going and coming were the better part of the pilgrimage. The estate
itself is beautifully situated, with far-away horizons; but it has
fallen into great neglect, while the house, almost in ruins, and
occupied by colored people, is to Northern eyes hardly more than a
larger cabin. It put me in mind of the question of a Western gentleman
whom I met at St. Augustine. He had come to Florida against his will,
the weather and the doctor having combined against him, and was looking
at everything through very blue spectacles. "Have you seen any of those
fine old country mansions," he asked, "about which we read so often in
descriptions of Southern, life?" He had been on the lookout for them, he
averred, ever since he left home, and had yet to find the first one; and
from his tone it was evident that he thought the Southern idea of a
"fine old mansion" must be different from his.
The Murat house, certainly, was never a palace, except as love may have
made it so. But it was old; people had lived in it, and died in it;
those who once owned it, whose name and memory still clung to it, were
now in narrower houses; and it was easy for the visitor--for one
visitor, at least--to fall into pensive meditation. I strolled about the
grounds; stood between the last year's cotton-rows, while a Carolina
wren poured out his soul from an oleander bush near by; admired the
confidence of a pair of shrikes, who had made a nest in a honeysuckle
vine in the front yard; listened to the sweet music of mocking-birds,
cardinals, and orchard orioles; watched the martins circling above the
trees; thought of the Princess, and smiled at the black children who
thrust their heads out of the windows of her "big house;" and then, with
a sprig of honeysuckle for a keepsake, I started slowly homeward.
The sun by this time was straight overhead, but my umbrella saved me
from absolute discomfort, while birds furnished here and there an
agreeable diversion. I recall in particular some white-crowned sparrows,
the first ones I had seen in Florida. At a bend in the road opposite the
water-lily swamp, while I was cooling myself in the shade of a friendly
pine-tree,--enjoying at the same time a fence overrun with Cherokee
roses,--a man and his little boy came along in a wagon. The man seemed
really disappointed when I told him that I was going into town, instead
of coming from it. It was pretty warm weather for walking, and he had
meant to offer me a lift. He was a Scandinavian, who had been for some
years in Florida. He owned a good farm not far from the Murat estate,
which latter he had been urged to buy; but he thought a man wasn't any
better off for owning too much land. He talked of his crops, his
children, the climate, and so on, all in a cheerful strain, pleasant to
hear. If the pessimists are right,--which may I be kept from
believing,--the optimists are certainly more comfortable to live with,
though it be only for ten minutes under a roadside shade-tree.
When I reached the street-car track at the foot of the hill, the one car
which plies back and forth through the city was in its place, with the
driver beside it, but no mules.
"Are you going to start directly?" I asked.
"Yes, sah," he answered; and then, looking toward the stable, he shouted
in a peremptory voice, "Do about, there! Do about!"
"What does that mean?" said I. "Hurry up?"
"Yes, sah, that's it. 'Tain't everybody that wants to be hurried up; so
we tells 'em, 'Do about!'"
Half a minute afterwards two very neatly dressed little colored boys
stepped upon the rear platform.
"Where you goin'?" said the driver. "Uptown?"
They said they were.
"Well, come inside. Stay out there, and you'll git hurt and cost this
dried-up company more money than you's wuth."
They dropped into seats by the rear door. He motioned them to the front
corner. "Sit down there," he said, "right there." They obeyed, and as he
turned away he added, what I found more and more to be true, as I saw
more of him, "I ain't de boss, but I's got right smart to say."
Then, he whistled to the mules, flourished his whip, and to a persistent
accompaniment of whacks and whistles we went crawling up the hill.
WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE.
I arrived at Tallahassee, from Jacksonville, late in the afternoon,
after a hot and dusty ride of more than eight hours. The distance is
only a hundred and sixty odd miles, I believe; but with some bright
exceptions, Southern railroads, like Southern men, seem to be under the
climate, and schedule time is more or less a formality.
For the first two thirds of the way the country is flat and barren.
Happily, I sat within earshot of an amateur political economist, who,
like myself, was journeying to the State capital. By birth and education
he was a New York State man, I heard him say; an old abolitionist, who
had voted for Birney, Fremont, and all their successors down to
Hayes--the only vote he was ever ashamed of. Now he was a "greenbacker."
The country was going to the dogs, and all because the government did
not furnish money enough. The people would find it out some time, he
guessed. He talked as a bird sings--for his own pleasure. But I was
pleased, too. His was an amiable enthusiasm, quite exempt, as it seemed,
from all that bitterness, which an exclusive possession of the truth so
commonly engenders. He was greatly in earnest; he knew he was right; but
he could still see the comical side of things; he still had a sense of
the ludicrous; and in that lay his salvation. For a sense of the
ludicrous is the best of mental antiseptics; it, if anything, will keep
our perishable human nature sweet, and save it from the madhouse. His
discourse was punctuated throughout with quiet laughter. Thus, when he
said, "_I_ call it the _late_ Republican party," it was with a chuckle
so good-natured, so free from acidity and self-conceit, that only a
pretty stiff partisan could have taken offense. Even his predictions of
impending national ruin were delivered with numberless merry quips and
twinkles. Many good Republicans and good Democrats (the adjective is
used in its political sense) might have envied him his sunny temper,
joined, as it was, to a good stock of native shrewdness. For something
in his eye made it plain that, with all his other qualities, our merry
greenbacker was a reasonably competent hand at a bargain; so that I was
not in the least surprised when his seat-mate told me afterward, in a
tone of much respect, that the "Colonel" owned a very comfortable
property at St. Augustine. But his best possession, I still thought, was
his humor and his own generous appreciation of it. To enjoy one's own
jokes is to have a pretty safe insurance against inward adversity.
Happily, I say, this good-humored talker sat within hearing. Happily,
too, it was now--April 4--the height of the season for flowering
dogwood, pink azalea, fringe-bushes, Cherokee roses, and water lilies.
All these had blossomed abundantly, and mile after mile the wilderness
and the solitary place were glad for them. Here and there, also, I
caught flying glimpses of some unknown plant bearing a long upright
raceme of creamy-white flowers. It might be a white lupine, I thought,
till at one of our stops between stations it happened to be growing
within reach. Then I guessed it to be a _Baptisia_, which guess was
afterward confirmed--to my regret; for the flowers lost at once all
their attractiveness. So ineffaceable (oftenest for good, but this time
for ill) is an early impression upon the least honorably esteemed of the
five senses! As a boy, it was one of my tasks to keep down with a scythe
the weeds and bushes in a rocky, thin-soiled cattle pasture. In that
task,--which, at the best, was a little too much like work--my most
troublesome enemy was the common wild indigo (_Baptisia tinctoria_),
partly from the wicked pertinacity with which it sprang up again after
every mowing, but especially from the fact that the cut or bruised stalk
exhaled what in my nostrils was a most abominable odor. Other people do
not find it so offensive, I suspect, but to me it was, and is, ten times
worse than the more pungent but comparatively salubrious perfume which a
certain handsome little black-and-white quadruped--handsome, but
impolite--is given to scattering upon the nocturnal breeze in moments of
extreme perturbation.
Somewhere beyond the Suwanee River (at which I looked as long as it
remained in sight--and thought of Christine Nilsson) there came a sudden
change in the aspect of the country, coincident with a change in the
nature of the soil, from white sand to red clay; a change indescribably
exhilarating to a New Englander who had been living, if only for two
months, in a country without hills. How good it was to see the land
rising, though never so gently, as it stretched away toward the horizon!
My spirits rose with it. By and by we passed extensive hillside
plantations, on which little groups of negroes, men and women, were at
work. I seemed to see the old South of which I had read and dreamed, a
South not in the least like anything to be found in the wilds of
southern and eastern Florida; a land of cotton, and, better still, a
land of Southern people, instead of Northern tourists and settlers. And
when we stopped at a thrifty-looking village, with neat, homelike
houses, open grounds, and lordly shade-trees, I found myself saying
under my breath, "Now, then, we are getting back into God's country."
As for Tallahassee itself, it was exactly what I had hoped to find it: a
typical Southern town; not a camp in the woods, nor an old city
metamorphosed into a fashionable winter resort; a place untainted by
"Northern enterprise," whose inhabitants were unmistakably at home, and
whose houses, many of them, at least, had no appearance of being for
sale. It is compactly built on a hill,--the state capitol crowning the
top,--down the pretty steep sides of which run roads into the open
country all about. The roads, too, are not so sandy but that it is
comparatively comfortable to walk in them--a blessing which the
pedestrian sorely misses in the towns of lower Florida: at St.
Augustine, for example, where, as soon as one leaves the streets of the
city itself, walking and carriage-riding alike become burdensome and,
for any considerable distance, all but impossible. Here at Tallahassee,
it was plain, I should not be kept indoors for want of invitations from
without.
I arrived, as I have said, rather late in the afternoon; so late that I
did nothing more than ramble a little about the city, noting by the way
the advent of the chimney swifts, which I had not found elsewhere, and
returning to my lodgings with a handful of "banana-shrub"
blossoms,--smelling wonderfully like their name,--which a good woman had
insisted upon giving me when I stopped beside the fence to ask her the
name of the bush. It was my first, but by no means my last, experience
of the floral generosity of Tallahassee people.
The next morning I woke betimes, and to my astonishment found the city
enveloped in a dense fog. The hotel clerk, an old resident, to whom I
went in my perplexity, was as much surprised as his questioner. He did
not know what it could mean, he was sure; it was very unusual; but he
thought it did not indicate foul weather. For a man so slightly
acquainted with such phenomena, he proved to be a remarkably good
prophet; for though, during my fortnight's stay, there must have been at
least eight foggy mornings, every day was sunny, and not a drop of rain
fell.
That first bright forenoon is still a bright memory. For one thing, the
mocking-birds outsang themselves till I felt, and wrote, that I had
never heard mocking-birds before. That they really did surpass their
brethren of St. Augustine and Sanford would perhaps be too much to
assert, but so it seemed; and I was pleased, some months afterward, to
come upon a confirmatory judgment by Mr. Maurice Thompson, who, if any
one, must be competent to speak.
"If I were going to risk the reputation of our country on the singing of
a mocking-bird against a European nightingale," says Mr. Thompson,[1] "I
should choose my champion from the hill-country in the neighborhood of
Tallahassee, or from the environs of Mobile.... I have found no birds
elsewhere to compare with those in that belt of country about thirty
miles wide, stretching from Live Oak in Florida, by way of Tallahassee,
to some miles west of Mobile."
[Footnote 1: _By-Ways and Bird-Notes_, p. 20.]
I had gone down the hill past some negro cabins, into a small,
straggling wood, and through the wood to a gate which let me into a
plantation lane. It was the fairest of summer forenoons (to me, I mean;
by the almanac it was only the 5th of April), and one of the fairest of
quiet landscapes: broad fields rising gently to the horizon, and before
me, winding upward, a grassy lane open on one side, and bordered on the
other by a deep red gulch and a zigzag fence, along which grew vines,
shrubs, and tall trees. The tender and varied tints of the new leaves,
the lively green of the young grain, the dark ploughed fields, the red
earth of the wayside--I can see them yet, with all that Florida sunshine
on them. In the bushes by the fence-row were a pair of cardinal
grosbeaks, the male whistling divinely, quite unabashed by the
volubility of a mocking-bird who balanced himself on the treetop
overhead,
"Superb and sole, upon a pluméd spray,"
and seemed determined to show a Yankee stranger what mocking-birds could
really do when they set out. He did his work well; the love notes of the
flicker could not have been improved by the flicker himself; but, right
or wrong, I could not help feeling that the cardinal struck a truer and
deeper note; while both together did not hinder me from hearing the
faint songs of grasshopper sparrows rising from the ground on either
side of the lane. It was a fine contrast: the mocker flooding the air
from the topmost bough, and the sparrows whispering their few almost
inaudible notes out of the grass. Yes, and at the self-same moment the
eye also had its contrast; for a marsh hawk was skimming over the field,
while up in the sky soared a pair of hen-hawks.
In the wood, composed of large trees, both hard wood and pine, I had
found a group of three summer tanagers, two males and one female,--the
usual proportion with birds generally, one may almost say, in the
pairing season. The female was the first of her sex that I had seen, and
I remarked with pleasure the comparative brightness of her dress. Among
tanagers, as among negroes, red and yellow are esteemed a pretty good
match. At this point, too, in a cluster of pines, I caught a new
song--faint and listless, like the indigo-bird's, I thought; and at the
word I started forward eagerly. Here, doubtless, was the indigo-bird's
southern congener, the nonpareil, or painted bunting, a beauty which I
had begun to fear I was to miss. I had recognized my first tanager from
afar, ten days before, his voice and theme were so like his Northern
relative's; but this time I was too hasty. My listless singer was not
the nonpareil, nor even a finch of any kind, but a yellow-throated
warbler. For a month I had seen birds of his species almost daily, but
always in hard wood trees, and silent. Henceforth, as long as I remained
in Florida, they were invariably in pines,--their summer quarters,--and
in free song. Their plumage is of the neatest and most exquisite; few,
even among warblers, surpass them in that regard: black and white
(reminding one of the black-and-white creeper, which they resemble also
in their feeding habits), with a splendid yellow gorget. Myrtle warblers
(yellow-rumps) were still here (the peninsula is alive with them in the
winter), and a ruby-crowned kinglet mingled its lovely voice with the
simple trills of pine warblers, while out of a dense low treetop some
invisible singer was pouring a stream of fine-spun melody. It should
have been a house wren, I thought (another was singing close by), only
its tune was several times too long.
At least four of my longer excursions into the surrounding country
(long, not intrinsically, but by reason of the heat) were made with a
view to possible ivory-billed woodpeckers. Just out of the town
northward, beyond what appeared to be the court end of Marion Street,
the principal business street of the city, I had accosted a gentleman in
a dooryard in front of a long, low, vine-covered, romantic-looking
house. He was evidently at home, and not so busy as to make an
interruption probably intrusive. I inquired the name of a tree, I
believe. At all events, I engaged him in conversation, and found him
most agreeable--an Ohio gentleman, a man of science, who had been in the
South long enough to have acquired large measures of Southern
_insouciance_ (there are times when a French word has a politer sound
than any English equivalent), which takes life as made for something
better than worry and pleasanter than hard work. He had seen
ivory-bills, he said, and thought I might be equally fortunate if I
would visit a certain swamp, about which he would tell me, or, better
still, if I would go out to Lake Bradford.
First, because it was nearer, I went to the swamp, taking an early
breakfast and setting forth in a fog that was almost a mist, to make as
much of the distance as possible before the sun came out. My course lay
westward, some four miles, along the railway track, which, thanks to
somebody, is provided with a comfortable footpath of hard clay covering
the sleepers midway between the rails. If all railroads were thus
furnished they might be recommended as among the best of routes for
walking naturalists, since they go straight through the wild country.
This one carried me by turns through woodland and cultivated field,
upland and swamp, pine land and hammock; and, happily, my expectations
of the ivory-bill were not lively enough to quicken my steps or render
me heedless of things along the way.
Here I was equally surprised and delighted by the sight of yellow
jessamine still in flower more than a month after I had seen the end of
its brief season, only a hundred miles further south. So great,
apparently, is the difference between the peninsula and this Tallahassee
hill-country, which by its physical geography seems rather to be a part
of Georgia than of Florida. Here, too, the pink azalea was at its
prettiest, and the flowering dogwood, also, true queen of the woods in
Florida as in Massachusetts. The fringe-bush, likewise, stood here and
there in solitary state, and thorn-bushes flourished in bewildering
variety.
Nearer the track were the omnipresent blackberry vines, some patches of
which are especially remembered for their bright rosy flowers.
Out of the dense vegetation of a swamp came the cries of Florida
gallinules, and then, of a sudden, I caught, or seemed to catch, the
sweet _kurwee_ whistle of a Carolina rail. Instinctively I turned my ear
for its repetition, and by so doing admitted to myself that I was not
certain of what I had heard, although the sora's call is familiar, and
the bird was reasonably near. I had been taken unawares, and every
ornithologist knows how hard it is to be sure of one's self in such a
case. He knows, too, how uncertain he feels of any brother observer who
in a similar case seems troubled by no distrust of his own senses. The
whistle, whatever it had been, was not repeated, and I lost my only
opportunity of adding the sora's name to my Florida catalogue--a loss,
fortunately, of no consequence to any but myself, since the bird is well
known as a winter visitor to the State.
Further along, a great blue heron was stalking about the edge of a
marshy pool, and further still, in a woody swamp, stood three little
blue herons, one of them in white plumage. In the drier and more open
parts of the way cardinals, mocking-birds, and thrashers were singing,
ground doves were cooing, quails were prophesying, and loggerhead
shrikes sat, trim and silent, on the telegraph wire. In the pine lands
were plenty of brown-headed nuthatches, full, as always, of friendly
gossip; two red-shouldered hawks, for whom life seemed to wear a more
serious aspect; three Maryland yellow throats; a pair of bluebirds, rare
enough now to be twice welcome; a black-and-white creeper, and a yellow
redpoll warbler. In the same pine woods, too, there was much good music:
house wrens, Carolina wrens, red-eyed and white-eyed vireos, pine
warblers, yellow-throated warblers, blue yellowbacks, red-eyed chewinks,
and, twice welcome, like the bluebirds, a Carolina chickadee.
A little beyond this point, in a cut through a low sand bank, I found
two pairs of rough-winged swallows, and stopped for some time to stare
at them, being myself, meanwhile, a gazing-stock for two or three
negroes lounging about the door of a cabin not far away. It is a happy
chance when a man's time is _doubly_ improved. Two of the birds--the
first ones I had ever seen, to be sure of them--perched directly before
me on the wire, one facing me, the other with his back turned. It was
kindly done; and then, as if still further to gratify my curiosity, they
visited a hole in the bank. A second hole was doubtless the property of
the other pair. Living alternately in heaven and in a hole in the
ground, they wore the livery of the earth.
"They are not fair to outward view
As many swallows be,"
I said to myself. But I was not the less glad to see them.
I should have been gladder for a sight of the big woodpecker, whose
reputed dwelling-place lay not far ahead. But, though I waited and
listened, and went through the swamp, and beyond it, I heard no strange
shout, nor saw any strange bird; and toward noon, just as the sun
brushed away the fog, I left the railway track for a carriage by-way
which, I felt sure, must somehow bring me back to the city. And so it
did, past here and there a house, till I came to the main road, and then
to the Murat estate, and was again on familiar ground.
Two mornings afterward I made another early and foggy start, this time
for Lake Bradford. My instructions were to follow the railway for a mile
or so beyond the station, and then take a road bearing away sharply to
the left. This I did, making sure I was on the right road by inquiring
of the first man I saw--a negro at work before his cabin. I had gone
perhaps half a mile further when a white man, on his way after a load of
wood, as I judged, drove up behind me. "Won't you ride?" he asked. "You
are going to Lake Bradford, I believe, and I am going a piece in the
same direction." I jumped up behind (the wagon consisting of two long
planks fastened to the two axles), thankful, but not without a little
bewilderment. The good-hearted negro, it appeared, had asked the man to
look out for me; and he, on his part, seemed glad to do a kindness as
well as to find company. We jolted along, chatting at arm's length, as
it were, about this and that. He knew nothing of the ivory-bill; but
wild turkeys--oh, yes, he had seen a flock of eight, as well as he could
count, not long before, crossing the road in the very woods through
which I was going. As for snakes, they were plenty enough, he guessed.
One of his horses was bitten while ploughing, and died in half an hour.
(A Florida man who cannot tell at least one snake story may be set down
as having land to sell.) He thought it a pretty good jaunt to the lake,
and the road wasn't any too plain, though no doubt I should get there;
but I began to perceive that a white man who traveled such distances on
foot in that country was more of a _rara avis_ than any woodpecker.
Our roads diverged after a while, and my own soon ran into a wood with
an undergrowth of saw palmetto. This was the place for the ivory-bill,
and as at the swamp two days before, so now I stopped and listened, and
then stopped and listened again. The Fates were still against me. There
was neither woodpecker nor turkey, and I pushed on, mostly through pine
woods--full of birds, but nothing new--till I came out at the lake.
Here, beside an idle sawmill and heaps of sawdust, I was greeted by a
solitary negro, well along in years, who demanded, in a tone of almost
comical astonishment, where in the world I had come from. I told him
from Tallahassee, and he seemed so taken aback that I began to think I
must look uncommonly like an invalid, a "Northern consumptive," perhaps.
Otherwise, why should a walk of six miles, or something less, be treated
as such a marvel? However, the negro and I were soon on the friendliest
of terms, talking of the old times, the war, the prospects of the
colored people (the younger ones were fast going to the bad, he
thought), while I stood looking out over the lake, a pretty sheet of
water, surrounded mostly by cypress woods, but disfigured for the
present by the doings of lumbermen. What interested me most (such is the
fate of the devotee) was a single barn swallow, the first and only one
that I saw on my Southern trip.