forethought 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 landlady 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! 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?" "Pinders," 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 paim warblers,
cardinal grosbeaks, mocking-birds, kingbirds, logger-heads,
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 zigzag 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
_naïveté_ 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.
This patriarch's unfavorable opinion as to the prospects of the colored
people was shared by my hopeful young widower before mentioned, who
expressed himself quite as emphatically. He was brought up among white
people ("I's been taughted a heap," he said), and believed that the
salvation of the blacks lay in their recognition of white supremacy. But
he was less perspicacious than the older man. He was one of the very few
persons whom I met at the South who did not recognize me at sight as a
Yankee. "Are you a legislator-man?" he asked, at the end of our talk.
The legislature was in session on the hill. But perhaps, after all, he
only meant to flatter me.