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. I 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 days 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 Scrip-ture 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
yellowbacks, 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,--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.