Chapter 9

As I have said, I followed the road over the nearly level plateau for what I guessed to be about three miles. Then I found myself in a bit of hollow that seemed made for a stopping-place, with a plantation road running off to the right, and a hillside cornfield of many acres on the left. In the field were a few tall dead trees. At the tip of one sat a sparrow-hawk, and to the trunk of another clung a red-bellied woodpecker, who, with characteristic foolishness, sat beside his hole calling persistently, and then, as if determined to publish what other birds so carefully conceal, went inside, thrust out his head, and resumed his clatter. Here, too, were a pair of bluebirds, noticeable for their rarity, and for the wonderful color--a shade deeper than is ever seen at the North, I think--of the male's blue coat. In a small thicket in the hollow beside the road were noisy white-eyed vireos, a ruby-crowned kinglet,--a tiny thing that within a month would be singing in Canada, or beyond,--an unseen wood pewee, and (also unseen) a hermit thrush, one of perhaps twenty solitary individuals that I found scattered about the woods in the course of my journeyings. Not one of them sang a note. Probably they did not know that there was a Yankee in Florida who--in some moods, at least--would have given more for a dozen bars of hermit thrush music than for a day and a night of the mocking-bird's medley. Not that I mean to disparage the great Southern performer; as a vocalist he is so far beyond the hermit thrush as to render a comparison absurd; but what I love is a _singer_, a voice to reach the soul. An old Tallahassee negro, near the "white Norman school,"--so he called it,--hit off the mocking-bird pretty well. I had called his attention to one singing in an adjacent dooryard. "Yes," he said, "I love to hear 'em. They's very amusin', very amusin'." My own feeling can hardly be a prejudice, conscious or unconscious, in favor of what has grown dear to me through early and long-continued association. The difference between the music of birds like the mocker, the thrasher, and the catbird and that of birds like the hermit, the veery, and the wood thrush is one of kind, not of degree; and I have heard music of the mocking-bird's kind (the thrasher's, that is to say) as long as I have heard music at all. The question is one of taste, it is true; but it is not a question of familiarity or favoritism. All praise to the mocker and the thrasher! May their tribe increase! But if we are to indulge in comparisons, give me the wood thrush, the hermit, and the veery; with tones that the mocking-bird can never imitate, and a simplicity which the Fates--the wise Fates, who will have variety--have put forever beyond his appreciation and his reach.

Florida as I saw it (let the qualification be noted) is no more a land of flowers than New England. In some respects, indeed, it is less so. Flowering shrubs and climbers there are in abundance. I rode in the cars through miles on miles of flowering dogwood and pink azalea. Here, on this Tallahassee road, were miles of Cherokee roses, with plenty of the climbing scarlet honeysuckle (beloved of humming-birds, although I saw none here), and nearer the city, as already described, masses of lantana and white honeysuckle. In more than one place pink double roses (vagrants from cultivated grounds, no doubt) offered buds and blooms to all who would have them. The cross-vine (_Bignonia_), less freehanded, hung its showy bells out of reach in the treetops. Thorn-bushes of several kinds were in flower (a puzzling lot), and the treelike blueberry (_Vaccinium arboreum_), loaded with its large, flaring white corollas, was a real spectacle of beauty. Here, likewise, I found one tiny crab-apple shrub, with a few blossoms, exquisitely tinted with rose-color, and most exquisitely fragrant. But the New Englander, when he talks of wild flowers, has in his eye something different from these. He is not thinking of any bush, no matter how beautiful, but of trailing arbutus, hepaticas, bloodroot, anemones, saxifrage, violets, dogtooth violets, spring beauties, "cowslips," buttercups, corydalis, columbine, Dutchman's breeches, clintonia, five-finger, and all the rest of that bright and fragrant host which, ever since he can remember, he has seen covering his native hills and valleys with the return of May.

It is not meant, of course, that plants like these are wholly wanting in Florida. I remember an abundance of violets, blue and white, especially in the flat-woods, where also I often found pretty butterworts of two or three sorts. The smaller blue ones took very acceptably the place of hepaticas, and indeed I heard them called by that name. But, as compared with what one sees in New England, such "ground flowers," flowers which it seems perfectly natural to pluck for a nosegay, were very little in evidence. I heard Northern visitors remark the fact again and again. On this pretty road out of Tallahassee--itself a city of flower gardens--I can recall nothing of the kind except half a dozen strawberry blossoms, and the oxalis and specularia before mentioned. Probably the round-leaved houstonia grew here, as it did everywhere, in small scattered patches. If there were violets as well, I can only say I have forgotten them.

Be it added, however, that at the time I did not miss them. In a garden of roses one does not begin by sighing for mignonette and lilies of the valley. Violets or no violets, there was no lack of beauty. The Southern highway surveyor, if such a personage exists, is evidently not consumed by that distressing puritanical passion for "slicking up things" which too often makes of his Northern brother something scarcely better than a public nuisance. At the South you will not find a woman cultivating with pain a few exotics beside the front door, while her husband is mowing and burning the far more attractive wild garden that nature has planted just outside the fence. The St. Augustine road, at any rate, after climbing the hill and getting beyond the wood, runs between natural hedges,--trees, vines, and shrubs carelessly intermingled,--not dense enough to conceal the prospect or shut out the breeze ("straight from the Gulf," as the Tallahassean is careful to inform you), but sufficient to afford much welcome protection from the sun. Here it was good to find the sassafras growing side by side with the persimmon, although when, for old acquaintance' sake, I put a leaf into my mouth I was half glad to fancy it a thought less savory than some I had tasted in Yankeeland. I took a kind of foolish satisfaction, too, in the obvious fact that certain plants--the sumach and the Virginia creeper, to mention no others--were less at home here than a thousand miles farther north. With the wild-cherry trees, I was obliged to confess, the case was reversed. I had seen larger ones in Massachusetts, perhaps, but none that looked half so clean and thrifty. In truth, their appearance was a puzzle, rum-cherry trees as by all tokens they undoubtedly were, till of a sudden it flashed upon me that there were no caterpillars' nests in them! Then I ceased to wonder at their odd look. It spoke well for my botanical acumen that I had recognized them at all.

Before I had been a week in Tallahassee I found that, without forethought or plan, I had dropped into the habit (and how pleasant it is to think that some good habits _can_ be dropped into!) of making the St. Augustine road my after-dinner sauntering-place. The morning was for a walk: to Lake Bradford, perhaps, in search of a mythical ivory-billed woodpecker, or westward on the railway for a few miles, with a view to rare migratory warblers. But in the afternoon I did not walk,--I loitered; and though I still minded the birds and flowers, I for the most part forgot my botany and ornithology. In the cool of the day, then (the phrase is an innocent euphemism), I climbed the hill, and after an hour or two on the plateau strolled back again, facing the sunset through a vista of moss-covered live-oaks and sweet gums. Those quiet, incurious hours are among the pleasantest of all my Florida memories. A cuckoo would be cooing, perhaps; or a quail, with cheerful ambiguity,-- such as belongs to weather predictions in general,--would be prophesying "more wet" and "no more wet" in alternate breaths; or two or three night-hawks would be sweeping back and forth high above the valley; or a marsh hawk would be quartering over the big oatfield. The martins would be cackling, in any event, and the kingbirds practicing their aerial mock somersaults; and the mocking-bird would be singing, and the redbird whistling. On the western slope, just below the oatfield, the Northern woman who owned the pretty cottage there (the only one on the road) was sure to be at work among her flowers. A laughing colored boy who did chores for her (without injury to his health, I could warrant) told me that she was a Northerner. But I knew it already; I needed no witness but her beds of petunias. In the valley, as I crossed the railroad track, a loggerhead shrike sat, almost of course, on the telegraph wire in dignified silence; and just beyond, among the cabins, I had my choice of mocking-birds and orchard orioles. And so, admiring the roses and the pomegranates, the lantanas and the honeysuckles, or chatting with some dusky fellow-pilgrim, I mounted the hill to the city, and likely as not saw before me a red-headed woodpecker sitting on the roof of the State House, calling attention to his patriotic self--in his tri-colored dress--by occasional vigorous tattoos on the tinned ridgepole. I never saw him there without gladness. The legislature had begun its session in an economical mood,--as is more or less the habit of legislatures, I believe,--and was even considering a proposition to reduce the salary and mileage of its members. Under such circumstances, it ought not to have been a matter of surprise, perhaps, that no flag floated from the cupola of the capitol. The people's money should not be wasted. And possibly I should never have remarked the omission but for a certain curiosity, natural, if not inevitable, on the part of a Northern visitor, as to the real feeling of the South toward the national government. Day after day I had seen a portly gentleman--with an air, or with airs, as the spectator might choose to express it--going in and out of the State House gate, dressed ostentatiously in a suit of Confederate gray. He had worn nothing else since the war, I was told. But of course the State of Florida was not to be judged by the freak of one man, and he only a member of the "third house." And even when I went into the governor's office, and saw the original "ordinance of secession" hanging in a conspicuous place on the wall, as if it were an heirloom to be proud of, I felt no stirring of sectional animosity, thorough-bred Massachusetts Yankee and old-fashioned abolitionist as I am. A brave people can hardly be expected or desired to forget its history, especially when that history has to do with sacrifices and heroic deeds. But these things, taken together, did no doubt prepare me to look upon it as a happy coincidence when, one morning, I heard the familiar cry of the red-headed woodpecker, for the first time in Florida, and looked up to see him flying the national colors from the ridgepole of the State House. I did not break out with "Three cheers for the red, white, and blue!" I am naturally undemonstrative; but I said to myself that _Melanerpes erythrocephalus_ was a very handsome bird.

ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLANTATION.

On one of my first jaunts into the suburbs of Tallahassee I noticed not far from the road a bit of swamp,--shallow pools with muddy borders and flats. It was a likely spot for "waders," and would be worth a visit. To reach it, indeed, I must cross a planted field surrounded by a lofty barbed-wire fence and placarded against trespassers; but there was no one in sight, or no one who looked at all like a land-owner; and, besides, it could hardly be accounted a trespass--defined by Blackstone as an "_unwarranted_ entry on another's soil"--to step carefully over the cotton rows on so legitimate an errand. Ordinarily I call myself a simple bird-gazer, an amateur, a field naturalist, if you will; but on occasions like the present I assume--with myself, that is--all the rights and titles of an ornithologist proper, a man of science strictly so called. In the interest of science, then, I climbed the fence and picked my way across the field. True enough, about the edges of the water were two or three solitary sandpipers, and at least half a dozen of the smaller yellowlegs,--two additions to my Florida list,--not to speak of a little blue heron and a green heron, the latter in most uncommonly green plumage. It was well I had interpreted the placard a little generously. "The letter killeth" is a pretty good text in emergencies of this kind. So I said to myself. The herons, meanwhile, had taken French leave, but the smaller birds were less suspicious; I watched them at my leisure, and left them still feeding.

Two days later I was there again, but it must be acknowledged that this time I tarried in the road till a man on horseback had disappeared round the next turn. It would have been manlier, without doubt, to pay no attention to him; but something told me that he was the cotton-planter himself, and, for better or worse, prudence carried the day with me. Finding nothing new, though the sandpipers and yellowlegs were still present, with a very handsome little blue heron and plenty of blackbirds, I took the road again and went further, and an hour or two afterward, on getting back to the same place, was overtaken again by the horseman. He pulled up his horse and bade me good-afternoon. Would I lend him my opera-glass, which happened to be in my hand at the moment? "I should like to see how my house looks from here," he said; and he pointed across the field to a house on the hill some distance beyond. "Ah," said I, glad to set myself right by a piece of frankness that under the circumstances could hardly work to my disadvantage; "then it is your land on which I have been trespassing." "How so?" he asked, with a smile; and I explained that I had been across his cotton-field a little while before. "That is no trespass," he answered (so the reader will perceive that I had been quite correct in my understanding of the law); and when I went on to explain my object in visiting his cane-swamp (for such it was, he said, but an unexpected freshet had ruined the crop when it was barely out of the ground), he assured me that I was welcome to visit it as often as I wished. He himself was very fond of natural history, and often regretted that he had not given time to it in his youth. As it was, he protected the birds on his plantation, and the place was full of them. I should find his woods interesting, he felt sure. Florida was extremely rich in birds; he believed there were some that had never been classified. "We have orioles here," he added; and so far, at any rate, he was right; I had seen perhaps twenty that day (orchard orioles, that is), and one sat in a tree before us at the moment. His whole manner was most kindly and hospitable,--as was that of every Tallahassean with whom I had occasion to speak,--and I told him with sincere gratitude that I should certainly avail myself of his courtesy and stroll through his woods.

I approached them, two mornings afterward, from the opposite side, where, finding no other place of entrance, I climbed a six-barred, tightly locked gate--feeling all the while like "a thief and a robber"--in front of a deserted cabin. Then I had only to cross a grassy field, in which meadow larks were singing, and I was in the woods. I wandered through them without finding anything more unusual or interesting than summer tanagers and yellow-throated warblers, which were in song there, as they were in every such place, and after a while came out into a pleasant glade, from which different parts of the plantation could be seen, and through which ran a plantation road. Here was a wooden fence,--a most unusual thing,--and I lost no time in mounting it, to rest and look about me. It is one of the marks of a true Yankee, I suspect, to like such a perch. My own weakness in that direction is a frequent subject of mirth with chance fellow travelers. The attitude is comfortable and conducive to meditation; and now that I was seated and at my ease, I felt that this was one of the New England luxuries which, almost without knowing it, I had missed ever since I left home.

Of my meditations on this particular occasion I remember nothing; but that is no sign they were valueless; as it is no sign that yesterday's dinner did me no good because I have forgotten what it was. In the latter case, indeed, and perhaps in the former as well, it would seem more reasonable to draw an exactly opposite inference. But, quibbles apart, one thing I do remember: I sat for some time on the fence, in the shade of a tree, with an eye upon the cane-swamp and an ear open for bird-voices. Yes, and it comes to me at this moment that here I heard the first and only bull-frog that I heard anywhere in Florida. It was like a voice from home, and belonged with the fence. Other frogs I had heard in other places. One chorus brought me out of bed in Daytona--in the evening--after a succession of February dog-day showers. "What is that noise outside?" I inquired of the landlady as I hastened downstairs. "That?" said she, with a look of amusement; "that's frogs." "It _may_ be," I thought, but I followed the sounds till they led me in the darkness to the edge of a swamp. No doubt the creatures were frogs, but of some kind new to me, with voices more lugubrious and homesick than I should have supposed could possibly belong to any batrachian. A week or two later, in the New Smyrna flat-woods, I heard in the distance a sound which I took for the grunting of pigs. I made a note of it, mentally, as a cheerful token, indicative of a probable scarcity of rattlesnakes; but by and by, as I drew nearer, the truth of the matter began to break upon me. A man was approaching, and when we met I asked him what was making that noise yonder. "Frogs," he said. At another time, in the flat-woods of Port Orange (I hope I am not taxing my reader's credulity too far, or making myself out a man of too imaginative an ear), I heard the bleating of sheep. Busy with other things, I did not stop to reflect that it was impossible there should be sheep in that quarter, and the occurrence had quite passed out of my mind when, one day, a cracker, talking about frogs, happened to say, "Yes, and we have one kind that makes a noise exactly like the bleating of sheep." That, without question, was what I had heard in the flat-woods. But this frog in the sugar-cane swamp was the same fellow that on summer evenings, ever and ever so many years ago, in sonorous bass that could be heard a quarter of a mile away, used to call from Reuben Loud's pond, "Pull him in! Pull him in!" or sometimes (the inconsistent amphibian), "Jug o' rum! Jug o' rum!"

I dismounted from my perch at last, and was sauntering idly along the path (idleness like this is often the best of ornithological industry), when suddenly I had a vision! Before me, in the leafy top of an oak sapling, sat a blue grosbeak. I knew him on the instant. But I could see only his head and neck, the rest of his body being hidden by the leaves. It was a moment of feverish excitement. Here was a new bird, a bird about which I had felt fifteen years of curiosity; and, more than that, a bird which here and now was quite unexpected, since it was not included in either of the two Florida lists that I had brought with me from home. For perhaps five seconds I had my opera-glass on the blue head and the thick-set, dark bill, with its lighter-colored under mandible. Then I heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs, and lifted my eyes. My friend the owner of the plantation was coming down the road at a gallop, straight upon me. If I was to see the grosbeak and make sure of him, it must be done at once. I moved to bring him fully into view, and he flew into the thick of a pine-tree out of sight. But the tree was not far off, and if Mr. ---- would pass me with a nod, the case was still far from hopeless. A bright thought came to me. I ran from the path with a great show of eager absorption, leveled my glass upon the pine-tree, and stood fixed. Perhaps Mr. ---- would take the hint. Alas! he had too much courtesy to pass his own guest without speaking. "Still after the birds?" he said, as he checked his horse. I responded, as I hope, without any symptom of annoyance. Then, of course, he wished to know what I was looking at, and I told him that a blue grosbeak had just flown into that pine-tree, and that I was most distressingly anxious to see more of him. He looked at the pine-tree. "I can't see him," he said. No more could I. "It wasn't a blue jay, was it?" he asked. And then we talked of one thing and another, I have no idea what, till he rode away to another part of the plantation where a gang of women were at work. By this time the grosbeak had disappeared utterly. Possibly he had gone to a bit of wood on the opposite side of the cane-swamp. I scaled a barbed-wire fence and made in that direction, but to no purpose. The grosbeak was gone for good. Probably I should never see another. Could the planter have read my thoughts just then he would perhaps have been angry with himself, and pretty certainly he would have been angry with me. That a Yankee should accept his hospitality, and then load him with curses and call him all manner of names! How should he know that I was so insane a hobbyist as to care more for the sight of a new bird than for all the laws and customs of ordinary politeness? As my feelings cooled, I saw that I was stepping over hills or rows of some strange-looking plants just out of the ground. Peanuts, I guessed; but to make sure I called to a colored woman who was hoeing not far off. "What are these?" "Pinders," she answered. I knew she meant peanuts,--otherwise "ground-peas" and "goobers,"--and now that I once more have a dictionary at my elbow I learn that the word, like "goober," is, or is supposed to be, of African origin.

I was preparing to surmount the barbed-wire fence again, when the planter returned and halted for another chat. It was evident that he took a genuine and amiable interest in my researches. There were a great many kinds of sparrows in that country, he said, and also of woodpeckers. He knew the ivory-bill, but, like other Tallahasseans, he thought I should have to go into Lafayette County (all Florida people say La_fay_ette) to find it. "That bird calling now is a bee-bird," he said, referring to a kingbird; "and we have a bird that is called the French mocking-bird; he catches other birds." The last remark was of interest for its bearing upon a point about which I had felt some curiosity, and, I may say, some skepticism, as I had seen many loggerhead shrikes, but had observed no indication that other birds feared them or held any grudge against them. As he rode off he called my attention to a great blue heron just then flying over the swamp. "They are very shy," he said. Then, from further away, he shouted once more to ask if I heard the mocking-bird singing yonder, pointing with his whip in the direction of the singer.