gripping the meat with those blue claws that he may be dropped on the dock or in a pail by shaking him off.

By the river at night may be seen a fine example of the continuance of a trade not taught in schools or in books, but handed down from father to son for countless generations. The fishing for channel cats in the St. Johns is a good business. The fish run from a few pounds in weight up to thirty or thirty-five. They sell in the rough for two and a half cents a pound. Nobody about here will eat cats and they are shipped north, I suspect to become boneless cod. But the cat fishing is not what I mean, it is the shrimping. These curious, bug-like creatures infest the river, and the negro fishermen capture them at night in primitive circular nets which have lead weights about the circumference and are held by a rope from the center. The fishermen cast these upon the surface by a peculiar motion which spreads them out flat. Then they sink and are drawn up by the central rope, looking for all the world like a dangling lace petticoat with shrimps and small fishes entangled in the lace. The water laps in ghostly fashion under the piers and the lantern light makes grotesque creatures out of an elder world of the fishermen.

Here, I suspect, is a fine survival. Were not the nets that Peter and his brethren cast into Galilee of this fashion? Did not the fishermen of an ancient legend who drew up the bottle which contained an afreet, find its cork entangled in a net like one of these? The slippers of Abu Kassim, in the Persian story, desperately thrown away and brought back again always by most untimely rescue—were not these hauled from the Euphrates once by a fisherman with just such a net? I believe so. But our thought, tangled like the shrimp in the net, has traveled a long way.

The name of the water hyacinth is linked for all time with Florida’s broad river. Here where the tide flows in the main stream I see but little of it. Now and then a fleet of tiny green boats floats boldly down as if piratically planning to take the open sea, with green halberds pointed bravely over blunt, round bows. I fancy the salt of the real sea is too much for these bold voyageurs, but they line the river bank everywhere, rarely a leaf showing along the main river, so closely are they cropped by the roaming aquatic cattle. These whet appetites of a morning on the hyacinths as they step over the green blanket of them that hides the sand. They breakfast far from shore on the homely waterweed, Anarcharis canadensis I take it to be, that grows so plentifully in water a few feet deep. Then they wade in again and give the hyacinths another crop as they go by to rest beneath the live-oaks and chew the cud of contentment.

This makes the hyacinths which blanket the shore but squat agglomerations of green-air bulbs that give one little idea of the real plant. These grow persistently, however, and now and then blossom out of season because of this pruning, showing a wonderful blue, hyacinth-like bloom that one might almost take for a translucent blue orchid, the standard petal larger and deeper blue with a mark like a yellow fleur-de-lis on it, a blossom that makes the banks of the St. Johns in spring a blue sheen of dainty color.

But you need to get away from the frequented banks of the river to see the water hyacinth in full growth. There, uncropped by cattle and unmolested, the plants crowd creeks from bank to bank with serried ranks of leaves whose deep green gives a fine color but whose culms effectually stop all navigation.

I was splashing along through the shallows that border this riverbank hyacinth blanket, headed toward a great bed of pied-billed grebes that were resting and feeding in a shallow near the entrance to Doctor’s Lake, when I had my first tiny adventure of the day. Right among the hyacinths near my feet I heard a scream of pain and terror. Very human it was, but tiny and with an elfin quality about it. I stepped to the right and it was at my left. I stepped to the left and it was at my right. I looked down, but it sounded twice before I located it.

Then I saw a small green frog, one with a body an inch and a half long, whose hind leg was caught beneath the water hyacinths. He it was that was giving these most human-like little screeches. Almost I reached to disentangle his foot with my finger. Then I bethought me what country I was in and poked with the handle of a net that I had with me, instead. This was just as well, for the poking disclosed the arrow-shaped head and baleful eyes of a young water moccasin. A blow or two broke his hold on the frog, that stopped his yelling forthwith and hopped eagerly away. The snake was soon despatched. He was only nine inches long, and how he hoped to swallow a frog so big I cannot say. Common report says he could stretch his rubber neck four times its usual size and accomplish his dinner.

Sitting in a clean sandbank, and safe, no doubt, I soon got intent on my birds. Never before had I seen so many grebes. There were easily half a thousand of them swimming about in such close communion that they jostled one another, all pied-bills. I saw no alien among them. Some rocked on the wavelets, their heads down between their shoulders, seeming half asleep. Others fed industriously. The water of the shallows along

here is so full of small fish that they had little trouble in getting their fill. Some seemed to succeed by merely dipping the head and picking up what came within reach. Others swam sedately, then of a sudden leapt into the air and curled below in a lightning-like plunge that often brought up a big one.

Before long I began to see that the great community was made up of families or associates, of two to five, oftenest three, as if this year’s father and mother kept the young still in charge. Now and then one grebe seemed to rush to another that had just come up and receive something from the resurgent bill, as if the mother had captured a special titbit which was passed over to the young. Sometimes, too, the would-be recipient was chided away with a sharp dab of the bill instead of the reached-for refreshment. Here no doubt was a bunco child, and the parent was too keen to be thus swindled. In that case the dab that rebuffed the impostor was followed by a swallow that settled the matter as far as that particular young mullet was concerned. There was, however, always a strong community spirit. The most of the five hundred coursed the shallows in one direction, swimming all heads one way with something like army discipline. The leader of this company had but to turn and swim back and the whole array turned front and made in the opposite direction. Yet there were squads under secondary leadership, for now and then a flock of twenty or so would rise and fly swiftly up or down stream without drawing the others. At such times a quaint little croaking cry was exchanged by many birds.

I might have learned more had I not happened to look sharp at the sand not far from my elbow. Something rather indistinct there took shape after a little, and a troubled conscience sent me up in the air, perhaps not so high as the top of the bayberry shrubs, but if not it was not my fault. I certainly had a strong desire to sit on top of them. The nearer grebes squawked and fled, but little did I care for them, for there in the sand at my feet as I came down I saw the ghost of my little moccasin, a stubby little nine-inch gray creature whose curious black mottlings left him still indistinct among his surroundings.

After all, it was but a ghost of a little gray snake, probably dead, for he did not move. Grown bold I turned him over with the toe of my big boot. He lay motionless. Then I gave him an extra poke and suddenly moved away some yards, for he turned back upon his belly, raised a threatening head and began to grow. All the cobras in India, concentrated, could not have looked more venomous. His markings became distinct and glowed. Two black loops far down on his neck became like great eyes, and the whole snake became so big of head that I looked for legs, thinking he must be some sort of lizard after all. Never have I seen a nine-inch creature look so portentous, and when I whacked him on the head with my net pole and stretched him out, undoubtedly dead, I had vague feelings that I was dealing with a magical creature that might at the next move become a dragon like those of King Arthur’s time and take me down at one fiery gulp.

It was my first encounter with a harmless inhabitant of the sandy barrens, the hog-nosed snake. The reptile may grow to a length of three feet. He has neither fangs nor venom, but he does not need them. When cornered he simply swells up to thrice his usual size, hisses, and acts generally as if built out of mowing machines and loaded with cyanide of potassium. I am still congratulating myself that this sand baby was not full-grown. If he had been, and terror can kill, the tiny frog-chaser of the water hyacinths would surely have been avenged.

CHAPTER IV

BIRDS OF A MORNING

I have spent many mornings trying to determine which bird is the first up. During the hot spell of two weeks ago, when the thermometer danced in the shade with the eighties all day and sank to sweet slumber with the sixties at night I was quite convinced that it must be the mockingbird, just because I heard him first. Then quite a few mockers used to greet the coming of the sun with melody, rolling golden notes of delightful song over the dew-wet sands from some topmost twig. Just in front of the house on the river bank is a group of yuccas, fifteen feet tall or so, stabbing the soft air in all directions with their needle-pointed Spanish bayonets.

I fancy every Northerner has to learn the full stabbing power of these bayonets by experience. A thicket of them is beautiful in its dark green setting of slim-pointed rosettes and is impassable to a white man as the outer rim of a British square. It would take a Fuzzy-wuzzy of the Soudanese tribes to break through in the one case as in the other. I once read in a novel of a lover who followed the desire of his heart to Florida, and at the critical moment forced his way to her “penetrating a thicket of Spanish bayonet.” I now realize that this lover was a man of steel, else the thicket had penetrated him. Inadvertently I leaned a little closer to one of these yucca groups the other day, and went to the repair shop with nineteen punctures, being fortunate that I did not permanently remain “hung” in the larder of the butcher bird—of whom more anon.

The top of a yucca is crowned each summer with a most beautiful pyramid of waxy, pale yellow flowers, a spike several feet tall with drooping blooms most delightful to behold, followed by pods that are now approaching maturity, looking much like stubby green bananas ripening to a glossy brownish red. On the top of one of these pod-pyramids a mocking bird used to sit during the warm spell, greeting the dawn with golden uproar. He and his fellows were most lively then, filling the thickets with harsh chirps when not singing. The songs of different mockers vary much, but their chirps are alike and are certainly most unmusical. They are loud, harsh and guttural. The “mia-u-w” of a catbird is a burst of melody in comparison.

But that singing was all for the hot weather. Suddenly the other night the wind came up out of the north, the mercury fell in the thermometer to the late forties, and we all froze to death—not as to our bodies, which simply grew goose-flesh, but in our minds. Singular thing, the Northern mind. It comes down to Florida from a country where the winter mercury dandles the zero mark on its knee mornings. It finds the jasmine in bloom and butterflies flitting from flower to flower. A few mornings later it finds the mercury at thirty-eight and frost on the jasmine. This does not specially trouble the jasmine, but it so freezes the Northern mind that the Northern body has to sit over roaring fires and rub its goose-flesh until the temperature rises again. But that is Florida.

After a second or third forty-degrees-above cold snap the visitor from frozen climes gets his balance and forgets to shiver, finding the chill a tonic and the mid-day warmth delightful. So I fancy it is with the mocking birds. They seem livelier now that cool weather has come, they chirp and flutter about with much more energy, but not one of them has opened his mouth in song since the mercury hit fifty. My front-door friend still sits on his yucca pod part of the day, however, and still I am puzzled to know when he leaves it and his double comes on duty.

He is a rather interesting fellow, this double, whom I need not have mistaken for the mocker at all, he is so different a bird. Yet he is about the same size, white beneath and with a good deal of gray in his upper works. Bill and tail differ from those of the mocker; still, at a distance of a hundred feet a casual glance did not enlighten me. I am still wondering if there is method in this quiet substitution. The double is a loggerhead shrike, the Southern butcher-bird. He feeds upon small birds, and he might well choose the perch which the mocker had just vacated as a most desirable hunting stand. Small birds flitting back and forth in the early morning would hear the mocker singing and know that he would never harm them. Then an hour or two later, flying by in perfect confidence, they would find themselves in the crooked beak of the loggerhead, to be impaled on one of the thorns of the yucca beneath the perch and there dissected at leisure, or left to wait while the loggerhead takes his ease, “hung” as we say of ducks and snipe.

Does the loggerhead take the mocking bird’s perch with forethought, bearing the opportunity in mind and trusting to the resemblance, or is it just a case of a convenient perch with both birds? He who can read the loggerhead’s mind may be able to tell me. So far I have failed to catch the butcher bird at his butchery, and though I look doubtfully at those convenient Spanish bayonet tips as I pass, I find I am the only innocent thus far impaled on them.

Of these small birds that the loggerhead might capture the very name is legion. All warblers seem to be here, and if they are difficult to keep track of in the North, here they are well nigh impossible. I find a live-oak tree full of uncountable flocks. I get the glass on one bird, and before I can begin to note his characteristics he has flitted like a shadow and another with far different markings is in his place. Birds that one knows at a glance may thus be noted at a glance, but the rarer varieties crowd in upon these until the mind in trying to distinguish and remember becomes inextricably confused and finally gives up in despair. I am beginning to believe that every small bird in Chapman’s “Birds of Eastern North America” is in convention on the west bank of the St. Johns. Some wiser and more farsighted man than I will have to tell how many varieties of warblers, finches, sparrows, and flycatchers may be seen on one good day in early December on the lower banks of the big river of Florida.

It is a relief to cross the trails of some more easily seen songsters. Take the Florida crows, for instance. These are a relaxation rather than a study. They lack the sardonic virility of their Northern cousins, these fish crows. They are smaller, not so strong of flight, and their call has none of the deep “caw, caw, caw” of our bird of canny humor. Their flight is flappy and less certain, and their cries have a humorous gurgle in them that seems hardly grown up. They seem like boys that have just reached the age when the voice breaks with a queer croak in it that makes you laugh. Corvus americana seems most of the time to be on definite business. In Massachusetts I have found him in the main forceful, dignified, and seemingly doing something worth while. Corvus ossifragus just straggles along with his fellows, having a mighty good time, and croaking hysterically about it.

It is a poor half-hour for birds when I do not find one of these flaming fellows the cardinals setting the thicket on fire. In the warm weather the cardinals were accustomed to whistle to me. The call, loud and clear, has a round cheeriness in it that should drive away all melancholy. The cardinal does not seem in the least afraid of me. If I approach him he may fly away at the last moment, but more often he simply sidles around the tree in a stiff, wooden sort of way that he has, remaining quiet if just a few strands of moss are between us. He seems to do this with deprecatory awkwardness, as if he knew he dazzled and tried to be humble about it. I do not think it can be to get out of sight altogether. If so it is a mistaken caution, for his flame will burn through quite a bit of gray moss, and where it is shielded by the deep, shiny green of live-oak leaves it flares only the brighter by the contrast.

His wife is even more beautifully clad, and though her olive green and ashy gray ought to make her less conspicuous the telltale cardinal blazes on crest, wings and tail, and I am likely to see her about as far as her flaming consort. I have not heard the female sing, though in defiance to the usual custom among song birds she is said to, a softer and even prettier song than that of her vivid mate. But even the male cardinal does not sing when it is cold, and I have not heard a note from any of them since the mercury got down to the forty neighborhood.

Passing from the puzzling opacity of live-oak groves and palmetto scrub I found myself later in a country far better fitted for hunting birds by sight. That was one of the interminable stretches of long-leaved pine forest of which this part of Florida is largely made. Here are trees that shoot up straight as arrows, sixty to a hundred feet high. Rarely is there a limb in the first fifty feet and the plumed tops seem to intercept the vivid sunlight but little. Under foot the carpet of twelve to fifteen inch needles is well called pine straw. It is a place of singular silence and a bewildering sameness. Along interminable levels you may look for what seem endless miles between these straight trunks till they draw together in the gray distance and, in kindness, shut off the view. One needs a compass and provisions to plunge, a wandering submarine, beneath this sea of similarity, and I skirted its edge only, lest I get lost and spend my days in an unending circuit.

Slipping along this polishing carpet of needles I heard what I at first took to be the familiar note of chickadees. Yet it was not that either. It was too throaty and lacked the gleeful definiteness of the chickadee. In fact it was a poor attempt.

Soon I saw the birds, gleaning in a gray group, hanging this way and that just as chickadees do. They had decided crests and I quite readily recognized them for the tufted titmouse which in this country takes the place of the chickadee.

The flock passed busily on and for a moment the silence of the place was impressive. A gentle wind was slightly swaying the tops of these tall trees, but there was no song of the pines to be heard. Underfoot partridge berry and pipsissewa, pyrola and club moss, which by right should always grow under pines, were not to be seen. Only the rich brown of the pine straw and the dark mould of decaying fallen trunks was there. Here and there a tiny shrub, usually a scrub live-oak, put out a feeble green, but it was not enough to break the monotony of melancholy that seemed to pervade the place. It was broken, though, in another moment. There was a whirr of wings and half-a-dozen birds dived, seemingly out of heaven, each on his own route, whirled with a whirrup of wings and lighted lightly as an athlete each on his chosen tree trunk.

It was like a circus act. For a moment each bird remained motionless, his stiff tail feathers jammed into the trunk below him, his head drawn back as if awaiting a signal, and through the melancholy silence came a creaking “k-r-r-k, kr-r-r-k.” It might have been a weather-vane swaying in the wind or it might have been tree toads. But it was neither. It was simply the voice of a flock of red-headed woodpeckers. These birds are rare in my locality North, but they seem here to be familiar spirits of the wood. Smaller and less beautiful than partridge woodpeckers, they seem much like them in their antics, which are always clown-like and amusing. They tap wood and pull grubs as if they knew I was looking at them and wanted to make the little farce as funny as possible.

The circus clown might well take the spirit of his antics from the actions of red-headed woodpeckers in a Southern pine forest. After scrambling in a jerky ludicrousness up a stub one would pause on the top of it motionless for a time, reminding me of an awkward boy trying to pose as Ajax defying the lightning. Then another would dive at him in full flight, driving him from his perch at the last moment, only to take it and assume the exact pose of the former, the whole thing done with the alert precision of a pair of good circus performers. Then the substitute, still motionless, would give his little treetoad-like creak, as if saying in humorous humility, “How’s that for an act?” Taine, the historian, has written of the immense loneliness of the pine barrens. But it is to be supposed that Taine was never entertained there by a flock of red-headed woodpeckers. But then, there are people whom vaudeville makes lonely.

I have not named the half of the birds I can identify of a morning in this great aviary, nor have I named the two that pleased me most. One was just plain bluebird, a young bird of a silent flock that slipped through the trees of the town. This young bird had not yet his mature plumage, and he hung behind and peered about in an uncertain way as if much impressed with the wonders of this new place to which mother had brought him, but still a bit lonesome and unsettled. I was right glad to see bluebirds. I have looked in vain so far for robins. The other is a bird that came with the cold snap and hangs about the tip of the Orange Park dock almost a quarter of a mile out in the river, without visible means of support. He hides under the stringers when I approach him, but I have had several good views, and if I know a snow bunting when I see one, this is he. What business he has so far South is more than I can tell, and he seems to feel an alien by the way he clings to the seclusion of the dock. Perhaps he came on the wrong boat and is only waiting for a return ticket. At any rate I was glad to see him and I wish him a safe return.

CHAPTER V

’TWIXT ORANGE GROVE AND SWAMP

I had thought all the orange trees of northern Florida killed by the great cold of a decade ago, and so in the main they were. But there are spots on the east bank of the lower St. Johns where the miles of warm water tempered the cold somewhat, so that though the trees were cut to the ground the life in the roots remained and has since burgeoned in reborn groves. The trees sprouted from the stump as oaks and chestnuts do in a Northern woodland, and now the sprouts bear fruit. At Mandarin, a dozen miles from Jacksonville, are such groves through one of which I delight to take my way to “the branch.” It is literally a branch of the level river into which it so smoothly glides with never a ripple on its black surface or a clot of foam to cloud its mirror.

Swamp and grove meet but do not mingle, the dividing line being firmly drawn by the teeth of the harrow that all summer long vexes the sand beneath the orange trees. With all its persistence this harrow barely keeps down the scutch and dog fennel and a score or two of other weeds that under soaking shower and fervid sun continually rise rampant. Even now that the almanac has decreed winter rosettes of seedlings of a score of nascent annuals spangle the gray with green that softens its glare to the eye and tempts the knight-errant grasshoppers. These zip from glare to glare, and seem to creak a bit as the tiny coolness of the northern breeze touches the joints of their machinery.

Sitting in the grateful shadow of an orange tree, facing sunward in the grove, the world becomes an expanse of glistening white sand, blotched with the deep green masses of foliage,

dappled with the gold of as yet unpicked fruit. Over yonder a short ladder spires above a tree and I can hear the snip-snip of the picker’s shears and the soft thud of fruit dropped into big bags. The noise fits in with the rampant listlessness of the creaking grasshopper machinery, a busy, drowsy blurring of staccato sounds that has a sleepy insistence. It fits the gray glitter of the sand and the shining sun. I note an orange sulphur butterfly, just the color of the fruit on which he seems to linger, where in the sun he may match his own shade. I have a fancy that he does this consciously, the dark tips of his wings contrasting harmoniously, as the black-green, glossy foliage does, with the golden fruit.

Something of this semi-conscious matching up of colors seems to exist in other insect life of the grove. The “orange puppy” that feeds on the young leaves is black with the same quality of blackness and curiously mottled with a cool gray of lichens and gray moss. When he rests quietly on a twig he is part of its growth, simply a gnarled excrescence, but no caterpillar. When by and by he tucks himself up for slumber in silk homespun and later, joyous, emerges, he has still the colors of the orange grove, the pale yellow of ripening fruit, barred with the dark shadows that are set by linear leaves on all that flits beneath them. One finds many happy insects among the oranges, too many perhaps for the joy of the grower, the perfection of whose product they mar. None should be happier than this Papilio cresphontes butterfly that is hatched on an orange twig, fattened on the crisp green leaves, falls asleep in their shadow and finally wakes, a spike-tailed fairy with shimmering black and gold wings, to drink deep of the honeyed dew in the gold hearts of odorous orange blossoms.

On the edge of the grove, at the very mark of the harrow, rises the tangle of the swamp margin. On the higher ground is the sumac, the leaves still green, though ripening in the margins to a dull red, holding none of the vivid flame that burns the Northern sumac leaves to ashes before October is over. It is December, indeed, and the wind out of the north has sometimes a wire edge of northern ice on it, but the first margin of dense trees that lines the river bank takes off this edge and the sun floods all the sheltered places with warmth that bids one seek the shade for shelter. There still he finds a sniff of tonic ozone in the air, expanding the exultant spirit while yet the body revels in a genial glow. The day seems a child of June, with October for its father. Elder crowds the sumac and blackberry canes tangle the two. The scuppernong grape twines supple vines all about and hangs its crinkly pale green leaves in festoons to the tops of the sweet-gum trees in the swamp behind. The pale amber wine of the scuppernong grape seems to hold in its depths something of the golden delight of this December sun, and just a tang of the vigor of the north wind.

The sweet-gum tree fills the swampy ground along the St. Johns “branches” and sheds its maple-like leaves in December. Sailing up the broad river you may trace the swampy spots now by the soft gray of bare twigs of the sweet gum, in beautiful contrast to the glossy dark green of live-oak and the paler silkiness of plumy tops of the long-leaved pines of the barrens. Its roots dispute the very black depths of the flowing waters with those of the cypress, and its purpling autumn leaves seem like those of a Massachusetts swamp maple that have by some mischance ripened without vividness. The sour-gum tree, which is nothing more than the tupelo which grows on the swamp edges at home, thrives as well in Florida and is true to its colors. The rich red of its leaves makes the most vivid blotches of autumn coloring I have yet found here. Along with the scuppernong grows its cousin vine, the Virginia creeper. This too holds much of its Northern red in the passing leaves. The homesick Northerner in Florida at this time of year will do well to take to the swamps. The pinky gray of baring sweet-gum twigs, the rich red of the bordering tupelos and the festooning ampelopsis will do much to make him feel at home.

Just beyond the mark of the harrow tooth the goldenrod has bloomed and the fluffy plumes of brown seed pappus mound into obese, inverted cornucopias for the seed-eating birds that flock along the swamp margin. The grapes and the Virginia creepers have been high-minded and have not rested without topping the tallest trees, but the greenbrier seems to have had less ambition. It has been content to help the blackberries tousle the close-set margin of the field, and its glossy green leaves and purple berries add their colors to the rest. The greenbrier here is gentler in its ways than our Northern representative. That well merits the name of horsebrier which is often given it. It is as strong as a horse and the kick-back of its stretched sinews will drive its numerous thorns to the hilt in your obtruding flesh. This vine has hardly thorns enough to be felt, and its leaves instead of ovate are hastate or halberd-shaped, whence I take the plant to be the Smilax auriculata.

I doubt if I would change Northern thickets in any particular, but if I would it should be to suggest gently to the horsebrier that its Southern cousin’s ways are most admirable and might be imitated to advantage. The auriculata does grip you valiantly and even scratch your legs when you would penetrate it with undue haste, but it is such a polite and lady-like scratch in comparison with some that might be mentioned that you feel like saying “thank you” rather than other things. In the wetter spots big purple asters which I take to be Aster elliottii, out of all the maze of scores of varieties of Southern asters, toss their corymbed heads in the breeze and still invite the passing butterfly. Cool weather has thinned out the butterflies, only the strongest remaining. About the asters flit a big and little sulphur and a lone zebra. But there are a half-dozen monarchs coming and going. These seem to be the strongest and most able to withstand cool weather of all butterflies. I see them out earliest in the morning and latest at night, often soaring in shade on days when the December wind has a Northern nip in it and when no other varieties are visible.

Loveliest of all old friends that help to make this thicket-borderland homelike is the Andropogon, the purple wood-grass, that holds the dryer corners with its brave wine-red culms and its gray mist of bearded blooms. The pampas grass is cultivated in gardens here in Florida for its feathery plumes. These are beautiful, no doubt, but their beauty cannot compare with that of the clumps of purple wood-grass that grow in the neglected border between this dark orange grove with its glistening white sands and the black depths of the swamp that borders the little branch. The Andropogon scoparius of our sandy fields north is less robust than this buxom beauty of the barrens. It grows but a scant knee high and seems to me now but slender and rather pale. This, which is I think the Andropogon arctatus, grows to my chin, and its culms seem as red as the skin of a ripening baldwin apple, a rich wine red that intoxicates the eye and makes it see in the misty beard of the tips a frothing as of bubbles rising to the top of a glass but now filled. With this the Florida fields seem to have as much of the joy of autumn as they can hold, and in it to drink deep to the passing of the purple year.

Through this border tangle one goes to enter the solemn silence of the swamp where the black water seems to listen as it glides breathlessly by to the river. In the steaming warmth of midsummer the place must drip with purple shadows. Now, because the sweet gums and swamp maples are losing their leaves it holds only a sun-flecked twilight that soothes after the black shadows beneath the orange trees and the glare of the sand. Here one may draw a long breath and let the bustle of a busy world slip from him. I have the same feeling on entering a church of a week day and hearing the heavy ticking of the clock. The silence broods. The maples are already bare, the gum trees partly, and the feathery fronds of cypress have grown brown on the trees and in part fallen, slipping one by one to the placid surface where they add their color to the purple of the other thick-strewn leaves.

In these fleets of dead and gone one gets the nearest approach to a Northern autumn that I have found as yet in all the woods. The small birds that frequent the groves do not seem to enter here and there is no sound of their twitter. Only the leaves are noisy within the place. Those which touch limp margins on the water have found a quiet that is finality. But their fellows, saying a final good-by to the twig, do it with little glad chirps as if the spirit within each joyed at its release. Nor is this the last cry. Many chuckle at each touch of limb and trunk on the way down and reach the water with an audible pat. Poets to the contrary notwithstanding, autumn is a joyous time with the leaves, at least those of deciduous trees. The maples, the sycamores, and the sweet gums all seem to give the laugh to the evergreens as they pass. The bare limbs stretch skyward with a relieved resurgence as of those who have done good work and welcome rest. Compared with them now the live-oaks seem over-tasked. They are as somber as Northern pines in winter, burdened with a never-ending routine of business.

I cannot say that the swamp cypresses seem glad. They are so weighted and surpliced with vestments of gray moss, priestly robes that sweep from upraised arms to the very water, that they are like weird priests of a lonely world mumbling perpetual incantations deep in their swaying gray beards.

The only bird of the swamp to-day was a great heron that looked white as he stood facing me, his chin in somber meditation on his breast, as if he might be a carving in stone, that suddenly took flight on tremendous wings, flapping solemnly out into the river sunshine and taking a post far out on an ancient, decaying dock. I might better have said becoming a post, for had I not seen him light I might have sworn he was part of the structure. He hunched himself up there till he had no more form than a decaying timber and his big beak, crossed at a wooden right angle to the rest of him, was exactly as if it had been nailed on. Only with the bird glass did I make sure that he was not a post after all. Then I discovered that instead of being the great blue heron, as I at first supposed, it was the Florida form, known as Ward’s heron, a bird much like the great blue but even greater, the lower part lighter and the legs olive instead of black.

I think Ward’s heron more lonesome and preternaturally solemn than any other, and he seems

to belong under the long robes of gray moss at the foot of the ancient cypress trees. He is as grotesque and wooden in his make-up as they.

The passing sun dropped the cool garment of December night lightly down through the bare limbs. The heron came flapping noiselessly back to his perch, to sway away like a gray ghost when he saw me still there. The low latitudes have summer and winter in each twenty-four hours, midsummer in the fervid warmth of the afternoon sun, midwinter in the black chill that comes between midnight and dawn. I passed reluctantly from the swamp while yet the level rays shone in long shafts of light through the mystic aisles. The heron was waiting to come back. It was time to be gone, yet I lingered lovingly where in one spot on the very margin of the black swamp water grew a single plant of Andropogon arctatus. It stood ankle deep in the water, a perfect plume of misty softness that had none of the wine-red radiance of its brothers of the open border. In the gray twilight it was a slender spirit of wood-grass, pale and sweet, the dearest creature of the day.

As I came along the western border of the orange grove with the placid river reflecting the crimson of the sunset between the great live-oak boles and the dripping streamers of gray moss, the full moon walked with me over the eastern border, seeming to stand a moment on tree after tree, a rounder and more perfect orange than any tree has yet borne, a symbol, let us believe, of a golden total of crops yet to come.

CHAPTER VI

JASMINE AND CHEROKEE ROSES

Almost a half century ago Harriet Beecher Stowe lived on the banks of the St. Johns River and wrought for noble ideals in her own brave, cheery way. In “Palmetto Leaves” she tells of the beautiful country round about her home, of the three great live-oaks that sheltered it, and of a caged cardinal grosbeak that used to sit on his perch by her door and sing enthusiastically, “What cheer! What cheer!” The slaves for whom she wrote and wrought are now but a memory, and the State of Florida itself forbids the caging of wild birds, however sweetly they sing or however cheerily they bear their captivity. The fine old house that nestled beneath the live-oaks so confidingly that its broad veranda partly clasped one of them has long since been torn down; and its very foundations obliterated by the tangle of wild verdure that rises here so soon from the unvexed earth; but the live-oaks remain, towering with rounded heads still higher and stretching noble arms in still wider benediction.

From the very tip of one of them this morning a tiny crimson flame burned in the sun as if a spirit of clear fire had grown up from the earth her feet had pressed, traversing all the arteries of the noble oak and finally lingering a moment poised for celestial flight, and from the flame fell the voice of a cardinal grosbeak shouting in clear mellow notes, “What cheer! What cheer!” A half-century is but a breath carved out of time, yet in it both birds and men have found freedom, and still spirits of clear flame poise upon the heights and bravely call, “What cheer!” For all I know this cardinal may be a lineal descendant of that other and have caught a voice of joyous prophecy from the place.

I have yet to see nobler specimens of the live-oak than these trees that still hold their ground where the old-time battle was so bravely and cheerily fought. To the cardinal as he swam into the morning glow and vanished they must have seemed three mighty domes of dense green. To me standing below they were the pillars and arches of a cool cathedral in whose dim upper recesses the mystic mistletoe hangs its strange, yellowish-green leaves and its pearl-white berries. More is born of thought than we are yet willing to acknowledge. Who knows what exaltation has come down the ages wrapped within the fiber of these druidical plants, to be subtly distilled on all beneath?

As the oaks are green above, so are they ghostly gray below with the long swaying draperies of Spanish moss that drip deep from every limb. These make prophets of eld of the great trees, and one stands beneath as in the inner council of the Sanhedrim. Great ideals could have found no braver setting than this, and the cool north wind that sings across the river seems to make one feel here the very breath of Puritanical austerity, of renunciation of self for the sake of others, and perhaps too of the Puritan’s scorn for any other method than his own. The sweetly surgent life of blossoming vines that climb in friendly embrace over all wild things here at Mandarin caresses and wooes with perfume all the spot and dares the rugged trunks of the great oaks themselves, yet it may not touch the cathedral mystery and majesty of their shadowy arches a half-hundred feet up. The high, clear spirit of the place is still regnant.

Round about Mandarin sweeps Florida, which has been touched and in tiny spots remodeled by alien hands ever since the days of De Soto, yet remains Florida still, wayward, lavish, wild and loving all things with sunny, sensuous profusion. It has been the scene of one experiment after another, and has obliterated the remains. Its tangle of vivid growth sweeps over many a ruin, from Fernandino to Biscayne Bay, the very building of which has been forgotten save perhaps in musty archives of some distant and less sunny clime in which the scheme originated. Just at this corner of the State, a quarter-century ago, the sweep of the river on one side and of untrammeled Florida on the other, inclosed a bit of Old England in a tiny colony of English people who had settled here, cleared the jungle and the level stretches of tall, long-leaved pine, and planted orange groves.

They brought with them sturdy English thrift and unchanging English ways, and soon the orange groves were everywhere, filling the spring air with the rich scent of their waxy white blooms and making the autumn days yellow with golden fruit. Docks sprang in narrow white lines far over the shallows to the deep waters where ships might load with the precious cargo for Northern ports, and English lanes and hedgerows divided and connected the groves. In English gardens bloomed roses and lilies and violets, and English ivy climbed over wide porches and set a somber background for all the odorous tropic and semi-tropic wild vines that loving hands planted with it. I can fancy the jungle leaning in wild gorgeousness over the outermost hedgerows and biding its time. For fifty years, since 1835, no harmful cold had reached this portion of Florida, but the jungle knew. Fifty years was but as a day in its experience.

It was on a February day in 1886 that it came. That noon the mercury stood at eighty degrees and all the gorgeous profusion of semi-tropical spring growth filled the air about with perfume of flowers that spangled all things. The kind sun steeped the land in content and the negroes sang at their work, knowing and loving its fervor on their bent backs. By mid-afternoon clouds had come up out of the southwest and much rain fell bringing a chill in the air such as may often be felt here in February, or indeed at any time between November and April. But this chill instead of passing with the clouds grew with the setting sun and when his last red light came across the river the rain had turned to icicles that hung in alien glory from all the trees. There they swayed and clashed in the keen northwest wind all night, and before morning the astonished glass had registered the temperature of a Northern winter night, fifteen above or thereabouts.

The very jungle itself must have been black in the face with dismay and a thousand acres of orange groves that were bearing five to fifteen boxes of noble fruit to the tree were frozen to the very roots. It was a black day for the little English colony, a day from which it has never recovered. The trees sprang from the roots, were rebudded by the more courageous only to be cut to the ground again about ten years later. A second time the more tenacious spirits began their work over again, but the courage of the colony was gone and though there are still groves of five hundred to a thousand trees here that for a third time are beginning to bear well, all faith in the prosperity of orange growing so far north in the peninsula is gone.

New prosperity is growing up in the little town and another type of people are making good here, but the fine houses of the orange growers stand for the most part tenantless, some for almost a score of years. The ancient gardens have taken pattern from the jungle and grown with all its lawless luxuriance, and the once trim hedgerows riot in a profusion that is as bewildering as it is beautiful.

Sometimes at night I think the tenants have come back. In the slender light of the new moon I seem to see white hands reaching out to refasten blinds that swing drunkenly from one hinge, and desisting in despair as the rude wind snatches them away and slams them. Sometimes in the full glare of day, peering through a broken pane I seem to see an old-time owner moving about in a room that a second later holds but long-forgotten furniture and a transparent form that dissolves in dancing motes of sun-smitten dust.

I find the ghosts nearest and friendliest, however, in the tangled growth of the old gardens. One that I love best lies far from the present town and I like to come to it from the jungle side, lured by the spicy breath of oleander blossoms. The north wind loses the salt breath of the river tides as he passes the house and draws deep on these rosy blooms, taking such store that he spills it through the foot-long needles of every pine that he passes. Coming from the swamp tangle beneath the sweet-gums and cypress, pushing through chin-high purple wood-grass, I let it lead me to-day straight to a huge ridge of wild cherokee rose plants that had once, no doubt, been an orderly hedge. It is winter now and sometimes the night brings frost, but the wild cherokee roses do not seem to mind that. The life vigor in them is such that it pushes out pointed white buds even now, and these open into five broad petals of pure white with a golden heart of close-pressed stamens.

The plant is so rough with its stubborn, hooked thorns set shoulder to shoulder along its stout interlacing stems that no finer hedge plant could be imagined. Not the deepest-flanked wild bull could push through this tangle were it devoid of thorns. Not the toughest-hided one could attempt those thorns without being torn and repulsed. And out of these stout stems, from among the defiant thorns spring these dainty white blooms bearing in their gold hearts a faint, fine perfume that is too modest to sail forth as does that of the oleanders on the errant wind. You must put your face close to the bloom and dare the thorns as you sniff deep before you know its fineness; but it is worth the trouble.

In and out among the cherokee thorns the wanton jasmine climbs. There is no place that it does not caress. Along the sand, amid brown leaves of deciduous trees, it creeps. It slips under porches and puts bud noses up through the cracked floors of long-disused buildings. It climbs trees and swings boldly from their topmost boughs, and later it blows yellow trumpets of invitation to the whole world and sends a sensuous perfume far and wide that all who pass may breathe their fill. The jasmine is common to all of the Florida world, yet withal it is so friendly sweet to each that none may have the heart to disapprove. The cherokee rose is different. He who would win the perfume of its heart of gold must bleed a bit, perchance, and wear an individual bloom very close before he gets it.

Coasting the thorn hedge, swinging the ancient gate on rusty hinge, a roadway leads me beneath sweet-gum and live-oak to the tennis court. Its level rectangle is still bare and close turfed with flat-bladed grass and a tiny, stemless plant whose reniform leaves are no bigger than my little finger nail, and help hold the even level of close green. Only in one spot has this turf been invaded. There a lawless honeysuckle has made a patch of its own glossy with green leaves. All else is as it stood when the last tennis ball bounded freely from its elastic surface. The sun steeps all this rectangle till it is one deep pool of golden light where silence and forgetfulness bathe.

The wilderness noises which come to the edge of this space but emphasize its silence and forgetfulness. In the trees that rim the court about ever-changing flocks of birds flit and chatter. Blue jays clang tintinnabulations, woodpeckers tap and croak tree-toad notes, warblers and sparrows and titmice and fly-catchers twinkle and chirp, and often try a half song of almost forgotten melody. Cardinals cry “tut, tut” much as uneasy robins do, but in softer and more cooing tones. A Carolina wren grows nervously curious in the cedar beneath which I sit, and flirts and quivers and scolds as only a wren can, coming nearer and nearer till I might almost put up my hand and touch his vibrating brown body. Then he withdraws a little and whistles till the cardinals lift their crested heads and listen and a tufted titmouse answers. “Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle,” he cries, and the very spirit of an English garden descends into the golden air. Gossamer threads of spider-web float silverly from tree to tree, argent ghosts of the old-time net, till I hear in the bird notes the chatter of laughing voices, and for a moment the place is peopled with gay young folk in flannels and the game goes merrily on.

It may have been that the lady of the house served the tea for which the wren called so lustily in the shade of the garden tangle which now rises twenty feet on the house side and completely hides it, though it is but a stone-toss away. Here cedar, spice bush, bayberry and oleander crowd one another in a struggle for upward supremacy in which the oleanders win, their trunks, as large as a man’s thigh at the base, dividing into long, aspiring branches that are pinnacled with pointed leaves and sprays of fragrant bloom. The jasmine climbs here, too, twining and straggling, loving and leaving, but the garden cherokees shoot upward in clean, noble sweeps that carry their brave stems almost to the oleander tops, whence they bound in long exultation, arching to the ground again.

I do not find these in bloom out of season, but the roses that crowd the crumbling arbor within toss up sprays of pink whose scent intertwines with that of the oleanders. It is a sad garden now, for all its riot of growth, for the ground beneath is dank with shade and decay and its once prim palings fall this way and that in a snarl of rough weeds where the sesbania opens its two-beaned pods and rattles in every passing breeze. The old house itself, once so prim and erect, seems to droop wearily, in round-shouldered senility, to the ground which already claims corners of the wide verandas. The pinnate-leaved stems of a twining vine, starred with white blooms, reach up to it lovingly and climb wistfully, only to drag it down with the tiny weight which it once held up so unconsciously. Within, the wind which sighs through broken panes carries light footfalls from room to room and as it sways long unlatched doors these grumble one to another, mumbling like uneasy sleepers who wait long for the cockcrow of dawn.

Down on the waterfront an ancient cement breakwater still guards smooth sands and the waves lap patiently at this, wearing it away infinitesimally and talking to one another in liquid undertones. They alone of all the voices of the place are oblivious of tenants past and present, of growth or decay, telling in changeless tones the tales the waters have told since long before man began, a primordial cell in their unending depths. The waterfront of the old place seems most melancholy of all, for there nature has failed most to hide the swift decay of man’s work. Yet there I notice with satisfaction one thing. That is the defiant erectness and primness of the English ivy that climbs one side of the house. This neither straggles nor retreats, but goes squarely upward as it was long ago set to do. It seems to hold the house up rather than to drag it down, an epitome of that British sturdiness from which it was transplanted but from which it may not swerve.

The low swinging sun faded into dun clouds to westward, letting a winter chill fall upon the place and bringing thoughts of the open fire at home with the big pitch logs shooting crimson flames up the wide chimney. Yet through all the chill air the oleanders held their rosy blooms proudly aloft and the pink roses sent their perfume too, following me along the sandy, hedge-bordered road on the homeward way. After all, the memory of the old place which always follows farthest is that of perfume and golden sunshine and the ghosts of merry voices echoing through the garden tangle and down the golden depths of the forgotten tennis court. Dearest of all is the heart of the wild cherokee rose, holding its faint, elusive perfume for those only who care enough to dare the stab of its keen, defensive thorns.

Dark clouds gloomed the west as I passed the Stowe place. It seemed inexpressibly gloomy and lonesome under the great arching oaks where the wild tangle of grape and jasmine, greenbrier, and I know not what other vines and shrubs cloaks the crumbling foundations and makes a thorny and impenetrable jungle of the walks the gracious lady’s feet once trod, and crowds and smothers the plants and shrubs she once tended. The sheltering oaks seemed to brood a silence of sorrow, failure, and forgetfulness. Of the chapel, the school, and the work she nobly tried to do among the poor and ignorant, what traces here remained? And then the sun shone low under the western clouds and sent red beams in beneath the brooding live-oak limbs and touched all the swaying moss with fire, lighting up the cathedral arches with a golden warmth and radiance that glorified the place and all thoughts connected with it. Over on the darkening lane a negro boy, born free, whistled on his way home, a little cadenced fragment of a tune without beginning or end—a whistle like that of the cardinal that had flown, a crimson flame, into the morning air. I knew then that whatever crumbles, the spirit of cheer and devotion and self-sacrifice lives on unquenched. The jungle may ride over and obliterate the Stowe place and the lovely English gardens, but the spirit of devotion that burned in the one and of homemaking hospitality that glowed in the other can never be quenched.

CHAPTER VII

A FROSTY MORNING IN FLORIDA

The first rays of the sun licked up these gray, feathery frost garments and only in the shadows did you still feel the chill the night had brought. Only the sweet potato vines seem to have been harmed by this wee frost. Down on the river’s brink the tangle of convolvulus still shows great white blooms as large as the palm of the hand. The river radiates warmth all night and it is a bitter cold that reaches the blossoms on its brim. In the gardens the roses, red and white and yellow, did not seem to mind. Dense walls of thick foliage had kept the cold from them and the jasmine whose yellow blooms seem to glow with their own warmth. The slim, pointed buds of the jasmine are to the open flowers now as a million to one, and not a bud even had been harmed. The sweet potato vines, however, were not so fortunate. Their heart-shaped leaves turned black and shriveled when the sun struck them.

Out of the sudden gray of dawn came the sun, a glowing ruby in a sky of clear gold. To look at this sky was to forget the chill and bathe in a rich warmth which seemed to distill from it invisible gold dust as the day advanced. By nine o’clock summer had come back, and all the open spaces in the wood were wells of this sky-distilled gold, through which you saw all things in a subtle haze of romance, as if the frost sprites had brought in their train all the joyous people out of fairyland. To walk through narrow forest roads where the sand made all footfalls noiseless was to glide forward without seeming effort, and in this rich atmosphere of vaporous gold surprise Oberon and Titania kissing beneath the mistletoe, to note the quiver of oak leaves as elves frolicked along their mossy boughs, and to see Puck starting forth to put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.

To be sure, if I watch Oberon and Titania long enough with the glass I shall perchance find them but a pair of redbirds, beauteous in crimson and olive green. The elfin train may become a flock of kinglets and warblers quivering in and out along the limbs in search of breakfast, and Puck be but a roguish red-headed woodpecker. These December birds are as elusive and as full of vanishings and roguish tricks as any fairy train in Christendom.

Florida roads have the same elusive quality. They part and bow to one another, meet and touch hands and glide away again as if dancing a minuet, leading you in a mazy dance hither and thither to the most delightful surprises. Here a tree has fallen before the wind or under the ax of a careless woodman, and blocks the way. Little does the road care for that. It leaves itself with an airy flourish of sandy ruts for good-bye as if just to avoid the obstruction. Then it may wander a dozen rods among slim trunks or along catbrier tangle, quietly seeking stray blue gentians or golden tufts of St. Peter’s wort, and saunter gently back to itself, or it may swing a wide corner and leave you at some man’s front gate, to admire his cherokee roses and negotiate with his dogs as best you may. To the traveler eager for some definite destination this quality may have its vexations. To the wood wanderer seeking but to find the true heart of a golden haze, conscious most of the mystic quality of all untrammeled nature and unexplored places, it is but an added delight.

If on such a day the birds of the bush have their elfin quality most strongly evident, those always fay-like creatures the short-horned grasshoppers are not to be forgotten. In the still haze of the yellow pine forest their shrill voices seem to make the stillness audible, to give it pitch and quality. Here on a leaf sits one, catching the full heat of the sun twice, once direct and again as it is reflected from the leaf’s gloss. His antennæ are short and brown, arched most delicately from a straight brow that seems to denote dignity of thought. His long, brown wings fit neatly to his brown abdomen and his legs have the same shade. He seems cloaked in the soft, delicate color from head to foot, yet you can but suspect that this is a domino, which he will later cast aside and appear a glittering sprite.