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"[1] 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.
[Footnote 1: 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,[1] 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.
[Footnote 1: 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
phoeniceus 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.[1]
[Footnote 1: 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
redwings under the name of _Agelaius phoeniceus 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.[1]
[Footnote 1: 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 archaeologist 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 underwoods. 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, shrikish 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,[1] 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_."
[Footnote 1: _The Auk_, vol. v. p. 273.]