or plan, I had dropped into the habit (and how pleasant it is to think
that some good habits can be dropped into!) of making the St. Augustine
road my after-dinner sauntering-place. The morning was for a walk: to
Lake Bradford, perhaps, in search of a mythical ivory-billed woodpecker,
or westward on the railway for a few miles, with a view to rare migratory
warblers. But in the afternoon I did not walk,--I loitered; and though
I still minded the birds and flowers, I for the most part forgot my
botany and ornithology. In the cool of the day, then (the phrase is an
innocent euphemism), I climbed the hill, and after an hour or two on
the plateau strolled back again, facing the sunset through a vista of
moss-covered live-oaks and sweet gums. Those quiet, incurious hours are
among the pleasantest of all my Florida memories. A cuckoo would be
cooing, perhaps; or a quail, with cheerful ambiguity,--such as belongs
to weather predictions in general,--would be prophesying "more wet" and
"no more wet" in alternate breaths; or two or three night-hawks would
be sweeping back and forth high above the valley; or a marsh hawk would
be quartering over the big oatfield. The martins would be cackling, in
any event, and the kingbirds practicing their aerial mock somersaults;
and the mocking-bird would be singing, and the redbird whistling. On
the western slope, just below the oatfield, the Northern woman who
owned the pretty cottage there (the only one on the road) was sure to
be at work among her flowers. A laughing colored boy who did chores
for her (without injury to his health, I could warrant) told me that
she was a Northerner. But I knew it already; I needed no witness but
her beds of petunias. In the valley, as I crossed the railroad track,
a loggerhead shrike sat, almost of course, on the telegraph wire in
dignified silence; and just beyond, among the cabins, I had my choice
of mocking-birds and orchard orioles. And so, admiring the roses and
the pomegranates, the lantanas and the honeysuckles, or chatting with
some dusky fellow-pilgrim, I mounted the hill to the city, and likely
as not saw before me a red-headed woodpecker sitting on the roof of the
State House, calling attention to his patriotic self--in his tri-colored
dress--by occasional vigorous tattoos on the tinned ridgepole. I never
saw him there without gladness. The legislature had begun its session in
an economical mood,--as is more or less the habit of legislatures, I
believe,--and was even considering a proposition to reduce the salary and
mileage of its members. Under such circumstances, it ought not to have
been a matter of surprise, perhaps, that no flag floated from the cupola
of the capitol. The people's money should not be wasted. And possibly
I should never have remarked the omission but for a certain curiosity,
natural, if not inevitable, on the part of a Northern visitor, as to the
real feeling of the South toward the national government. Day after day I
had seen a portly gentleman--with an air, or with airs, as the spectator
might choose to express it--going in and out of the State House gate,
dressed ostentatiously in a suit of Confederate gray. He had worn nothing
else since the war, I was told. But of course the State of Florida was
not to be judged by the freak of one man, and he only a member of the
"third house." And even when I went into the governor's office, and
saw the original "ordinance of secession" hanging in a conspicuous
place on the wall, as if it were an heirloom to be proud of, I felt no
stirring of sectional animosity, thorough-bred Massachusetts Yankee
and old-fashioned abolitionist as I am. A brave people can hardly be
expected or desired to forget its history, especially when that history
has to do with sacrifices and heroic deeds. But these things, taken
together, did no doubt prepare me to look upon it as a happy coincidence
when, one morning, I heard the familiar cry of the red-headed woodpecker,
for the first time in Florida, and looked up to see him flying the
national colors from the ridgepole of the State House. I did not break
out with "Three cheers for the red, white, and blue!" I am naturally
undemonstrative; but I said to myself that _Melanerpes erythrocephalus_
was a very handsome bird.
ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLANTATION.
On one of my first jaunts into the suburbs of Tallahassee I noticed not
far from the road a bit of swamp,--shallow pools with muddy borders and
flats. It was a likely spot for "waders," and would be worth a visit.
To reach it, indeed, I must cross a planted field surrounded by a lofty
barbed-wire fence and placarded against trespassers; but there was
no one in sight, or no one who looked at all like a land-owner; and,
besides, it could hardly be accounted a trespass--defined by Blackstone
as an "_unwarranted_ entry on another's soil"--to step carefully over
the cotton-rows on so legitimate an errand. Ordinarily I call myself
a simple bird-gazer, an amateur, a field naturalist, if you will; but
on occasions like the present I assume--with myself, that is--all the
rights and titles of an ornithologist proper, a man of science strictly
so called. In the interest of science, then, I climbed the fence and
picked my way across the field. True enough, about the edges of the water
were two or three solitary sandpipers, and at least half a dozen of the
smaller yellowlegs,--two additions to my Florida list,--not to speak of a
little blue heron and a green heron, the latter in most uncommonly green
plumage. It was well I had interpreted the placard a little generously.
"The letter killeth" is a pretty good text in emergencies of this kind.
So I said to myself. The herons, meanwhile, had taken French leave, but
the smaller birds were less suspicious; I watched them at my leisure, and
left them still feeding.
Two days later I was there again, but it must be acknowledged that this
time I tarried in the road till a man on horseback had disappeared round
the next turn. It would have been manlier, without doubt, to pay no
attention to him; but something told me that he was the cotton-planter
himself, and, for better or worse, prudence carried the day with
me. Finding nothing new, though the sandpipers and yellowlegs were
still present, with a very handsome little blue heron and plenty of
blackbirds, I took the road again and went further, and an hour or two
afterward, on getting back to the same place, was overtaken again by the
horseman. He pulled up his horse and bade me good-afternoon. Would I
lend him my opera-glass, which happened to be in my hand at the moment?
"I should like to see how my house looks from here," he said; and he
pointed across the field to a house on the hill some distance beyond.
"Ah," said I, glad to set myself right by a piece of frankness that under
the circumstances could hardly work to my disadvantage; "then it is your
land on which I have been trespassing." "How so?" he asked, with a smile;
and I explained that I had been across his cotton-field a little while
before. "That is no trespass," he answered (so the reader will perceive
that I had been quite correct in my understanding of the law); and when
I went on to explain my object in visiting his cane-swamp (for such it
was, he said, but an unexpected freshet had ruined the crop when it was
barely out of the ground), he assured me that I was welcome to visit it
as often as I wished. He himself was very fond of natural history, and
often regretted that he had not given time to it in his youth. As it
was, he protected the birds on his plantation, and the place was full
of them. I should find his woods interesting, he felt sure. Florida was
extremely rich in birds; he believed there were some that had never been
classified. "We have orioles here," he added; and so far, at any rate, he
was right; I had seen perhaps twenty that day (orchard orioles, that is),
and one sat in a tree before us at the moment. His whole manner was most
kindly and hospitable,--as was that of every Tallahassean with whom I had
occasion to speak,--and I told him with sincere gratitude that I should
certainly avail myself of his courtesy and stroll through his woods.
I approached them, two mornings afterward, from the opposite side, where,
finding no other place of entrance, I climbed a six-barred, tightly
locked gate--feeling all the while like "a thief and a robber "--in front
of a deserted cabin. Then I had only to cross a grassy field, in which
meadow larks were singing, and I was in the woods. I wandered through
them without finding anything more unusual or interesting than summer
tanagers and yellow-throated warblers, which were in song there, as they
were in every such place, and after a while came out into a pleasant
glade, from which different parts of the plantation could be seen, and
through which ran a plantation road. Here was a wooden fence,--a most
unusual thing,--and I lost no time in mounting it, to rest and look about
me. It is one of the marks of a true Yankee, I suspect, to like such a
perch. My own weakness in that direction is a frequent subject of mirth
with chance fellow travelers. The attitude is comfortable and conducive
to meditation; and now that I was seated and at my ease, I felt that this
was one of the New England luxuries which, almost without knowing it, I
had missed ever since I left home.
Of my meditations on this particular occasion I remember nothing; but
that is no sign they were valueless; as it is no sign that yesterday's
dinner did me no good because I have forgotten what it was. In the
latter case, indeed, and perhaps in the former as well, it would seem
more reasonable to draw an exactly opposite inference. But, quibbles
apart, one thing I do remember: I sat for some time on the fence, in the
shade of a tree, with an eye upon the cane-swamp and an ear open for
bird-voices. Yes, and it comes to me at this moment that here I heard the
first and only bull-frog that I heard anywhere in Florida. It was like
a voice from home, and belonged with the fence. Other frogs I had heard
in other places. One chorus brought me out of bed in Daytona--in the
evening--after a succession of February dog-day showers. "What is that
noise outside?" I inquired of the land-lady as I hastened downstairs.
"That?" said she, with a look of amusement; "that's frogs." "It _may_
be," I thought, but I followed the sounds till they led me in the
darkness to the edge of a swamp. No doubt the creatures were frogs, but
of some kind new to me, with voices more lugubrious and homesick than I
should have supposed could possibly belong to any batrachian. A week or
two later, in the New Smyrna flat-woods, I heard in the distance a sound
which I took for the grunting of pigs. I made a note of it, mentally, as
a cheerful token, indicative of a probable scarcity of rattlesnakes; but
by and by, as I drew nearer, the truth of the matter began to break upon
me. A man was approaching, and when we met I asked him what was making
that noise yonder. "Frogs," he said. At another time, in the flat-woods
of Port Orange (I hope I am not taxing my reader's credulity too far, or
making myself out a man of too imaginative an ear), I heard the bleating
of sheep. Busy with other things, I did not stop to reflect that it was
impossible there should be sheep in that quarter, and the occurrence
had quite passed out of my mind when, one day, a cracker, talking about
frogs, happened to say, "Yes, and we have one kind that makes a noise
exactly like the bleating of sheep." That, without question, was what I
had heard in the flat-woods. But this frog in the sugar-cane swamp was
the same fellow that on summer evenings, ever and ever so many years ago,
in sonorous bass that could be heard a quarter of a mile away, used to
call from Reuben Loud's pond, "Pull him in I Pull him in!" or sometimes
(the inconsistent amphibian), "Jug o' rum! Jug o' rum!"
I dismounted from my perch at last, and was sauntering idly along the
path (idleness like this is often the best of ornithological industry),
when suddenly I had a vision! Before me, in the leafy top of an oak
sapling, sat a blue grosbeak. I knew him on the instant. But I could see
only his head and neck, the rest of his body being hidden by the leaves.
It was a moment of feverish excitement. Here was a new bird, a bird about
which I had felt fifteen years of curiosity; and, more than that, a bird
which here and now was quite unexpected, since it was not included in
either of the two Florida lists that I had brought with me from home.
For perhaps five seconds I had my opera-glass on the blue head and the
thick-set, dark bill, with its lighter-colored under mandible. Then I
heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs, and lifted my eyes. My friend the
owner of the plantation was coming down the road at a gallop, straight
upon me. If I was to see the grosbeak and make sure of him, it must be
done at once. I moved to bring him fully into view, and he flew into the
thick of a pine-tree out of sight.
But the tree was not far off, and if Mr. ---- would pass me with a nod,
the case was still far from hopeless. A bright thought came to me. I
ran from the path with a great show of eager absorption, leveled my
glass upon the pine-tree, and stood fixed. Perhaps Mr. ---- would take
the hint. Alas! he had too much courtesy to pass his own guest without
speaking. "Still after the birds?" he said, as he checked his horse.
I responded, as I hope, without any symptom of annoyance. Then, of
course, he wished to know what I was looking at, and I told him that a
blue grosbeak had just flown into that pine-tree, and that I was most
distressingly anxious to see more of him. He looked at the pine-tree.
"I can't see him," he said. No more could I. "It wasn't a blue jay, was
it?" he asked. And then we talked of one thing and another, I have no
idea what, till he rode away to another part of the plantation where a
gang of women were at work. By this time the grosbeak had disappeared
utterly. Possibly he had gone to a bit of wood on the opposite side of
the cane-swamp. I scaled a barbed-wire fence and made in that direction,
but to no purpose. The grosbeak was gone for good. Probably I should
never see another. Could the planter have read my thoughts just then he
would perhaps have been angry with himself, and pretty certainly he would
have been angry with me. That a Yankee should accept his hospitality, and
then load him with curses and call him all manner of names! How should
he know that I was so insane a hobbyist as to care more for the sight of
a new bird than for all the laws and customs of ordinary politeness? As
my feelings cooled, I saw that I was stepping over hills or rows of some
strange-looking plants just out of the ground. Peanuts, I guessed; but to
make sure I called to a colored woman who was hoeing not far off. "What
are these?" "Finders," she answered. I knew she meant peanuts,--otherwise
"ground-peas" and "goobers,"--and now that I once more have a dictionary
at my elbow I learn that the word, like "goober," is, or is supposed to
be, of African origin.
I was preparing to surmount the barbed-wire fence again, when the planter
returned and halted for another chat. It was evident that he took a
genuine and amiable interest in my researches. There were a great many
kinds of sparrows in that country, he said, and also of woodpeckers. He
knew the ivory-bill, but, like other Tallahasseans, he thought I should
have to go into Lafayette County (all Florida people say La_fay_ette) to
find it. "That bird calling now is a bee-bird," he said, referring to a
kingbird; "and we have a bird that is called the French mocking-bird; he
catches other birds." The last remark was of interest for its bearing
upon a point about which I had felt some curiosity, and, I may say, some
skepticism, as I had seen many loggerhead shrikes, but had observed no
indication that other birds feared them or held any grudge against them.
As he rode off he called my attention to a great blue heron just then
flying over the swamp. "They are very shy," he said. Then, from further
away, he shouted once more to ask if I heard the mocking-bird singing
yonder, pointing with his whip in the direction of the singer.
For some time longer I hung about the glade, vainly hoping that the
grosbeak would again favor my eyes. Then I crossed more planted
fields,--climbing more barbed-wire fences, and stopping on the way to
enjoy the sweetly quaint music of a little chorus of white-crowned
sparrows,--and skirted once more the muddy shore of the cane-swamp,
where the yellowlegs and sandpipers were still feeding. That brought me
to the road from which I had made my entry to the place some days before;
but, being still unable to forego a splendid possibility, I recrossed
the plantation, tarried again in the glade, sat again on the wooden
fence (if that grosbeak only _would_ show himself!), and thence went on,
picking a few heads of handsome buffalo clover, the first I had ever
seen, and some sprays of penstemon, till I came again to the six-barred
gate and the Quincy road. At that point, as I now remember, the air was
full of vultures (carrion crows), a hundred or more, soaring over the
fields in some fit of gregariousness. Along the road were white-crowned
and white-throated sparrows (it was the 12th of April), orchard orioles,
thrashers, summer tanagers, myrtle and palm warblers, cardinal grosbeaks,
mocking-birds, kingbirds, loggerheads, yellow-throated vireos, and sundry
others, but not the blue grosbeak, which would have been worth them all.
Once back at the hotel, I opened my Coues's Key to refresh my memory
as to the exact appearance of that bird. "Feathers around base of
bill black," said the book. I had not noticed that. But no matter; the
bird was a blue grosbeak, for the sufficient reason that it could not
be anything else. A black line between the almost black beak and the
dark-blue head would be inconspicuous at the best, and quite naturally
would escape a glimpse so hasty as mine had been. And yet, while I
reasoned in this way, I foresaw plainly enough that, as time passed,
doubt would get the better of assurance, as it always does, and I should
never be certain that I had not been the victim of some illusion. At
best, the evidence was worth nothing for others. If only that excellent
Mr. ----, for whose kindness I was unfeignedly thankful (and whose pardon
I most sincerely beg if I seem to have been a bit too free in this
rehearsal of the story),--if only Mr. ---- could have left me alone for
ten minutes longer!
The worry and the imprecations were wasted, after all, as, Heaven be
thanked, they so often are; for within two or three days I saw other blue
grosbeaks and heard them sing. But that was not on a cotton plantation,
and is part of another story.
A FLORIDA SHRINE.
All pilgrims to Tallahassee visit the Murat place. It is one of the
most conveniently accessible of those "points of interest" with which
guide-books so anxiously, and with so much propriety, concern themselves.
What a tourist prays for is something to see. If I had ever been a
tourist in Boston, no doubt I should before now have surveyed the
world from the top of the Bunker Hill monument. In Tallahassee, at all
events, I went to the Murat estate. In fact, I went more than once; but
I remember especially my first visit, which had a livelier sentimental
interest than the others because I was then under the agreeable delusion
that the Prince himself had lived there. The guide-book told me so,
vouchsafing also the information that after building the house he
"interested himself actively in local affairs, became a naturalized
citizen, and served successively as postmaster, alderman, and mayor "--a
model immigrant, surely, though it is rather the way of immigrants,
perhaps, not to refuse political responsibilities.
Naturally, I remembered these things as I stood in front of "the big
house "--a story-and-a-half cottage--amid the flowering shrubs. Here
lived once the son of the King of Naples; himself a Prince, and--worthy
son of a worthy sire--alderman and then mayor of the city of Tallahassee.
Thus did an uncompromising democrat pay court to the shades of Royalty,
while a mocking-bird sang from a fringe-bush by the gate, and an oriole
flew madly from tree to tree in pursuit of a fair creature of the
reluctant sex.
The inconsistency, if such it was, was quickly punished. For, alas!
when I spoke of my morning's pilgrimage to an old resident of the town,
he told me that Murat never lived in the house, nor anywhere else in
Tallahassee, and of course was never its postmaster, alderman, or mayor.
The Princess, he said, built the house after her husband's death,
and lived there, a widow. I appealed to the guide-book. My informant
sneered,--politely,--and brought me a still older Tallahassean, Judge,
whose venerable name I am sorry to have forgotten, and that indisputable
citizen confirmed all that his neighbor had said. For once, the
guide-book compiler must have been misinformed.
The question, happily, was one of no great consequence. If the Prince had
never lived in the house, the Princess had; and she, by all accounts (and
I make certain her husband would have said the same), was the worthier
person of the two. And even if neither of them had lived there, if my
sentiment had been _all_ wasted (but there was no question of tears),
the place itself was sightly, the house was old, and the way thither a
pleasant one--first down the hill in a zig-zag course to the vicinity of
the railway station, then by a winding country road through the valley
past a few negro cabins, and up the slope on the farther side. Prince
Murat, or no Prince Murat, I should love to travel that road to-day,
instead of sitting before a Massachusetts fire, with the ground deep
under snow, and the air full of thirty or forty degrees of frost.
In the front yard of one of the cabins opposite the car-wheel foundry,
and near the station, as I now remember, a middle-aged negress was
cutting up an oak log. She swung the axe with vigor and precision, and
the chips flew; but I could not help saying, "You ought to make the man
do that."
She answered on the instant. "I would," she said, "if I had a man to
_make_."
"I'm sure you would," I thought. Her tongue was as sharp as her axe.
Ought I to have ventured a word in her behalf, I wonder, when a man
of her own color, and a pretty near neighbor, told me with admirable
_näiveté_ the story of his bereavement and his hopes? His wife had died
a year before, he said, and so far, though he had not let the grass grow
under his feet, he had found no one to take her place. He still meant to
do so, if he could. He was only seventy-four years old, and it was not
good for a man to be alone. He seemed a gentle spirit, and I withheld all
mention of the stalwart and manless wood-cutter. I hope he went farther,
and fared better. So youthful as he was, surely there was no occasion for
haste.
When I had skirted a cotton-field--the crop just out of the ground--and
a bit of wood on the right, and a swamp with a splendid display of white
water-lilies on the left, and had begun to ascend the gentle slope, I met
a man of considerably more than seventy-four years.
"Can you tell me just where the Murat place is?" I inquired.
He grinned broadly, and thought he could. He was one of the old Murat
servants, as his father had been before him. "I was borned on to him," he
said, speaking of the Prince. Murat was "a gentleman, sah." That was a
statement which it seemed impossible for him to repeat often enough. He
spoke from a slave's point of view. Murat was a good master. The old man
had heard him say that he kept servants "for the like of the thing." He
didn't abuse them. He "never was for barbarizing a poor colored person
at all." Whipping? Oh, yes. "He didn't miss your fault. No, sah, he
didn't miss your fault." But his servants never were "ironed." He "didn't
believe in barbarousment."
The old man was thankful to be free; but to his mind emancipation had
not made everything heavenly. The younger set of negroes ("my people"
was his word) were on the wrong road. They had "sold their birthright,"
though exactly what he meant by that remark I did not gather. "They ain't
got no sense," he declared, "and what sense they has got don't do 'em no
good."
I told him finally that I was from the North. "Oh, I knows it," he
exclaimed, "I knows it;" and he beamed with delight. How did he know, I
inquired. "Oh, I knows it. I can see it _in_ you. Anybody would know it
that had any jedgment at all. You's a perfect gentleman, sah." He was too
old to be quarreled with, and I swallowed the compliment.
I tore myself away, or he might have run on till night--about his old
master and mistress, the division of the estate, an abusive overseer ("he
was a perfect dog, sah! "), and sundry other things. He had lived a long
time, and had nothing to do now but to recall the past and tell it over.
So it will be with us, if we live so long. May we find once in a while a
patient listener.