nothing better than that. They were resplendent with fruit, and on my
earlier visits were also in bloom. One did not need to climb the hill
to learn the fact. For an out-of-door sweetness it would be hard, I
think, to improve upon the scent of orange blossoms. As for the oranges
themselves, they seemed to be in little demand, large and handsome as
they were. Southern people in general, I fancy, look upon wild fruit of
this kind as not exactly edible. I remember asking two colored men in
Tallahassee whether the oranges still hanging conspicuously from a tree
just over the wall (a sight not so very common in that part of the State)
were sweet or sour. I have forgotten just what they said, but I remember
how they _looked_. I meant the inquiry as a mild bit of humor, but to
them it was a thousandfold better than that: it was wit ineffable. What
Shakespeare said about the prosperity of a jest was never more strikingly
exemplified. In New Smyrna, with orange groves on every hand, the wild
fruit went begging with natives and tourists alike; so that I feel a
little hesitancy about confessing my own relish for it, lest I should be
accused of affectation. Not that I devoured wild oranges by the dozen,
or in place of sweet ones; one sour orange goes a good way, as the common
saying is; but I ate them, nevertheless, or rather drank them, and found
them, in a thirsty hour, decidedly refreshing.
The unusual coldness of the past season (Florida winters, from what I
heard about them, must have fallen of late into a queer habit of being
regularly exceptional) had made it difficult to buy sweet oranges that
were not dry and "punky"[4] toward the stem; but the hardier wild fruit
had weathered the frost, and was so juicy that, as I say, you did not
so much eat one as drink it. As for the taste, it was a wholesome
bitter-sour, as if a lemon had been flavored with quinine; not quite so
sour as a lemon, perhaps, nor _quite_ so bitter as Peruvian bark, but,
as it were, an agreeable compromise between the two. When I drank one,
I not only quenched my thirst, but felt that I had taken an infallible
prophylactic against the malarial fever. Better still, I had surprised
myself. For one who had felt a lifelong distaste, unsocial and almost
unmanly, for the bitter drinks which humanity in general esteems so
essential to its health and comfort, I was developing new and unexpected
capabilities; than which few things can be more encouraging as years
increase upon a man's head, and the world seems to be closing in about
him.
[4] I have heard this useful word all my life, and now am surprised to
find it wanting in the dictionaries.
Later in the season, on this same shell mound, I might have regaled
myself with fresh figs. Here, at any rate, was a thrifty-looking
fig-tree, though its crop, if it bore one, would perhaps not have
waited my coming so patiently as the oranges had done. Here, too, was
a red cedar; and to me, who, in my ignorance, had always thought of
this tough little evergreen as especially at home on my own bleak and
stony hillsides, it seemed an incongruous trio,--fig-tree, orange-tree,
and savin. In truth, the cedars of Florida were one of my liveliest
surprises. At first I refused to believe that they were red cedars, so
strangely exuberant were they, so disdainful of the set, cone-shaped,
toy-tree pattern on which I had been used to seeing red cedars built.
And when at last a study of the flora compelled me to admit their
identity,[5] I turned about and protested that I had never seen red
cedars before. One, in St. Augustine, near San Marco Avenue, I had the
curiosity to measure. The girth of the trunk at the smallest place was
six feet five inches, and the spread of the branches was not less than
fifty feet.
[5] I speak as if I had accepted my own study of the manual as
conclusive. I did for the time being, but while writing this paragraph
I bethought myself that I might be in error, after all. I referred the
question, therefore, to a friend, a botanist of authority. "No wonder the
red cedars of Florida puzzled you," he replied. "No one would suppose
at first that they were of the same species as our New England savins.
The habit is entirely different; but botanists have found no characters
by which to separate them, and you are safe in considering them as
_Juniperus Virginiana_."
The stroller in this road suffered few distractions. The houses, two
or three to the mile, stood well back in the woods, with little or no
cleared land about them. Picnic establishments they seemed to a Northern
eye, rather than permanent dwellings. At one point in the hammock, a
rude camp was occupied by a group of rough-looking men and several small
children, who seemed to be getting on as best they could--none too well,
to judge from appearances--without feminine ministrations. What they
were there for I never made out. They fished, I think, but whether by way
of amusement or as a serious occupation I did not learn. Perhaps, like
the Indians of old, they had come to the river for the oyster season.
They might have done worse. They never paid the slightest attention
to me, nor once gave me any decent excuse for engaging them in talk.
The best thing I remember about them was a tableau caught in passing.
A "norther" had descended upon us unexpectedly (Florida is not a whit
behind the rest of the world in sudden changes of temperature), and while
hastening homeward, toward nightfall, hugging myself to keep warm, I saw,
in the woods, this group of campers disposed about a lively blaze.
Let us be thankful, say I, that memory is so little the servant of the
will. Chance impressions of this kind, unforeseen, involuntary, and
inexplicable, make one of the chief delights of traveling, or rather
of having traveled. In the present case, indeed, the permanence of the
impression is perhaps not altogether beyond the reach of a plausible
conjecture. We have not always lived in houses; and if we love the sight
of a fire out-of-doors,--a camp-fire, that is to say,--as we all do, so
that the burning of a brush-heap in a neighbor's yard will draw us to the
window, the feeling is but part of an ancestral inheritance. We have come
by it honestly, as the phrase is. And so I need not scruple to set down
another reminiscence of the same kind,--an early morning street scene, of
no importance in itself, in the village of New Smyrna. It may have been
on the morning next after the "norther" just mentioned. I cannot say. We
had two or three such touches of winter in early March; none of them at
all distressing, be it understood, to persons in ordinary health. One
night water froze,--"as thick as a silver dollar,"--and orange growers
were alarmed for the next season's crop, the trees being just ready to
blossom. Some men kept fires burning in their orchards overnight; a
pretty spectacle, I should think, especially where the fruit was still
ungathered. On one of these frosty mornings, then, I saw a solitary
horseman, not "wending his way," but warming his hands over a fire that
he had built for that purpose in the village street. One might live
and die in a New England village without seeing such a sight. A Yankee
would have betaken himself to the corner grocery. But here, though that
"adjunct of civilization" was directly across the way, most likely it had
never had a stove in it. The sun would give warmth enough in an hour,--by
nine o'clock one would probably be glad of a sunshade; but the man was
chilly after his ride; it was still a bit early to go about the business
that had brought him into town: what more natural than to hitch his
horse, get together a few sticks, and kindle a blaze? What an insane idea
it would have seemed to him that a passing stranger might remember him
and his fire three months afterward, and think them worth talking about
in print! But then, as was long ago said, it is the fate of some men to
have greatness thrust upon them.
This main street of the village, by the way, with its hotels and shops,
was no other than my river road itself, in its more civilized estate, as
I now remember with a sense of surprise. In my mind the two had never
any connection. It was in this thoroughfare that one saw now and then
a group of cavaliers strolling about under broad-brimmed hats, with big
spurs at their heels, accosting passers-by with hearty familiarity,
first names and hand-shakes, while their horses stood hitched to the
branches of roadside trees,--a typical Southern picture. Here, on a
Sunday afternoon, were two young fellows who had brought to town a mother
coon and three young ones, hoping to find a purchaser. The guests at the
hotels manifested no eagerness for such pets, but the colored bell-boys
and waiters gathered about, and after a little good-humored dickering
bought the entire lot, box and all, for a dollar and a half; first having
pulled the little ones out between the slats--not without some risk to
both parties--to look at them and pass them round. The venders walked off
with grins of ill-concealed triumph. The Fates had been kind to them, and
they had three silver half-dollars in their pockets. I heard one of them
say something about giving part of the money to a third man who had told
them where the nest was; but his companion would listen to no such folly.
"He wouldn't come with us," he said, "and we won't tell him a damned
thing." I fear there was nothing distinctively Southern about _that_.
Here, too, in the heart of the town, was a magnificent cluster of
live-oaks, worth coming to Florida to see; far-spreading, full of ferns
and air-plants, and heavy with hanging moss. Day after day I went out to
admire them. Under them was a neglected orange grove, and in one of the
orange-trees, amid the glossy foliage, appeared my first summer tanager.
It was a royal setting, and the splendid vermilion-red bird was worthy
of it. Among the oaks I walked in the evening, listening to the strange
low chant of the chuck-will's-widow,--a name which the owner himself
pronounces with a rest after the first syllable. Once, for two or three
days, the trees were amazingly full of blue yellow-backed warblers.
Numbers of them, a dozen at least, could be heard singing at once
directly over one's head, running up the scale not one after another, but
literally in unison. Here the tufted titmouse, the very soul of monotony,
piped and piped and piped, as if his diapason stop were pulled out and
stuck, and could not be pushed in again. He is an odd genius. With plenty
of notes, he wearies you almost to distraction, harping on one string
for half an hour together. He is the one Southern bird that I should
perhaps be sorry to see common in Massachusetts; but that "perhaps"
is a large word. Many yellow-throated warblers, silent as yet, were
commonly in the live-oaks, and innumerable myrtle birds, also silent,
with prairie warblers, black-and-white creepers, solitary vireos, an
occasional chickadee, and many more. It was a birdy spot; and just across
the way, on the shrubby island, were red-winged blackbirds, who piqued
my curiosity by adding to the familiar _conkaree_ a final syllable,--the
Florida termination, I called it,--which made me wonder whether, as
has been the case with so many other Florida birds, they might not
turn out to be a distinct race, worthy of a name (_Agelaius phœniceus
something-or-other_), as well as of a local habitation. I suggest the
question to those whose business it is to be learned in such matters.[6]
[6] My suggestion, I now discover,--since this paper was first
printed,--was some years too late. Mr. Ridgway, in his _Manual of North
American Birds_ (1887), had already described a subspecies of Florida
red-wings under the name of _Agelaius phœniceus bryanti_. Whether my New
Smyrna birds should come under that title cannot be told, of course, in
the absence of specimens; but on the strength of the song I venture to
think it highly probable.
The tall grass about the borders of the island was alive with clapper
rails. Before I rose in the morning I heard them crying in full chorus;
and now and then during the day something would happen, and all at once
they would break out with one sharp volley, and then instantly all
would be silent again. Theirs is an apt name,--_Rallus crepitans_. Once
I watched two of them in the act of crepitating, and ever after that,
when the sudden uproar burst forth, I seemed to see the reeds full of
birds, each with his bill pointing skyward, bearing his part in the
salvo. So far as I could perceive, they had nothing to fear from human
enemies. They ran about the mud on the edge of the grass, especially
in the morning, looking like half-grown pullets. Their specialty was
crab-fishing, at which they were highly expert, plunging into the water
up to the depth of their legs, and handling and swallowing pretty large
specimens with surprising dexterity. I was greatly pleased with them, as
well as with their local name, "everybody's chickens."
Once I feared we had heard the last of them. On a day following a sudden
fall of the mercury, a gale from the north set in at noon, with thunder
and lightning, hail, and torrents of rain. The river was quickly lashed
into foam, and the gale drove the ocean into it through the inlet, till
the shrubbery of the rails' island barely showed above the breakers.
The street was deep under water, and fears were entertained for the new
bridge and the road to the beach. All night the gale continued, and
all the next day till late in the afternoon; and when the river should
have been at low tide, the island was still flooded. Gravitation was
overmatched for the time being. And where were the rails, I asked myself.
They could swim, no doubt, when put to it, but it seemed impossible that
they could survive so fierce an inundation. Well, the wind ceased, the
tide went out at last; and behold, the rails were in full cry, not a
voice missing! How they had managed it was beyond my ken.
Another island, farther out than that of the rails (but the rails,
like the long-billed marsh wrens, appeared to be present in force all
up and down the river, in suitable places), was occupied nightly as
a crow-roost. Judged by the morning clamor, which, like that of the
rails, I heard from my bed, its population must have been enormous.
One evening I happened to come up the street just in time to see the
hinder part of the procession--some hundreds of birds--flying across
the river. They came from the direction of the pine lands in larger and
smaller squads, and with but a moderate amount of noise moved straight
to their destination. All but one of them so moved, that is to say. The
performance of that one exception was a mystery. He rose high in the air,
over the river, and remained soaring all by himself, acting sometimes
as if he were catching insects, till the flight had passed, even to the
last scattering detachments. What could be the meaning of his eccentric
behavior? Some momentary caprice had taken him, perhaps. Or was he, as
I could not help asking, some duly appointed officer of the day,--grand
marshal, if you please,--with a commission to see all hands in before
retiring himself? He waited, at any rate, till the final stragglers had
passed; then he came down out of the air and followed them. I meant to
watch the ingathering a second time, to see whether this feature of it
would be repeated, but I was never there at the right moment. One cannot
do everything.
Now, alas, Florida seems very far off. I am never likely to walk again
under those New Smyrna live-oaks, nor to see again all that beauty of the
Hillsborough. And yet, in a truer and better sense of the word, I do see
it, and shall. What a heavenly light falls at this moment on the river
and the island woods! Perhaps we must come back to Wordsworth, after
all,--
"The light that never was, on sea or land."
A MORNING AT THE OLD SUGAR MILL.[7]
[7] I have called the ruin here spoken of a "sugar mill" for no better
reason than because that is the name commonly applied to it by the
residents of the town. When this sketch was written, I had never heard
of a theory since broached in some of our Northern newspapers,--I know
not by whom,--that the edifice in question was built as a chapel, perhaps
by Columbus himself! I should be glad to believe it, and can only add
my hope that he will be shown to have built also the so-called sugar
mill a few miles north of New Smyrna, in the Dunlawton hammock behind
Port Orange. In that, to be sure, there is still much old machinery, but
perhaps its presence would prove no insuperable objection to a theory
so pleasing. In matters of this kind, much depends upon subjective
considerations; in one sense, at least, "all things are possible to him
that believeth." For my own part, I profess no opinion. I am neither an
archæologist nor an ecclesiastic, and speak simply as a chance observer.
On the third or fourth day of my sojourn at the Live Oak Inn, the lady
of the house, noticing my peripatetic habits, I suppose, asked whether I
had been to the old sugar mill. The ruin is mentioned in the guide-books
as one of the historic features of the ancient settlement of New Smyrna,
but I had forgotten the fact, and was thankful to receive a description
of the place, as well as of the road thither,--a rather blind road, my
informant said, with no houses at which to inquire the way.
Two or three mornings afterward, I set out in the direction indicated.
If the route proved to be half as vague as my good lady's account
of it had sounded, I should probably never find the mill; but the
walk would be pleasant, and that, after all, was the principal
consideration, especially to a man who just then cared more, or thought
he did, for a new bird or a new song than for an indefinite number of
eighteenth-century relics.
For the first half-mile the road follows one of the old Turnbull canals
dug through the coquina stone which underlies the soil hereabout; then,
after crossing the railway, it strikes to the left through a piece of
truly magnificent wood, known as the cotton-shed hammock, because, during
the war, cotton was stored here in readiness for the blockade runners of
Mosquito Inlet. Better than anything I had yet seen, this wood answered
to my idea of a semi-tropical forest: live-oaks, magnolias, palmettos,
sweet gums, maples, and hickories, with here and there a long-leaved pine
overtopping all the rest. The palmettos, most distinctively Southern of
them all, had been badly used by their hardier neighbors; they looked
stunted, and almost without exception had been forced out of their normal
perpendicular attitude. The live-oaks, on the other hand, were noble
specimens; lofty and wide-spreading, elm-like in habit, it seemed to me,
though not without the sturdiness which belongs as by right to all oaks,
and seldom or never to the American elm.
What gave its peculiar tropical character to the wood, however, was
not so much the trees as the profusion of plants that covered them and
depended from them: air-plants (_Tillandsia_), large and small,--like
pineapples, with which they claim a family relationship,--the exuberant
hanging moss, itself another air-plant, ferns, and vines. The ferns,
a species of polypody ("resurrection ferns," I heard them called),
completely covered the upper surface of many of the larger branches,
while the huge vines twisted about the trunks, or, quite as often,
dropped straight from the treetops to the ground.
In the very heart of this dense, dark forest (a forest primeval, I should
have said, but I was assured that the ground had been under cultivation
so recently that, to a practiced eye, the cotton-rows were still visible)
stood a grove of wild orange-trees, the handsome fruit glowing like lamps
amid the deep green foliage. There was little other brightness. Here and
there in the undergrowth were yellow jessamine vines, but already--March
11--they were past flowering. Almost or quite the only blossom just
now in sight was the faithful round-leaved houstonia, growing in
small flat patches in the sand on the edge of the road, with budding
partridge-berry--a Yankee in Florida--to keep it company. Warblers and
titmice twittered in the leafy treetops, and butterflies of several
kinds, notably one gorgeous creature in yellow and black, like a larger
and more resplendent Turnus, went fluttering through the under-woods.
I could have believed myself in the heart of a limitless forest; but
Florida hammocks, so far as I have seen, are seldom of great extent, and
the road presently crossed another railway track, and then, in a few rods
more, came out into the sunny pine-woods, as one might emerge from a
cathedral into the open day. Two men were approaching in a wagon (except
on Sunday, I am not certain that I ever met a foot passenger in the
flat-woods), and I improved the opportunity to make sure of my course.
"Go about fifty yards," said one of them, "and turn to the right; then
about fifty yards more, and turn to the left. _That_ road will take you
to the mill." Here was a man who had traveled in the pine lands,--where,
of all places, it is easy to get lost and hard to find yourself,--and
not only appreciated the value of explicit instructions, but, being a
Southerner, had leisure enough and politeness enough to give them. I
thanked him, and sauntered on. The day was before me, and the place was
lively with birds. Pine-wood sparrows, pine warblers, and red-winged
blackbirds were in song; two red-shouldered hawks were screaming, a
flicker was shouting, a red-bellied woodpecker cried _kur-r-r-r_,
brown-headed nuthatches were gossiping in the distance, and suddenly I
heard, what I never thought to hear in a pinery, the croak of a green
heron. I turned quickly and saw him. It was indeed he. What a friend is
ignorance, mother of all those happy surprises which brighten existence
as they pass, like the butterflies of the wood. The heron was at home,
and I was the stranger. For there was water near, as there is everywhere
in Florida; and subsequently, in this very place, I met not only the
green heron, but three of his relatives,--the great blue, the little
blue, and the dainty Louisiana, more poetically known (and worthy to wear
the name) as the "Lady of the Waters."
On this first occasion, however, the green heron was speedily forgotten;
for just then I heard another note, unlike anything I had ever heard
before,--as if a great Northern shrike had been struck with preternatural
hoarseness, and, like so many other victims of the Northern winter, had
betaken himself to a sunnier clime. I looked up. In the leafy top of
a pine sat a boat-tailed grackle, splendidly iridescent, engaged in a
musical performance which afterward became almost too familiar to me,
but which now, as a novelty, was as interesting as it was grotesque.
This, as well as I can describe it, is what the bird was doing. He opened
his bill,--_set_ it, as it were, wide apart,--and holding it thus,
emitted four or five rather long and very loud grating, shriekish notes;
then instantly shook his wings with an extraordinary flapping noise,
and followed that with several highly curious and startling cries, the
concluding one of which sometimes suggested the cackle of a robin. All
this he repeated again and again with the utmost fervor. He could not
have been more enthusiastic if he had been making the sweetest music in
the world. And I confess that I thought he had reason to be proud of
his work. The introduction of wing-made sounds in the middle of a vocal
performance was of itself a stroke of something like genius. It put me in
mind of the firing of cannons as an accompaniment to the Anvil Chorus.
Why should a creature of such gifts be named for his bodily dimensions,
or the shape of his tail? Why not _Quiscalus gilmorius_, Gilmore's
grackle?
That the sounds _were_ wing-made I had no thought of questioning. I had
seen the thing done,--seen it and heard it; and what shall a man trust,
if not his own eyes and ears, especially when each confirms the other?
Two days afterward, nevertheless, I began to doubt. I heard a grackle
"sing" in the manner just described, wing-beats and all, while flying
from one tree to another; and later still, in a country where boat-tailed
grackles were an every-day sight near the heart of the village, I more
than once saw them produce the sounds in question without any perceptible
movement of the wings, and furthermore, their mandibles could be seen
moving in time with the beats. So hard is it to be sure of a thing, even
when you see it and hear it.
"Oh yes," some sharp-witted reader will say, "you saw the wings
flapping,--beating time,--and so you imagined that the sounds were like
wing-beats." But for once the sharp-witted reader is in the wrong. The
resemblance is not imaginary. Mr. F. M. Chapman, in A List of Birds
Observed at Gainesville, Florida,[8] says of the boat-tailed grackle
(_Quiscalus major_): "A singular note of this species greatly resembles
the flapping of wings, as of a coot tripping over the water; this sound
was very familiar to me, but so excellent is the imitation that for a
long time I attributed it to one of the numerous coots which abound in
most places favored by _Q. major_."
[8] _The Auk_, vol. v. p. 273.