. Augustine without another search for my unknown "warbler." The very next morning found me again at the swamp, where for at least an hour I sat and listened. I heard no _tee-koi, tee-koo_, but was rewarded twice over for my walk. In the first place, before reaching the swamp, I found the third of my flat-wood novelties, the red-cockaded woodpecker. As had happened with the nuthatch and the sparrow, I heard him before seeing him: first some notes, which by themselves would hardly have suggested a woodpecker origin, and then a noise of hammering. Taken together, the two sounds, left little doubt as to their author; and presently I saw him,--or rather them, for there were two birds. I learned nothing about them, either then or afterwards (I saw perhaps eight individuals during my ten weeks' visit), but it was worth something barely to see and hear them. Henceforth _Dryobates borealis_ is a bird, and not merely a name. This, as I have said, was among the pines, before reaching the swamp. In the swamp itself, there suddenly appeared from somewhere, as if by magic (a dramatic entrance is not without its value, even out-of-doors), a less novel but far more impressive figure, a pileated woodpecker; a truly splendid fellow, with the scarlet cheek-patches. When I caught sight of him, he stood on one of the upper branches of a tall pine, looking wonderfully alert and wide-awake; now stretching out his scrawny neck, and now drawing it in again, his long crest all the while erect and flaming. After a little he dropped into the underbrush, out of which came at intervals a succession of raps. I would have given something to have had him under my glass just then, for I had long felt curious to see him in the act of chiseling out those big, oblong, clean-cut, sharp-angled "peck-holes" which, close to the base of the tree, make so common and notable a feature of Vermont and New Hampshire forests; but, though I did my best, I could not find him, till all at once he came up again and took to a tall pine,--the tallest in the wood,--where he pranced about for a while, striking sundry picturesque but seemingly aimless attitudes, and then made off for good. All in all, he was a wild-looking bird, if ever I saw one.

I was no sooner in St. Augustine, of course, than my eyes were open for wild flowers. Perhaps I felt a little disappointed. Certainly the land was not ablaze with color. In the grass about the old fort fhere was plenty of the yellow oxalis and the creeping white houstonia; and from a crevice in the wall, out of reach, leaned a stalk of goldenrod in full bloom. The reader may smile, if he will, but this last flower was a surprise and a stumbling-block. A vernal goldenrod! Dr. Chapman's Flora made no mention of such an anomaly. Sow thistles, too, looked strangely anachronistic. I had never thought of them as harbingers of springtime. The truth did not break upon me till a week or so afterward. Then, on the way to the beach at Daytona, where the pleasant peninsula road traverses a thick forest of short-leaved pines, every tree of which leans heavily inland at the same angle ("the leaning pines of Daytona," I always said to myself, as I passed), I came upon some white beggar's-ticks,--like daisies; and as I stopped to see what they were, I noticed the presence of ripe seeds. The plant had been in flower a long time. And then I laughed at my own dullness. It fairly deserved a medal. As if, even in Massachusetts, autumnal flowers--the groundsel, at least--did not sometimes persist in blossoming far into the winter! A day or two after this, I saw a mullein stalk still presenting arms, as it were (the mullein, always looks the soldier to me), with one bright flower. If I had found _that_ in St. Augustine, I flatter myself I should have been less easily fooled.

There were no such last-year relics in the flat-woods, so far as I remember, but spring blossoms were beginning to make their appearance there by the middle of February, particularly along the railroad,--violets in abundance (_Viola cucullata_), dwarf orange-colored dandelions (_Krigia_), the Judas-tree, or redbud, St. Peter's-wort, blackberry, the yellow star-flower (_Hypoxis juncea_), and butterworts. I recall, too, in a swampy spot, a fine fresh tuft of the golden club, with its gorgeous yellow spadix,--a plant that I had never seen in bloom before, although I had once admired a Cape Cod "hollow" full of the rank tropical leaves. St. Peter's-wort, a low shrub, thrives everywhere in the pine barrens, and, without being especially attractive, its rather sparse yellow flowers--not unlike the St. John's-wort--do something to enliven the general waste. The butterworts are beauties, and true children of the spring. I picked my first ones, which by chance were of the smaller purple species (_Pinguicula pumila_), on my way down from the woods, on a moist bank. At that moment a white man came up the road. "What do you call this flower?" said I. "Valentine's flower," he answered at once. "Ah," said I, "because it is in bloom on St. Valentine's Day, I suppose?" "No, sir," he said. "Do you speak Spanish?" I had to shake my head. "Because I could explain it better in Spanish," he continued, as if by way of apology; but he went on in perfectly good English: "If you put one of them under your pillow, and think of some one you would like very much to see,--some one who has been dead a long time,--you will be likely to dream of him. It is a very pretty flower," he added. And so it is; hardly prettier, however, to my thinking, than the blossoms of the early creeping blackberry (_Rubus trivialis_). With them I fairly fell in love: true white roses, I called them, each with its central ring of dark purplish stamens; as beautiful as the cloudberry, which once, ten years before, I had found, on the summit of Mount Clinton, in New Hampshire, and refused to believe a _Rubus_, though Dr. Gray's key led me to that genus again and again. There _is_ something in a name, say what you will.

Some weeks later, and a little farther south,--in the flat-woods behind New Smyrna,--I saw other flowers, but never anything of that tropical exuberance at which the average Northern tourist expects to find himself staring. Boggy places were full of blue iris (the common _Iris versicolor_ of New England, but of ranker growth), and here and there a pool was yellow with bladderwort. I was taken also with the larger and taller (yellow) butterwort, which I used never to see as I went through the woods in the morning, but was sure to find standing in the tall dry grass along the border of the sandy road, here one and there one, on my return at noon. In similar places grew a "yellow daisy" (_Leptopoda_), a single big head, of a deep color, at the top of a leafless stem. It seemed to be one of the most abundant of Florida spring flowers, but I could not learn that it went by any distinctive vernacular name. Beside the railway track were blue-eyed grass and pipewort, and a dainty blue lobelia (_L. Feayana_), with once in a while an extremely pretty coreopsis, having a purple centre, and scarcely to be distinguished from one that is common in gardens. No doubt the advancing season brings an increasing wealth of such beauty to the flat-woods. No doubt, too, I missed the larger half of what might have been found even at the time of my visit; for I made no pretense of doing any real botanical work, having neither the time nor the equipment. The birds kept me busy, for the most part, when the country itself did not absorb my attention.

More interesting, and a thousand times more memorable, than any flower or bird was the pine barren itself. I have given no true idea of it, I am perfectly aware: open, parklike, flooded with sunshine, level as a floor. "What heartache," Lanier breaks out, poor exile, dying of consumption,--"what heartache! Ne'er a hill!" A dreary country to ride through, hour after hour; an impossible country to live in, but most pleasant for a half-day winter stroll. Notwithstanding I never went far into it, as I have already said, I had always a profound sensation of remoteness; as if I might go on forever, and be no farther away.

Yet even here I had more than one reminder that the world is a small place. I met a burly negro in a cart, and fell into talk with him about the Florida climate, an endless topic, out of which a cynical traveler may easily extract almost endless amusement. How abput the summers here? I inquired. Were they really as paradisaical (I did not use that word) as some reports would lead one to suppose? The man smiled, as if he had heard something like that before. He did not think the Florida summer a dream of delight, even on the east coast. "I'm tellin' you the truth, sah; the mosquiters an' sandflies is awful." Was he born here? I asked. No; he came from B----, Alabama. Everybody in eastern Florida came from somewhere, as well as I could make out.

"Oh, from B----," said I. "Did you know Mr. W----, of the ---- Iron Works?"

He smiled again. "Yes, sah; I used to work for him. He's a nice man." He spoke the truth that time beyond a peradventure. He was healthier here than in the other place, he thought, and wages were higher; but he liked the other place better "for pleasure." It was an odd coincidence, was it not, that I should meet in this solitude a man who knew the only citizen of Alabama with whom I was ever acquainted.

At another time I fell in with an oldish colored man, who, like myself, had taken to the woods for a quiet Sunday stroll. _He_ was from Mississippi, he told me. Oh, yes, he remembered the war; he was a slave, twenty-one years old, when it broke out. To his mind, the present generation of "niggers" were a pretty poor lot, for all their "edication." He had seen them crowding folks off the sidewalk, and puffing smoke in their faces. All of which was nothing new; I had found that story more or less common among negroes of his age. He didn't believe much in "edication;" but when I asked if he thought the blacks were better off in slavery times, he answered quickly, "I'd rather be a free man, _I_ had." He wasn't married; he had plenty to do to take care of himself. We separated, he going one way and I the other; but he turned to ask, with much seriousness (the reader must remember that this was only three months after a national election), "Do you think they'll get free trade?" "Truly," said I to myself, "'the world is too much with us.' Even in the flat-woods there is no escaping the tariff question." But I answered, in what was meant to be a reassuring tone, "Not yet awhile. Some time." "I hope not," he said,--as if liberty to buy and sell would be a dreadful blow to a man living in a shanty in a Florida pine barren! He was taking the matter rather too much to heart, perhaps; but surely it was encouraging to see such a man interested in broad economical questions, and I realized as never before the truth of what the newspapers so continually tell us, that political campaigns are educational.

BESIDE THE MARSH.

I am sitting upon the upland bank of a narrow winding creek. Before me is a sea of grass, brown and green of many shades. To the north the marsh is bounded by live-oak woods,--a line with numberless indentations,--beyond which runs the Matanzas River, as I know by the passing and repassing of sails behind the trees. Eastward are sand-hills, dazzling white in the sun, with a ragged green fringe along their tops. Then comes a stretch of the open sea, and then, more to the south, St. Anastasia Island, with its tall black-and-white lighthouse and the cluster of lower buildings at its base. Small sailboats, and now and then a tiny steamer, pass up and down the river to and from St. Augustine.

A delicious south wind is blowing (it is the 15th of February), and I sit in the shade of a cedar-tree and enjoy the air and the scene. A contrast, this, to the frozen world I was living in, less than a week ago.

As I approached the creek, a single spotted sandpiper was teetering along the edge of the water, and the next moment a big blue heron rose just beyond him and went flapping away to the middle of the marsh. Now, an hour afterward, he is still standing there, towering above the tall grass. Once when I turned that way I saw, as I thought, a stake, and then something moved upon it,--a bird of some kind. And what an enormous beak! I raised my field-glass. It was the heron. His body was the post, and his head was the bird. Meanwhile, the sandpiper has stolen away, I know not when or where. He must have omitted the _tweet, tweet_, with which ordinarily he signalizes his flight. He is the first of his kind that I have seen during my brief stay in these parts.

Now a multitude of crows pass over; fish crows, I think they must be, from their small size and their strange, ridiculous voices. And now a second great blue heron comes in sight, and keeps on over the marsh and over the live-oak wood, on his way to the San Sebastian marshes, or some point still more remote. A fine show he makes, with his wide expanse of wing, and his feet drawn up and standing out behind him. Next a marsh hawk in brown plumage comes skimming over the grass. This way and that he swerves in ever graceful lines. For one to whom ease and grace come by nature, even the chase of meadow mice is an act of beauty, while another goes awkwardly though in pursuit of a goddess.

Several times I have noticed a kingfisher hovering above the grass (so it looks, but no doubt he is over an arm of the creek), striking the air with quick strokes, and keeping his head pointed downward, after the manner of a tern. Then he disappeared while I was looking at something else. Now I remark him sitting motionless upon the top of a post in the midst of the marsh.

A third blue heron appears, and he too flies over without stopping. Number One still keeps his place; through the glass I can see him dressing his feathers with his clumsy beak. The lively strain of a white-eyed vireo, pertest of songsters, comes to me from somewhere on my right, and the soft chipping of myrtle warblers is all but incessant. I look up from my paper to see a turkey buzzard sailing majestically northward. I watch him till he fades in the distance. Not once does he flap his wings, but sails and sails, going with the wind, yet turning again and again to rise against it,--helping himself thus to its adverse, uplifting pressure in the place of wing-strokes, perhaps,--and passing onward all the while in beautiful circles. He, too, scavenger though he is, has a genius for being graceful. One might almost be willing to be a buzzard, to fly like that!

The kingfisher and the heron are still at their posts. An exquisite yellow butterfly, of a sort strange to my Yankee eyes, flits past, followed by a red admiral. The marsh hawk is on the wing again, and while looking at him I descry a second hawk, too far away to be made out. Now the air behind me is dark with crows,--a hundred or two, at least, circling over the low cedars. Some motive they have for all their clamor, but it passes my owlish wisdom to guess what it can be. A fourth blue heron appears, and drops into the grass out of sight.

Between my feet is a single blossom of the yellow oxalis, the only flower to be seen; and very pretty it is, each petal with an orange spot at the base.

Another buzzard, another marsh hawk, another yellow butterfly, and then a smaller one, darker, almost orange. It passes too quickly over the creek and away. The marsh hawk comes nearer, and I see the strong yellow tinge of his plumage, especially underneath. He will grow handsomer as he grows older. A pity the same could not be true of men. Behind me are sharp cries of titlarks. From the direction of the river come frequent reports of guns. Somebody is doing his best to be happy! All at once I prick up my ears. From the grass just across the creek rises the brief, hurried song of a long-billed marsh wren. So _he_ is in Florida, is he? Already I have heard confused noises which I feel sure are the work of rails of some kind. No doubt there is abundant life concealed in those acres on acres of close grass.

The heron and the kingfisher are still quiet. Their morning hunt was successful, and for to-day Fate cannot harm them. A buzzard, with nervous, rustling beats, goes directly above the low cedar under which I am resting.

At last, after a siesta of two hours, the heron has changed his place. I looked up just in season to see him sweeping over the grass, into which he dropped the next instant. The tide is falling. The distant sand-hills are winking in the heat, but the breeze is deliciously cool, the very perfection of temperature, if a man is to sit still in the shade. It is eleven o'clock. I have a mile to go in the hot sun, and turn away. But first I sweep the line once more with my glass. Yonder to the south are two more blue herons standing in the grass. Perhaps there are more still. I sweep the line. Yes, far, far away I can see four heads in a row. Heads and necks rise above the grass. But so far away! Are they birds, or only posts made alive by my imagination? I look again. I believe I was deceived. They are nothing but stakes. See how in a row they stand. I smile at myself. Just then one of them moves, and another is pulled down suddenly into the grass. I smile again. "Ten great blue herons," I say to myself.

All this has detained me, and meantime the kingfisher has taken wing and gone noisily up the creek. The marsh hawk appears once more. A killdeer's sharp, rasping note--a familiar sound in St. Augustine--comes from I know not where. A procession of more than twenty black vultures passes over my head. I can see their feet drawn up under them. My own I must use in plodding homeward.

ON THE BEACH AT DAYTONA.

The first eight days of my stay in Daytona were so delightful that I felt as if I had never before seen fine weather, even in my dreams. My east window looked across the Halifax River to the peninsula woods. Beyond them was the ocean. Immediately after breakfast, therefore, I made toward the north bridge, and in half an hour or less was on the beach. Beaches are much the same the world over, and there is no need to describe this one--Silver Beach, I think I heard it called--except to say that it is broad, hard, and, for a pleasure-seeker's purpose, endless. It is backed by low sand-hills covered with impenetrable scrub,--oak and palmetto,--beyond which is a dense growth of short-leaved pines. Perfect weather, a perfect beach, and no throng of people: here were the conditions of happiness; and here for eight days I found it. The ocean itself was a solitude. Day after day not a sail was in sight. Looking up and down the beach, I could usually see somewhere in the distance a carriage or two, and as many foot passengers; but I often walked a mile, or sat for half an hour, without being within hail of any one. Never were airs more gentle or colors more exquisite.