Produced by Tom Cosmas compiled from images made available
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Books by Mr. Torrey,
------
BIRDS IN THE BUSH. 16mo, $1.25.
A RAMBLER'S LEASE. 16mo, $1.25.
THE FOOT-PATH WAY. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 16mo, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
Boston and New York.
A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK
BY
BRADFORD TORREY
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1894
Copyright, 1894, By BRADFORD TORREY.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._ Electrotyped and
Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
CONTENTS
PAGE
In the Flat-Woods 1
Beside the Marsh 34
On the Beach at Daytona 41
Along the Hillsborough 68
A Morning at the Old Sugar Mill 102
On the Upper St. John's 121
On the St. Augustine Road 151
Ornithology on a Cotton Plantation 180
A Florida Shrine 193
Walks about Tallahassee 204
A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK.
IN THE FLAT-WOODS.
In approaching Jacksonville by rail, the traveler rides hour after hour
through seemingly endless pine barrens, otherwise known as low pine-woods
and flat-woods, till he wearies of the sight. It would be hard, he
thinks, to imagine a region more unwholesome looking and uninteresting,
more poverty-stricken and God-forsaken, in its entire aspect. Surely, men
who would risk life in behalf of such a country deserved to win their
cause.
Monotonous as the flat-woods were, however, and malarious as they
looked,--arid wastes and stretches of stagnant water flying past the car
window in perpetual alternation,--I was impatient to get into them. They
were a world the like of which I had never seen; and wherever I went in
eastern Florida, I made it one of my earliest concerns to seek them out.
My first impression was one of disappointment, or perhaps I should
rather say, of bewilderment. In fact, I returned from my first visit
to the flat-woods under the delusion that I had not been into them at
all. This was at St. Augustine, whither I had gone after a night only in
Jacksonville. I looked about the quaint little city, of course, and went
to the South Beach, on St. Anastasia Island; then I wished to see the
pine lands. They were to be found, I was told, on the other side of the
San Sebastian. The sun was hot (or so it seemed to a man fresh from the
rigors of a New England winter), and the sand was deep; but I sauntered
through New Augustine, and pushed on up the road toward Moultrie (I
believe it was), till the last houses were passed and I came to the edge
of the pine-woods. Here, presently, the roads began to fork in a very
confusing manner. The first man I met--a kindly cracker--cautioned me
against getting lost; but I had no thought of taking the slightest risk
of that kind. I was not going to _explore_ the woods, but only to enter
them, sit down, look about me, and listen. The difficulty was to get into
them. As I advanced, they receded. It was still only the beginning of
a wood; the trees far apart and comparatively small, the ground covered
thickly with saw-palmetto, interspersed here and there with patches of
brown grass or sedge.
In many places the roads were under water, and as I seemed to be making
little progress, I pretty soon sat down in a pleasantly shaded spot.
Wagons came along at intervals, all going toward the city, most of them
with loads of wood; ridiculously small loads, such as a Yankee boy would
put upon a wheelbarrow. "A fine day," said I to the driver of such a
cart. "Yes, sir," he answered, "it's a _pretty_ day." He spoke with an
emphasis which seemed to imply that he accepted my remark as well meant,
but hardly adequate to the occasion. Perhaps, if the day had been a
few shades brighter, he would have called it "handsome," or even "good
looking." Expressions of this kind, however, are matters of local or
individual taste, and as such are not to be disputed about. Thus, a man
stopped me in Tallahassee to inquire what time it was. I told him, and
he said, "Ah, a little sooner than I thought." And why not "sooner" as
well as "earlier"? But when, on the same road, two white girls in an
ox-cart hailed me with the question, "What time 'tis?" I thought the
interrogative idiom a little queer; almost as queer, shall we say, as
"How do you do?" may have sounded to the first man who heard it,--if the
reader is able to imagine such a person.
Meanwhile, let the morning be "fine" or "pretty," it was all one to the
birds. The woods were vocal with the cackling of robins, the warble of
bluebirds, and the trills of pine warblers. Flickers were shouting--or
laughing, if one pleased to hear it so--with true flickerish prolixity,
and a single downy woodpecker called sharply again and again. A
mocking-bird near me (there is _always_ a mocking-bird near you, in
Florida) added his voice for a time, but soon relapsed into silence. The
fact was characteristic; for, wherever I went, I found it true that the
mocker grew less musical as the place grew wilder. By instinct he is
a public performer, he demands an audience; and it is only in cities,
like St. Augustine and Tallahassee, that he is heard at his freest and
best. A loggerhead shrike--now close at my elbow, now farther away--was
practicing his extensive vocabulary with perseverance, if not with
enthusiasm. Like his relative the "great northern," though perhaps in a
less degree, the loggerhead is commonly at an extreme, either loquacious
or dumb; as if he could not let his moderation be known unto any man.
Sometimes I fancied him possessed with an insane ambition to match the
mocking-bird in song as well as in personal appearance. If so, it is
not surprising that he should be subject to fits of discouragement and
silence. Aiming at the sun, though a good and virtuous exercise, as we
have all heard, is apt to prove dispiriting to sensible marksmen. Crows
(fish crows, in all probability, but at the time I did not know it)
uttered strange, hoarse, flat-sounding caws. Every bird of them must have
been born without a palate, it seemed to me. White-eyed chewinks were
at home in the dense palmetto scrub, whence they announced themselves
unmistakably by sharp whistles. Now and then one of them mounted a
leaf, and allowed me to see his pale yellow iris. Except for this mark,
recognizable almost as far as the bird could be distinguished at all, he
looked exactly like our common New England towhee. Somewhere behind me
was a king-fisher's rattle, and from a savanna in the same direction came
the songs of meadow larks; familiar, but with something unfamiliar about
them at the same time, unless my ears deceived me.
More interesting than any of the birds yet named, because more strictly
characteristic of the place, as well as more strictly new to me, were
the brown-headed nuthatches. I was on the watch for them: they were one
of the three novelties which I knew were to be found in the pine lands,
and nowhere else,--the other two being the red-cockaded woodpecker and
the pine-wood sparrow; and being thus on the lookout, I did not expect
to be taken by surprise, if such a paradox (it is nothing worse) may be
allowed to pass. But when I heard them twittering in the distance, as I
did almost immediately, I had no suspicion of what they were. The voice
had nothing of that nasal quality, that Yankee twang, as some people
would call it, which I had always associated with the nuthatch family. On
the contrary, it was decidedly finchlike,--so much so that some of the
notes, taken by themselves, would have been ascribed without hesitation
to the goldfinch or the pine finch, had I heard them in New England;
and even as things were, I was more than once deceived for the moment.
As for the birds themselves, they were evidently a cheerful and thrifty
race, much more numerous than the red-cockaded woodpeckers, and much
less easily overlooked than the pine-wood sparrows. I seldom entered the
flat-woods anywhere without finding them. They seek their food largely
about the leafy ends of the pine branches, resembling the Canadian
nuthatches in this respect, so that it is only on rare occasions that one
sees them creeping about the trunks or larger limbs. Unlike their two
Northern relatives, they are eminently social, often traveling in small
flocks, even in the breeding season, and keeping up an almost incessant
chorus of shrill twitters as they flit hither and thither through the
woods. The first one to come near me was full of inquisitiveness; he flew
back and forth past my head, exactly as chickadees do in a similar mood,
and once seemed almost ready to alight on my hat. "Let us have a look at
this stranger," he appeared to be saying. Possibly his nest was not far
off, but I made no search for it. Afterwards I found two nests, one in a
low stump, and one in the trunk of a pine, fifteen or twenty feet from
the ground. Both of them contained young ones (March 31 and April 2), as
I knew by the continual goings-in-and-out of the fathers and mothers. In
dress the brown-head is dingy, with little or nothing of the neat and
attractive appearance of our New England nuthatches.
In this pine-wood on the road to Moultrie I found no sign of the new
woodpecker or the new sparrow. Nor was I greatly disappointed. The place
itself was a sufficient novelty,--the place and the summer weather. The
pines murmured overhead, and the palmettos rustled all about. Now a
butterfly fluttered past me, and now a dragonfly. More than one little
flock of tree swallows went over the wood, and once a pair of phœbes
amused me by an uncommonly pretty lover's quarrel. Truly it was a
pleasant hour. In the midst of it there came along a man in a cart, with
a load of wood. We exchanged the time of day, and I remarked upon the
smallness of his load. Yes, he said; but it was a pretty heavy load to
drag seven or eight miles over such roads. Possibly he understood me as
implying that he seemed to be in rather small business, although I had no
such purpose, for he went on to say: "In 1861, when this beautiful war
broke out between our countries, my father owned niggers. We didn't have
to do _this_. But I don't complain. If I hadn't got a bullet in me, I
should do pretty well."
"Then you were in the war?" I said.
"Oh, yes, yes, sir! I was in the Confederate service. Yes, sir, I'm a
Southerner to the backbone. My grandfather was a ----" (I missed the
patronymic), "and commanded St. Augustine."
The name had a foreign sound, and the man's complexion was swarthy, and
in all simplicity I asked if he was a Minorcan. I might as well have
touched a lighted match to powder. His eyes flashed, and he came round
the tail of the cart, gesticulating with his stick.
"Minorcan!" he broke out. "Spain and the island of Minorca are two
places, ain't they?"
I admitted meekly that they were.
"You are English, ain't you?" he went on. "You are English,--Yankee
born,--ain't you?"
I owned it.
"Well, I'm Spanish. That ain't Minorcan. My grandfather was a ----,
and commanded St. Augustine. He couldn't have done that if he had been
Minorcan."
By this time he was quieting down a bit. His father remembered the Indian
war. The son had heard him tell about it.
"Those were dangerous times," he remarked. "You couldn't have been
standing out here in the woods then."
"There is no danger here now, is there?" said I.
"No, no, not now." But as he drove along he turned to say that _he_
wasn't afraid of _any_ thing; he wasn't that kind of a man. Then, with a
final turn, he added, what I could not dispute, "A man's life is always
in danger."
After he was gone, I regretted that I had offered no apology for my
unintentionally offensive question; but I was so taken by surprise,
and so much interested in the man as a specimen, that I quite forgot
my manners till it was too late. One thing I learned: that it is not
prudent, in these days, to judge a Southern man's blood, in either sense
of the word, by his dress or occupation. This man had brought seven or
eight miles a load of wood that might possibly be worth seventy-five
cents (I questioned the owner of what looked like just such a load
afterward, and found his asking price half a dollar), and for clothing
had on a pair of trousers and a blue cotton shirt, the latter full of
holes, through which the skin was visible; yet his father was a ---- and
had "owned niggers."
A still more picturesque figure in this procession of wood-carters was a
boy of perhaps ten or eleven. He rode his horse, and was barefooted and
barelegged; but he had a cigarette in his mouth, and to each brown heel
was fastened an enormous spur. Who was it that infected the world with
the foolish and disastrous notion that work and play are two different
things? And was it Emerson, or some other wise man, who said that a boy
was the true philosopher?
When it came time to think of returning to St. Augustine for dinner, I
appreciated my cracker's friendly warning against losing my way; for
though I had hardly so much as entered the woods, and had taken, as I
thought, good heed to my steps, I was almost at once in a quandary as
to my road. There was no occasion for worry,--with the sun out, and
my general course perfectly plain; but here was a fork in the road,
and whether to bear to the left or to the right was a simple matter
of guess-work. I made the best guess I could, and guessed wrong, as
was apparent after a while, when I found the road under deep water
for several rods. I objected to wading, and there was no ready way of
going round, since the oak and palmetto scrub crowded close up to the
roadside, and just here was all but impenetrable. What was still more
conclusive, the road was the wrong one, as the inundation proved, and,
for aught I could tell, might carry me far out of my course. I turned
back, therefore, under the midday sun, and by good luck a second attempt
brought me out of the woods very near where I had entered them. I visited
this particular piece of country but once afterward, having in the mean
time discovered a better place of the same sort along the railroad, in
the direction of Palatka. There, on a Sunday morning, I heard my first
pine-wood sparrow. Time and tune could hardly have been in truer accord.
The hour was of the quietest, the strain was of the simplest, and the
bird sang as if he were dreaming. For a long time I let him go on without
attempting to make certain who he was. He seemed to be rather far off: if
I waited his pleasure, he would perhaps move toward me; if I disturbed
him, he would probably become silent. So I sat on the end of a sleeper
and listened. It was not great music. It made me think of the swamp
sparrow; and the swamp sparrow is far from being a great singer. A single
prolonged, drawling note (in that respect unlike the swamp sparrow, of
course), followed by a succession of softer and sweeter ones,--that was
all, when I came to analyze it; but that is no fair description of what I
heard. The quality of the song is not there; and it was the quality, the
feeling, the soul of it, if I may say what I mean, that made it, in the
true sense of a much-abused word, charming.
There could be little doubt that the bird was a pine-wood sparrow; but
such things are not to be taken for granted. Once or twice, indeed,
the thought of some unfamiliar warbler had crossed my mind. At last,
therefore, as the singer still kept out of sight, I leaped the ditch
and pushed into the scrub. Happily I had not far to go; he had been
much nearer than I thought. A small bird flew up before me, and dropped
almost immediately into a clump of palmetto. I edged toward the spot and
waited. Then the song began again, this time directly in front of me,
but still faraway-sounding and dreamy. I find that last word in my hasty
note penciled at the time, and can think of no other that expresses the
effect half so well. I looked and looked, and all at once there sat the
bird on a palmetto leaf. Once again he sang, putting up his head. Then
he dropped out of sight, and I heard nothing more. I had seen only his
head and neck,--enough to show him a sparrow, and almost of necessity the
pine-wood sparrow. No other strange member of the finch family was to be
looked for in such a place.
On further acquaintance, let me say at once, _Pucæa æstivalis_ proved to
be a more versatile singer than the performances of my first bird would
have led me to suppose. He varies his tune freely, but always within a
pretty narrow compass; as is true, also, of the field sparrow, with whom,
as I soon came to feel, he has not a little in common. It is in musical
form only that he suggests the swamp sparrow. In tone and spirit, in the
qualities of sweetness and expressiveness, he is nearly akin to _Spizella
pusilla_. One does for the Southern pine barren what the other does for
the Northern berry pasture. And this is high praise; for though in New
England we have many singers more brilliant than the field sparrow,
we have none that are sweeter, and few that in the long run give more
pleasure to sensitive hearers.
I found the pine-wood sparrow afterward in New Smyrna, Port Orange,
Sanford, and Tallahassee. So far as I could tell, it was always the
same bird; but I shot no specimens, and speak with no authority.[1]
Living always in the pine lands, and haunting the dense undergrowth,
it is heard a hundred times where it is seen once,--a point greatly in
favor of its effectiveness as a musician. Mr. Brewster speaks of it as
singing always from an elevated perch, while the birds that I saw in the
act of song, a very limited number, were invariably perched low. One
that I watched in New Smyrna (one of a small chorus, the others being
invisible) sang for a quarter of an hour from a stake or stump which
rose perhaps a foot above the dwarf palmetto. It was the same song that
I had heard in St. Augustine; only the birds here were in a livelier
mood, and sang _out_ instead of _sotto voce_. The long introductory note
sounded sometimes as if it were indrawn, and often, if not always, had
a considerable burr in it. Once in a while the strain was caught up at
the end and sung over again, after the manner of the field sparrow,--one
of that bird's prettiest tricks. At other times the song was delivered
with full voice, and then repeated almost under the singer's breath.
This was done beautifully in the Port Orange flat-woods, the bird being
almost at my feet. I had seen him a moment before, and saw him again
half a minute later, but at that instant he was out of sight in the
scrub, and seemingly on the ground. This feature of the song, one of its
chief merits and its most striking peculiarity, is well described by Mr.
Brewster. "Now," he says, "it has a full, bell-like ring that seems to
fill the air around; next it is soft and low and inexpressibly tender;
now it is clear again, but so modulated that the sound seems to come from
a great distance."[2]
[1] Two races of the pine-wood sparrow are recognized by ornithologists,
_Pucæa æstivalis_ and _P. æstivalis bachmanii_, and both of them have
been found in Florida; but, if I understand the matter right, _Pucæa
æstivalis_ is the common and typical Florida bird.
[2] _Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club_, vol. vii. p. 98.
Not many other birds, I think (I cannot recall any), habitually vary
their song in this manner. Other birds sing almost inaudibly at times,
especially in the autumnal season. Even the brown thrasher, whose
ordinary performance is so full-voiced, not to say boisterous, will
sometimes soliloquize, or seem to soliloquize, in the faintest of
undertones. The formless autumnal warble of the song sparrow is familiar
to every one. And in this connection I remember, and am not likely ever
to forget, a winter wren who favored me with what I thought the most
bewitching bit of vocalism to which I had ever listened. He was in the
bushes close at my side, in the Franconia Notch, and delivered his whole
song, with all its customary length, intricacy, and speed, in a tone--a
whisper, I may almost say--that ran along the very edge of silence. The
unexpected proximity of a stranger may have had something to do with his
conduct, as it often appears to have with the thrasher's; but, however
that may be, the cases are not parallel with that of the pine-wood
sparrow, inasmuch as the latter bird not merely sings under his breath
on special occasions, whether on account of the nearness of a listener
or for any other reason, but in his ordinary singing uses louder and
softer tones interchangeably, almost exactly as human singers and players
do; as if, in the practice of his art, he had learned to appreciate,
consciously or unconsciously (and practice naturally goes before theory),
the expressive value of what I believe is called musical dynamics.
I spent many half-days in the pine lands (how gladly now would I spend
another!), but never got far into them. ("Into their depths," my pen was
on the point of making me say; but that would have been a false note.
The flat-woods have no "depths.") Whether I followed the railway,--in
many respects pretty satisfactory method,--or some roundabout, aimless
carriage road, a mile or two was generally enough. The country offers
no temptation to pedestrian feats, nor does the imagination find its
account in going farther and farther. For the reader is not to think
of the flat-woods as in the least resembling a Northern forest, which
at every turn opens before the visitor and beckons him forward. Beyond
and behind, and on either side, the pine-woods are ever the same. It is
this monotony, by the bye, this utter absence of landmarks, that makes
it so unsafe for the stranger to wander far from the beaten track. The
sand is deep, the sun is hot; one place is as good as another. What use,
then, to tire yourself? And so, unless the traveler is going somewhere,
as I seldom was, he is continually stopping by the way. Now a shady spot
entices him to put down his umbrella,--for there is a shady spot, here
and there, even in a Florida pine-wood; or blossoms are to be plucked; or
a butterfly, some gorgeous and nameless creature, brightens the wood as
it passes; or a bird is singing; or an eagle is soaring far overhead, and
must be watched out of sight; or a buzzard, with upturned wings, floats
suspiciously near the wanderer, as if with sinister intent (buzzard
shadows are a regular feature of the flat-wood landscape, just as cloud
shadows are in a mountainous country); or a snake lies stretched out in
the sun,--a "whip snake," perhaps, that frightens the unwary stroller by
the amazing swiftness with which it runs away from him; or some strange
invisible insect is making uncanny noises in the underbrush. One of my
recollections of the railway woods at St. Augustine is of a cricket, or
locust, or something else,--I never saw it,--that amused me often with a
formless rattling or drumming sound. I could think of nothing but a boy's
first lesson upon the bones, the rhythm of the beats was so comically
mistimed and bungled.
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.[3] No sooner was the song repeated, however, than I saw
that I had beep, 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:--
[Illustration: Musical notes]
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.
[3] As it was, I did not find _Dendroica virens_ in Florida. On my way
home, in Atlanta, April 20, 1 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 phœbe
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 there 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 about 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' sand-flies is awful." Was he born here? I No;
he came from B----, Alabama. Everybody in eastern Florida came from
somewhere, as well as I could make out. "Oil, 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 clown 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.
As for birds, they were surprisingly scarce, but never wanting
altogether. If everything else failed, a few fish-hawks were sure to be
in sight. I watched them at first with eager interest. Up and down the
beach they went, each by himself, with heads pointed downward, scanning
the shallow water. Often they stopped in their course, and by means of
laborious flappings held themselves poised over a certain spot. Then,
perhaps, they set their wings and shot downward clean under water. If the
plunge was unsuccessful, they shook their feathers dry and were ready
to begin again. They had the fisherman's gift. The second, and even the
third attempt might fail, but no matter; it was simply a question of time
and patience. If the fish was caught, their first concern seemed to be
to shift their hold upon it, till its head pointed to the front. That
done, they shook themselves vigorously and started landward, the shining
white victim wriggling vainly in the clutch of the talons. I took it for
granted that they retired with their quarry to some secluded spot on the
peninsula, till one day I happened to be standing upon a sand-hill as
one passed overhead. Then I perceived that he kept on straight across
the peninsula and the river. More than once, however, I saw one of them
in no haste to go inland. On my second visit, a hawk came circling about
my head, carrying a fish. I was surprised at the action, but gave it no
second thought, nor once imagined that he was making me his protector,
till suddenly a large bird dropped rather awkwardly upon the sand, not
far before me. He stood for an instant on his long, ungainly legs, and
then, showing a white head and a white tail, rose with a fish in his
talons, and swept away landward out of sight. Here was the osprey's
parasite, the bald eagle, for which I had been on the watch. Meantime,
the hawk too had disappeared. Whether it was his fish which the eagle had
picked up (having missed it in the air) I cannot say. I did not see it
fall, and knew nothing of the eagle's presence until he fluttered to the
beach.
Some days later, I saw the big thief--emblem of American liberty--play
his sharp game to the finish. I was crossing the bridge, and by accident
turned and looked upward. (By accident, I say, but I was always doing
it.) High in the air were two birds, one chasing the other,--a fish-hawk
and a young eagle with dark head and tail. The hawk meant to save his
dinner if he could. Round and round he went, ascending at every turn, his
pursuer after him hotly. For aught I could see, he stood a good chance of
escape, till all at once another pair of wings swept into the field of my
glass.
"A third is in the race! Who is the third,
Speeding away swift as the eagle bird?"