course, why the wings are shaken just at the right instant. To that I
must respond with the time-honored formula, "Not prepared." The reader
may believe, if he will, that the bird is aware of the imitative quality
of the notes, and amuses itself by heightening the delusion of the
looker-on. My own more commonplace conjecture is that the sounds are
produced by snappings and gratings of the big mandibles ("He is gritting
his teeth," said a shrewd unornithological Yankee, whose opinion I had
solicited), and that the wing movements may be nothing but involuntary
accompaniments of this almost convulsive action of the beak. But perhaps
the sounds _are_ wing-made, after all.
On the day of which I am writing, at any rate, I was troubled by no
misgivings. I had seen something new, and was only desirous to see more
of it. Who does not love an original character? For at least half an
hour the old mill was forgotten, while I chased the grackle about, as he
flew hither and thither, sometimes with a loggerhead shrike in furious
pursuit. Once I had gone a few rods into the palmetto scrub, partly
to be nearer the bird, but still more to enjoy the shadow of a pine,
and was standing under the tree, motionless, when a man came along the
road in a gig. "Surveying?" he asked, reining in his horse. "No, sir;
I am looking at a bird in the tree yonder." I wished him to go on, and
thought it best to gratify his curiosity at once. He was silent a moment;
then he said, "Looking at the old sugar house from there?" That was too
preposterous, and I answered with more voice, and perhaps with a touch
of impatience, "No, no; I am trying to see a bird in that pine-tree." He
was silent again. Then he gathered up the reins. "I'm so deaf I can't
hear you," he said, and drove on. "Good-by," I remarked, in a needless
undertone; "you're a good man, I've no doubt, but deaf people shouldn't
be inquisitive at long range." The advice was sound enough, in itself
considered; properly understood, it might be held to contain, or at least
to suggest, one of the profoundest, and at the same time one of the most
practical, truths of all devout philosophy; but the testiness of its tone
was little to my credit. He was a good man,--and the village doctor,--and
more than once afterward put me under obligation. One of his best
appreciated favors was unintended and indirect. I was driving with him
through the hammock, and we passed a bit of swamp. "There are some pretty
flowers," he exclaimed; "I think I must get them." At the word he jumped
out of the gig, bade me do the same, hitched his horse, a half-broken
stallion, to a sapling, and plunged into the thicket. I strolled
elsewhere; and by and by he came back, a bunch of common blue iris in one
hand, and his shoes and stockings in the other. "They are very pretty,"
he explained (he spoke of the flowers), "and it is early for them." After
that I had no doubt of his goodness, and in case of need would certainly
have called him rather than his younger rival at the opposite end of the
village.
When I tired of chasing the grackle, or the shrike had driven him away (I
do not remember now how the matter ended), I started again toward the old
sugar mill. Presently a lone cabin came into sight. The grass-grown road
led straight to it, and stopped at the gate. Two women and a brood of
children stood in the door, and in answer to my inquiry one of the women
(the children had already scampered out of sight) invited me to enter the
yard. "Go round the house," she said, "and you will find a road that runs
right down to the mill."
The mill, as it stands, is not much to look at: some fragments of wall
built of coquina stone, with two or three arched windows and an arched
door, the whole surrounded by a modern plantation of orange-trees, now
almost as much a ruin as the mill itself. But the mill was built more
than a hundred years ago, and serves well enough the principal use of
abandoned and decaying things,--to touch the imagination. For myself, I
am bound to say, it was a precious two hours that I passed beside it,
seated on a crumbling stone in the shade of a dying orange-tree.
Behind me a redbird was whistling (cardinal grosbeak, I have been
accustomed to call him, but I like the Southern name better, in spite of
its ambiguity), now in eager, rapid tones, now slowly and with a dying
fall. Now his voice fell almost to a whisper, now it rang out again; but
always it was sweet and golden, and always the bird was out of sight
in the shrubbery. The orange-trees were in bloom; the air was full of
their fragrance, full also of the murmur of bees. All at once a deeper
note struck in, and I turned to look. A humming-bird was hovering amid
the white blossoms and glossy leaves. 1 saw his flaming throat, and
the next instant he was gone, like a flash of light,--the first hummer
of the year. I was far from home, and expectant of new things. That, I
dare say, was the reason why I took the sound at first for the boom of a
bumble-bee; some strange Floridian bee, with a deeper and more melodious
bass than any Northern insect is master of.
It is good to be here, I say to myself, and we need no tabernacle. All
things are in harmony. A crow in the distance says _caw_, _caw_ in a
meditative voice, as if he, too, were thinking of clays past; and not
even the scream of a hen-hawk, off in the pine-woods, breaks the spell
that is upon us. A quail whistles,--a true Yankee Bob White, to judge him
by his voice,--and the white-eyed chewink (he is _not_ a Yankee) whistles
and sings by turns. The bluebird's warble and the pine warbler's trill
could never be disturbing to the quietest mood. Only one voice seems
out of tune: the white-eyed vireo, even to-day, cannot forget his saucy
accent. But he soon falls silent. Perhaps, after all, he feels himself an
intruder.
The morning is cloudless and warm, till suddenly, as if a door had been
opened eastward, the sea breeze strikes me. Henceforth the temperature
is perfect as I sit in the shadow. I think neither of heat nor of cold.
I catch a glimpse of a beautiful leaf-green lizard on the gray trunk of
an orange-tree, but it is gone (I wonder where) almost before I can say
I saw it. Presently a brown one, with light-colored stripes and a bluish
tail, is seen traveling over the crumbling wall, running into crannies
and out again. Now it stops to look at me with its jewel of an eye.
And there, on the rustic arbor, is a third one, matching the unpainted
wood in hue. Its throat is white, but when it is inflated, as happens
every few seconds, it turns to the loveliest rose color. This inflated
membrane should be a vocal sac, I think, but I hear no sound. Perhaps the
chameleon's voice is too fine for dull human sense.
On two sides of me, beyond the orange-trees, is a thicket of small oaks
and cabbage palmettos,--hammock, I suppose it is called. In all other
directions are the pine-woods, with their undergrowth of saw palmetto.
The cardinal sings from the hammock, and so does the Carolina wren. The
chewinks, the blackbirds (a grackle just now flies over, and a fish-hawk,
also), with the bluebirds and the pine warblers, are in the pinery. From
the same place comes the song of a Maryland yellow-throat. There, too,
the hen-hawks are screaming.
At my feet are blue violets and white houstonia. Vines, thinly covered
with fresh leaves, straggle over the walls,--Virginia creeper, poison
ivy, grapevine, and at least one other, the name of which I do not
know. A clump of tall blackberry vines is full of white blossoms,
"bramble roses faint and pale," and in one corner is a tuft of scarlet
blooms,--sage, perhaps, or something akin to it. For the moment I feel no
curiosity. But withal the place is unkempt, as becomes a ruin. "Winter's
ragged hand" has been rather heavy upon it. Withered palmetto leaves and
leaf-stalks litter the ground, and of course, being in Florida, there
is no lack of orange-peel lying about. Ever since I entered the State a
new Scripture text has been running in my head: In the place where the
orange-peel falleth, there shall it lie.
The mill, as I said, is now the centre of an orange grove. There must
be hundreds of trees. All of them are small, but the greater part are
already dead, and the rest are dying. Those nearest the walls are fullest
of leaves, as if the walls somehow gave them protection. The forest is
creeping into the inclosure. Here and there the graceful palm-like tassel
of a young long-leaved pine rises above the tall winter-killed grass. It
is not the worst thing about the world that it tends to run wild.
Now the quail sings again, this time in two notes, and now the hummer is
again in the orange-tree. And all the while the redbird whistles in the
shrubbery. He feels the beauty of the day. If I were a bird, I would sing
with him. From far away comes the chant of a pine-wood sparrow. I can
just hear it.
This is a place for dreams and quietness. Nothing else seems worth
the having. Let us feel no more the fever of life. Surely they are
the wise who seek Nirvana; who insist not upon themselves, but wait
absorption--reabsorption--into the infinite. The dead have the better
part. I think of the stirring, adventurous man who built these walls and
dug these canals. His life was full of action, full of journeyings and
fightings. Now he is at peace, and his works do follow him--into the
land of forgetfulness. Blessed are the dead. Blessed, too, are the bees,
the birds, the butterflies, and the lizards. Next to the dead, perhaps,
they are happy. And I also am happy, for I too am under the spell. To me
also the sun and the air are sweet, and I too, for to-day at least, am
careless of the world and all its doings.
So I sat dreaming, when suddenly there was a stir in the grass at my
feet. A snake was coming straight toward me. Only the evening before a
cracker had filled my ears with stories of "rattlers" and "moccasins." He
seemed to have seen them everywhere, and to have killed them as one kills
mosquitoes. I looked a second time at the moving thing in the grass. It
was clothed in innocent black; but, being a son of Adam, I rose with
involuntary politeness to let it pass. An instant more, and it slipped
into the masonry at my side, and I sat down again. It had been out taking
the sun, and had come back to its hole in the wall. How like the story of
my own day,--of my whole winter vacation! Nay, if we choose to view it
so, how like the story of human life itself!
As I started homeward, leaving the mill and the cabin behind me, some
cattle were feeding in the grassy road. At sight of my umbrella (there
are few places where a sunshade is more welcome than in a Florida
pine-wood) they scampered away into the scrub. Poor, wild-eyed,
hungry-looking things! I thought of Pharaoh's lean kine. They were like
the country itself, I was ready to say. But perhaps I misjudged both,
seeing both, as I did, in the winter season. With the mercury at 80°,
or thereabout, it is hard for the Northern tourist to remember that he
is looking at a winter landscape. He compares a Florida winter with a
New England summer, and can hardly find words to tell you how barren and
poverty-stricken the country looks.
After this I went more than once to the sugar mill. Morning and afternoon
I visited it, but somehow I could never renew the joy of my first visit.
Moods are not to be had for the asking, nor earned by a walk. The place
was still interesting, the birds were there, the sunshine was pleasant,
and the sea breeze fanned me. The orange blossoms were still sweet,
and the bees still hummed about them; but it was another day, or I was
another man. In memory, none the less, all my visits blend in one, and
the ruined mill in the dying orchard remains one of the bright spots
in that strange Southern world which, almost from the moment I left it
behind me, began to fade into indistinctness, like the landscape of a
dream.
ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S.
The city of Sanford is a beautiful and interesting place, I hope, to
those who live in it. To the Florida tourist it is important as lying
at the head of steamboat navigation on the St. John's River, which here
expands into a lake--Lake Monroe--some five miles in width, with Sanford
on one side, and Enterprise on the other; or, as a waggish traveler once
expressed it, with Enterprise on the north, and Sanford and enterprise on
the south.
Walking naturalists and lovers of things natural have their own point
of view, individual, unconventional, whimsical, if you please,--very
different, at all events, from that of clearer-witted and more
serious-minded men; and the inhabitants of Sanford will doubtless take it
as a compliment, and be amused rather than annoyed, when I confess that
I found their city a discouragement, a widespread desolation of houses
and shops. If there is a pleasant country road leading out of it in any
direction, I was unlucky enough to miss it. My melancholy condition was
hit off before my eyes in a parable, as it were, by a crowd of young
fellows, black and white, whom I found one afternoon in a sand-lot just
outside the city, engaged in what was intended for a game of baseball.
They were doing their best,--certainly they made noise enough; but
circumstances were against them. When the ball came to the ground,
from no matter what height or with what impetus, it fell dead in the
sand; if it had been made of solid rubber, it could not have rebounded.
"Base-running" was little better than base-walking. "Sliding" was safe,
but, by the same token, impossible. Worse yet, at every "foul strike" or
"wild throw" the ball was lost, and the barefooted fielders had to pick
their way painfully about in the outlying saw-palmetto scrub till they
found it. I had never seen our "national game" played under conditions
so untoward. None but true patriots would have the heart to try it, I
thought, and I meditated writing to Washington, where the quadrennial
purification of the civil service was just then in progress,--under a
new broom,--to secure, if possible, a few bits of recognition ("plums"
is the technical term, I believe) for men so deserving. The first
baseman certainly, who had oftenest to wade into the scrub, should have
received a consulate, at the very least. Yet they were a merry crew,
those national gamesters. Their patriotism was of the noblest type,--the
unconscious. They had no thought of being heroes, nor dreamed of bounties
or pensions. They quarreled with the umpire, of course, but not with
Fate; and I hope I profited by their example. My errand in Sanford was to
see something of the river in its narrower and better part; and having
done that, I did not regret what otherwise might have seemed a profitless
week.
First, however, I walked about the city. Here, as already at St.
Augustine, and afterward at Tallahassee, I found the mocking-birds in
free song. They are birds of the town. And the same is true of the
loggerhead shrikes, a pair of which had built a nest in a small water-oak
at the edge of the sidewalk, on a street corner, just beyond the reach
of passers-by. In the roadside trees--all freshly planted, like the
city--were myrtle warblers, prairie warblers, and blue yellow-backs,
the two latter in song. Once, after a shower, I watched a myrtle bird
bathing on a branch among the wet leaves. The street gutters were running
with sulphur water, but he had waited for rain. I commended his taste,
being myself one of those to whom water and brimstone is a combination
as malodorous as it seems unscriptural. Noisy boat-tailed grackles, or
"jackdaws," were plentiful about the lakeside, monstrously long in the
tail, and almost as large as the fish crows, which were often there
with them. Over the broad lake swept purple martins and white-breasted
swallows, and nearer the shore fed peacefully a few pied-billed grebes,
or dabchicks, birds that I had seen only two or three times before, and
at which I looked more than once before I made out what they were. They
had every appearance of passing a winter of content. At the tops of three
or four stakes, which stood above the water at wide intervals,--and at
long distances from the shore,--sat commonly as many cormorants, here,
as everywhere, with plenty of idle time upon their hands. On the other
side of the city were orange groves, large, well kept, thrifty-looking;
the fruit still on the trees (March 20, or thereabouts), or lying in
heaps underneath, ready for the boxes. One man's house, I remember, was
surrounded by a fence overrun with Cherokee rosebushes, a full quarter of
a mile of white blossoms.
My best botanical stroll was along one of the railroads (Sanford is a
"railway centre," so called), through a dreary sand waste. Here I picked
a goodly number of novelties, including what looked like a beautiful pink
chicory, only the plant itself was much prettier (_Lygodesmia_); a very
curious sensitive-leaved plant (_Schrankia_), densely beset throughout
with curved prickles, and bearing globes of tiny pink-purple flowers;
a calopogon, quite as pretty as our Northern _pulchellus_; a clematis
(_Baldwinii_), which looked more like a bluebell than a clematis till
I commenced pulling it to pieces; and a great profusion of one of the
smaller papaws, or custard-apples, a low shrub, just then full of large,
odd-shaped, creamy-white, heavy-scented blossoms. I was carrying a
sprig of it in my hand when I met a negro. "What is this?" I asked. "I
dunno, sir." "Isn't it papaw?" "No, sir, that ain't papaw;" and then,
as if he had just remembered something, he added, "That's dog banana."
Oftener than anywhere else I resorted to the shore of the lake,--to the
one small part of it, that is to say, which was at the same time easily
reached and comparatively unfrequented. There--going one day farther than
usual--I found myself in the borderland of a cypress swamp. On one side
was the lake, but between me and it were cypress-trees; and on the other
side was the swamp itself, a dense wood growing in stagnant black water
covered here and there with duckweed or some similar growth: a frightful
place it seemed, the very abode of snakes and everything evil. Stories
of slaves hiding in cypress swamps came into my mind. It must have been
cruel treatment that drove them to it! Buzzards flew about my head, and
looked at me. "He has come here to die," I imagined them saying among
themselves. "No one comes here for anything else. Wait a little, and
we will pick his bones." They perched near by, and, not to lose time,
employed the interval in drying their wings, for the night had been
showery. Once in a while one of them shifted his perch with an ominous
rustle. They were waiting for me, and were becoming impatient. "He is
long about it," one said to another; and I did not wonder. The place
seemed one from which none who entered it could ever go out; and there
was no going farther in without plunging into that horrible mire. I stood
still, and looked and listened. Some strange noise, "bird or devil,"
came from the depths of the wood. A flock of grackles settled in a tall
cypress, and for a time made the place loud. How still it was after they
were gone! I could hardly withdraw my gaze from the green water full of
slimy black roots and branches, any one of which might suddenly lift its
head and open its deadly white mouth! Once a fish-hawk fell to screaming
farther down the lake. I had seen him the day before, standing on the
rim of his huge nest in the top of a tree, and uttering the same cries.
All about me gigantic cypresses, every one swollen enormously at the
base, rose straight and branchless into the air. Dead trees, one might
have said,--light-colored, apparently with no bark to cover them; but if
I glanced up, I saw that each bore at the top a scanty head of branches
just now putting forth fresh green leaves, while long funereal streamers
of dark Spanish moss hung thickly from every bough.
I am not sure how long I could have stayed in such a spot, if I had not
been able to look now and then through the branches of the under-woods
out upon the sunny lake. Swallows innumerable were playing over the
water, many of them soaring so high as to be all but invisible. Wise and
happy birds, lovers of sunlight and air. _They_ would never be found
in a cypress swamp. Along the shore, in a weedy shallow, the peaceful
dabchicks were feeding. Far off on a post toward the middle of the lake
stood a cormorant. But I could not keep my eyes long at once in that
direction. The dismal swamp had me under its spell, and meanwhile the
patient buzzards looked at me. "It is almost time," they said; "the fever
will do its work,"--and I began to believe it. It was too bad to come
away; the stupid town offered no attraction; but it seemed perilous to
remain. Perhaps I _could_ not come away. I would try it and see. It was
amazing that I could; and no sooner was I out in the sunshine than I
wished I had stayed where I was; for having once left the place, I was
never likely to find it again. The way was plain enough, to be sure, and
my feet would no doubt serve me. But the feet cannot do the mind's part,
and it is a sad fact, one of the saddest in life, that sensations cannot
be repeated.
With the fascination of the swamp still upon me, I heard somewhere in
the distance a musical voice, and soon came in sight of a garden where a
middle-aged negro was hoeing,--hoeing and singing: a wild, minor, endless
kind of tune; a hymn, as seemed likely from a word caught here and there;
a true piece of natural melody, as artless as any bird's. I walked slowly
to get more of it, and the happy-sad singer minded me not, but kept on
with his hoe and his song. Potatoes or corn, whatever his crop may have
been,--I did not notice, or, if I did, I have forgotten,--it should have
prospered under his hand.
Farther along, in the highway,--a sandy track, with wastes of scrub on
either side,--a boy of eight or nine, armed with a double-barreled gun,
was lingering about a patch of dwarf oaks and palmettos. "Haven't got
that rabbit yet, eh?" said I. (I had passed him there on my way out, and
he had told me what he was after.)
"No, sir," he answered.
"I don't believe there's any rabbit there."
"Yes, there is, sir; I saw one a little while ago, but he got away before
I could get pretty near."
"Good!" I thought. "Here is a grammarian. Not one boy in ten in this
country but would have said 'I seen.'" A scholar like this was worth
talking with. "Are there many rabbits here?" I asked.
"Yes, sir, there's a good deal."
And so, by easy mental stages, I was clear of the swamp and back in the
town,--saved from the horrible, and delivered to the commonplace and the
dreary.
My best days in Sanford were two that I spent on the river above the
lake. A youthful boatman, expert alike with the oar and the gun, served
me faithfully and well, impossible as it was for him to enter fully into
the spirit of a man who wanted to look at birds, but not to kill them. I
think he had never before seen a customer of that breed. First he rowed
me up the "creek," under promise to show me alligators, moccasins, and
no lack of birds, including the especially desired purple gallinule.
The snakes were somehow missing (a loss not irreparable), and so were
the purple gallinules; for them, the boy thought, it was still rather
early in the season, although he had killed one a few days before, and
for proof had brought me a wing. But as we were skirting along the shore
I suddenly called "Hist!" An alligator lay on the bank just before us.
The boy turned his head, and instantly was all excitement. It was a big
fellow, he said,--one of three big ones that inhabited the creek. He
would get him this time. "Are you sure?" I asked. "Oh yes, I'll blow
the top of his head off." He was loaded for gallinules, and I, being no
sportsman, and never having seen an alligator before, was some shades
less confident. But it was his game, and I left him to his way. He pulled
the boat noiselessly against the bank in the shelter of tall reeds, put
down the oars, with which he could almost have touched the alligator,
and took up his gun. At that moment the creature got wind of us, and
slipped incontinently into the water, not a little to my relief. One live
alligator is worth a dozen dead ones, to my thinking. He showed his back
above the surface of the stream for a moment shortly afterward, and then
disappeared for good.