Chapter III: Part 3

In truth, I can hardly feel it credible that I was in the midst of snowstorms less than a week ago. For a long two days winter has seemed a thing utterly past and forgotten. Only now and then it comes upon me, with the shock of unexpected news, that this is not summer, but January.

The bay, for some reason to me unknown, is almost without birds. The only one just now in sight is a cormorant pretty far offshore, diving and swimming by turns. I imagine him to be a loon till suddenly he takes wing, with outstretched neck, and after a long flight comes to rest, not in the water, but at the top of a stake. Somewhere behind me a flicker is shouting as in springtime, and on one side a mockingbird is calling (“smacking” is the word that comes of itself to my pencil), and a blue-gray gnatcatcher utters now and then a fine, thread-like ejaculation.

The stillness is really a relief, even to my ornithological ears; for though they had been starved for two or three months in Massachusetts, they have been so dinned with bird voices for the last two days that a brief period of silence is grateful. The centre of the town, where I have taken up my abode, literally swarms with fish crows and boat-tailed grackles, every one trying, as it seems, to outdo its rivals in noisiness. I remember the day, eight or nine years ago, when in the flatwoods of New Smyrna I spent an hour of almost painful excitement in taking observations upon the first boat-tail I had ever seen. It would have been hard at that moment for me to imagine that so clever and interesting a bird could ever become a nuisance. Fortunately, both crow and grackle retire to roost early and are comparatively late risers; otherwise the people of Miami might be driven to violent measures, as against a plague. As things are, the birds have no fears. They alight in the shade trees before the windows, or gather about the kitchen door, crows and blackbirds alike (and the male blackbirds, with their overgrown tails, are almost or quite as large as the crows), as fearless as so many English sparrows.

After them the abundant birds hereabout, so far as I have yet discovered, are buzzards, carrion crows (black vultures), blue jays, catbirds (which I have never seen half so plentiful), palm warblers, myrtle warblers, and blue-gray gnatcatchers. Less numerous, but still decidedly common, are flickers, red-bellied woodpeckers, mockingbirds, Florida yellow-throats, hummingbirds, ground doves, and phœbes. Day before yesterday a long procession of tree swallows straggled past me as I wandered along the bay shore, and in the same place a flock of masculine red-winged blackbirds were holding a vociferous mid-winter convention in a thicket of tall reeds. White-eyed vireos are well distributed, and sing as saucily as if the month were May instead of January. Solitary vireos are present likewise, but I have seen only one, and he was not yet in tune.

Out in the pine lands I came upon a single group of pine warblers and half a dozen bluebirds, both singing freely. What a voice the bluebird has! It does a Yankee’s heart good to hear it. I have yet to see a robin or a chickadee.

All in all, notwithstanding the woods are alive with wings, there is surprisingly little music. The season of song is not yet come. Phœbes, for some reason, form a bright exception to the rule, and now and then a cardinal grosbeak whistles with a sweetness that beggars words. Twice, I think, I have heard a distant mockingbird singing, and yesterday, in front of the hotel, I stopped to watch a pair that seemed to be in what I should call a decidedly lyrical mood, though they were silent as dead men. They stood on the pavement a foot or so apart, and took turns in a very original and pretty kind of dance. One and then the other suddenly hopped straight upward for an inch or two, both feet at once. Between whiles they stood motionless, or sometimes one (always the same) moved a little away from its partner. Plainly they were much in earnest, and without question the ceremony, simple, and almost laughable, as it looked, had some deep and perfectly understood significance. Ritualism is not confined to churches. Everywhere the heart speaks by attitude and gesticulation.

A noble concert it will be when all these thousands of song-birds recover their voices. May I be here to enjoy it. For the present I am contented to wait. It is sufficient just now to be in so strange a land in so lovely a season, with acres of morning-glories and moon-flowers all about, roses and marigolds in the gardens, birds in every bush (not an English sparrow among them), airs gratefully cool from the sea, and bright summer weather. For a winter-killed Yankee, this is what old Omar would have called “Paradise enow.”

A FROSTY MORNING

There is nothing like weather. It is man’s comfort and his misery; more important still, perhaps, it is his prosperity and his ruin. Indeed, it has almost divine prerogatives. It wounds and it heals; it kills and it makes alive. And this, which in good degree is true everywhere, is especially true in a country like southern Florida, the Mecca at once of pleasure-seeking winter vacationers, health-seeking tourists, and livelihood-seeking settlers. For all these, Florida is what it is because of its climate, that is to say, its weather. Speak with whom you will, weather is the topic that naturally comes uppermost.

Yesterday (January 22) was one of the most delightful days imaginable; for a pedestrian, I mean to say. I know an insect collector, a gentle soul, little used to complaining against the order of the world, who pronounced it “horrid.” For the successful prosecution of her industry there lacked a few degrees of warmth. Florida insects, it appears, are much less hardy than their Northern cousins, keeping indoors, and so out of the net, in temperature such as a Yankee butterfly or beetle, thicker-skinned or thicker-blooded, would scorn to be afraid of. But if yesterday was perfect, to-day, by my reckoning, at least, has been finer still--perfection heaped upon perfection. Yet every one hereabout is more or less unhappy, and with more or less reason. In the night between these two perfect days an air from the North descended suddenly upon us, and the temperature took an alarming drop, some say to 38°, some to 31°--a drop which meant discomfort to all, and disaster to many. When I put my head out of doors at seven o’clock this morning, on my way to the post office, I was startled. My first thought was to run back for an overcoat. Instead of that I put on steam.

Breakfast over, I betook myself to the pine lands, my rule being to improve cool days in that sunny region, leaving the shady hammock woods for hotter weather. It was cold enough for overcoat and mittens. In Massachusetts, with anything like the same temperature, I should certainly have worn them. Here, however, it was not so plain a case. I was to be on foot till noon, and I felt sure that long before that time the lightest outer garment would become intolerable. So I buttoned my one coat tightly about me, stuffed my hands into my pockets, and hastened my steps. For a mile, perhaps, I kept up the pace. By that time the sun had begun to make itself felt. At the end of the second mile the temperature was nothing less than summer-like, and before the third mile was finished my coat was on my arm; and as I came down one of the city streets, on my return at noon, and met two Seminole Indians walking abroad dressed, after their airy fashion, in nothing but waistcoat and shirt, the sight of their comfortable uncivilized legs was calculated to make a perspiring man envious.

By nine o’clock, indeed, the weather was superb; but presently I came to an opening in the woods. Here was a field of tomato plants in front of a new, unpainted house. Some recent settler had cleared a piece of ground and established a home in this land of perpetual summer. And to support himself and his family he had “gone into early tomatoes.” So much was to be seen at a glance. And yes, there stood the man himself in the midst of his plantation. I went near and accosted him, expressing my hope that the frost (for by this time it was plain there had been one) had not damaged his crop. He had been badly frightened in the night, he confessed, but thought he had mostly escaped harm. “I was glad,” he said, dwelling upon the verb with a pleasant foreign accent, “when I saw the thermometer” (pronounced etymologically, with the accent on the penult). I fear he was worse hit than he knew. At all events there were many acres of wilting tomato plants only a mile away on the same road. One man, whom I saw looking over his field, was calling the attention of a solicitous neighbor to the fact that a certain part of the plantation had fared better than the rest. A few burning stumps had happened to be left smouldering on one edge of the field overnight, and the wind had drifted a light blanket of smoke across that corner.

But even in unprotected gardens the different parts had not fared alike. Here the tender plants were wilting as the sun shone on them, and yonder, only five or ten yards away, there was no symptom of blight. So true is it of tomato vines, as of nobler creations, that one shall be taken and the other left. The frost is like the wind, it striketh where it listeth, and thou seest the effect thereof; and the poor man suffereth with the rich.

Such are the cruel uncertainties of truck farming in this sub-tropical region, far down toward the very tip of Florida. Like the speculator in copper or in oil, the farmer goes to bed rich and gets up poor. But, like the dabbler in “shares,” the farmer is not easily discouraged. Though he has moved from one point to another, farther and farther down the peninsula, the frost pursuing him, he will still try again. There is one thing to be depended upon (let us be thankful to say it)--a sanguine man’s hope.

So much for tillers of the soil. For the rest of us, mere idlers and wayfarers, concerned only with questions of sight-seeing and momentary comfort, a day like the present needs no bettering. My own course, as I have said, lay through the pine woods--sunny, spacious, not in the least like anything that a New Englander would call a forest. At short intervals the road, white and hard, ran past a small clearing, generally with a house upon it. Here would be orange trees, mango trees (just now in bloom), splendid hibiscus shrubs, pineapples, perhaps, with other novelties pleasant for Northern eyes to look upon, or, quite as likely, a field of tomatoes (the fruit nearly grown), or a sweet-potato patch.

Near one of the houses the loud cries of some strange bird troubled my curiosity. The opera-glass showed me nothing, and I was none the wiser till beside a second house I heard the same voice again. This time I put aside my scruples and made a set attempt to solve the mystery. A woman before the door was inquisitive about the stranger, but the stranger was still more inquisitive about the bird; and by and by, on a lower perch than I had thought, there the fellow stood at the top of a shrub, directly before my eyes, a Florida jay. It was nine years since I had seen a bird of his kind, and the sight was welcome accordingly. Perhaps he knew it. At any rate, whether for my pleasure or his own, he held his ground and kept up his harsh, shrikely vociferations.

The Florida jay (a crestless bird, not at all the same as the Florida blue jay, which abounds everywhere and is everywhere noisy, especially in the villages) is strictly a bird of the peninsula, being found nowhere else--a remarkable instance of extreme localization. I ran upon still another individual before reaching the end of my jaunt,--on the outskirts of Lemon City,--and all three were in dooryards. Oak scrub (where you may look out for rattlesnakes) and human neighborhood, these, as I read the signs, are the Florida jay’s desiderata.

In general, as compared with the hammock woods, the pine lands are nearly birdless. An occasional sparrow hawk (another strangely trustful creature, very common in this country[5]), an occasional mockingbird (more than once in splendid song), a shrike now and then, a flock of myrtle-birds, and another of palm warblers, a good many white-breasted swallows and turkey buzzards overhead, with a bunch of silent sparrows skulking beneath the dwarf palmettoes,--these are what I now remember.

Birds or no birds, flowers or no flowers, I should have enjoyed the eight miles. The bright sunshine, the temperate, genial warmth, the endless, widely spaced woods, the blue sky, and on one side the blue expanse of Biscayne Bay,--summer in winter,--I am not so long from snowy Massachusetts but that these things are enough to make for me a kind of perpetual fiesta. As I said to begin with (and it is as true of thoughts and feelings as of the tenderest of garden crops), there is nothing like weather.

BEWILDERMENT

If any untraveled Northern botanist wishes to be puzzled, hopelessly confused, clean put out of his reckoning, let him come to Miami. His knowledge will drop away from him till not a rag is left. Let him arrive, as I did, after dark, and in the morning take the road southward to Cocoanut Grove. The distance is only five miles, and the walking excellent. I should like to go with him, and listen to his exclamations and comments.

The cocoanut palms before the hotel, as he leaves the piazza, he has no need to inquire about; such things he has at least seen in pictures. And the parti-colored crotons, likewise, are nothing new; he has seen the like in hot-houses, if nowhere else. And the scores of big, round hibiscus bushes, each with its score or two of regal scarlet blossoms,--these, or poverty-stricken imitations of them, he has admired before now in the Boston Public Garden and elsewhere. The acalypha shrubs, also, he will perhaps recognize upon a second look, though he has never before seen them growing as a hedge, carefully squared, three or four feet high, and as many feet thick. Yonder euphorbia bush, too (_Poinsettia_), with its flaring, flaming rosettes of scarlet floral leaves at the tips of the stems--this, like the crotons, he is more or less familiar with under glass. All these are cultivated plants, pleasant to look upon out of doors in mid-winter, but of themselves not especially interesting, perhaps, to a botanist.

But now, at the foot of Thirteenth or Fourteenth Street, less than a quarter of a mile from the hotel, we come to some vacant lots. Here are a few dingy live-oaks (still with last year’s leaves on), and in their shadow, sprawling over the tangled undergrowth, a wilderness of gadding morning-glory vines. How lovely the flowers are--pink and blue! Unless it be the ubiquitous fish crow, there is nothing else so common in this Miami country as the morning-glory; and the vines, acres on acres, hold in bloom, one kind and another, so I am given to understand, almost or quite the whole year round.

Now we leave the sidewalk and are in the pine woods. The trees--long-leaved pines--our botanist knows well enough, the train having brought him past a thousand miles of such, on his way hither; though, even so, he might be puzzled to tell to which of two related species (_Palustris_ and _Elliottii_) they belong. From the rude bridge, as we cross the Miami River, he admires the myriad-footed, glossy-leaved mangrove thickets that line the banks, especially as he looks up the stream. Just beyond are ancient live-oaks, the huge spreading branches of which support a profusion of air-plants (poor relations of the pineapple), with here and there an orchid. I should like to show him an _Epidendrum_ such as I secured ten days ago--an open spray of a dozen blooms, handsome enough to grace the finest of hothouse collections; but I have not been able to find a second specimen, with all my searching. However, a smaller, one-flowered species is common enough, and if he is sufficiently enterprising he will climb one of the trees for it, or--as I did--cut a stick by means of which, with more or less hard work, he can pry the bulbous root from its foothold.

“What is this yellow flower?” he asks, as we go on.

“I don’t know,” is my answer. “Some member of the pulse family.”

My companion knew as much as that already.

“And this bush, with its strangely contorted pods?”

Here I am more at home, and proud to show it. The plant is _Pithecolobium Unguis-Cati_, I tell him. Small wonder the pods are twisted.

With this we come to more live-oaks, on which are more air-plants and orchids, and just beyond is a confusion of thick-leaved trees and shrubs.

“What is this?” he asks; “and this? and this?”

I have no idea, I am obliged to answer. But the tall tree a little farther on is _Ficus aurea_, I hasten to remark, with a show of extreme erudition.

“A fig-tree?” he answers, in a tone of surprise; for, being a botanist, he knows, of course, that _ficus_ is fig.

Yes, I assure him, it is a _kind_ of fig (rubber tree, it is otherwise called), though the leaf is small and, as botanists say, “entire,” not in the least resembling the modest fig-leaf of convention. I know the tree’s name, as I know that of the shrub before mentioned, because I was told it yesterday. One’s knowledge (of names) increases rapidly under favorable circumstances, in a country like this.

Yonder very noticeable shrub, bearing large globular bunches of small bright-purplish berries (no eye could miss them), is the French mulberry, so called (_Callicarpa Americana_); and the larger and leafier bush near it, set along the branches with more loosely disposed orange-colored berries, is _Trema micrantha_, a plant which Chapman’s Flora credits to but one place in the United States,--“Shellmounds in Lastero Bay, South Florida,”--though hereabout it is one of the commonest of the common. Both it and the French mulberry are prime favorites with various kinds of birds. Mockingbirds and catbirds are feasting on the berries at this moment.

And yes, here is a tree that I knew would excite my companion’s curiosity. No stranger ever drove over this road (and the first drive of every newcomer to Miami is taken this way) without asking his driver about it: a large tree, all its leafy branches far above the ground, with a strangely conspicuous mahogany-colored bark, the outermost layers of which peel off in loose papery flakes, after the manner of the canoe birch. On my first jaunt into the hammock I heard more than one driver pronounce its eloquent name--gumbo-limbo. The two or three men of whom I made inquiries could tell me nothing more, till my host, who professed no botany, modestly suggested a reference to the dictionary. There, sure enough, I found the clue I was seeking. The tree is _Bursera gummifera_, or Jamaica birch, one of two Florida representatives of the tropical torch-wood family. It is among the chief of my South Florida admirations, especially for its color. It and the Seminoles should be of kindred stock. In the lobby of the hotel, the other evening, I heard one man rallying another (who had been fishing and playing golf bareheaded) upon the magnificent complexion he had put on. “Your face reminds me of the gumbo-limbo,” the joker said. The comparison was obvious. I had been thinking the same thing.

Our course takes us through a brief tract of pine land largely occupied by bayberry bushes, about which there are always many myrtle warblers (which is the same as to say bayberry warblers); and presently we are in a dense tropical forest. This is the place I have desired my companion to see; and here, after a few minutes of silent wonderment, his curiosity begins to play. “What is this? What is this? What is this?” His interrogations come in crowds; and to every one my answer is ready--“I don’t know.” I am in the case of the poor fellow whose sarcastic French instructor promised to teach him in one sentence how to answer correctly every question he might be asked. Like him I have only to respond, “_Je ne sais pas._” Trees, shrubs, and vines are all far out of my range. During the fortnight that I have been here, to be sure, I have begun to distinguish differences among them, and even to recognize individuality; but as to what they are, and what their names are, I know absolutely nothing.

It is a strange sensation, so delightfully, tantalizingly strange that I can hardly keep away from the place. Day after day, in spite of the dust and (sometimes) the scorching heat, my steps turn in this direction. “Where have you been?” my new acquaintances say to me at the dinner table; and I answer, almost of course, “Down in the hammock.”

Here and there, wherever there is a favorable opening, I venture a few steps into the jungle; but sometimes I cannot stay. A feeling of something like superstitious terror comes over me, the wood is so dense and dark and strange. I am glad to get back into the dusty road. My supposititious companion will be braver than I, I dare say, but he will be with me in confessing how confusingly alike all the trees look, and how utterly unavailable all his previous knowledge proves to be. On this point I have talked with two botanists, and they have both assured me that, although they had lived much in upper Florida, they found themselves here in a world they knew nothing about. With me, who am not a botanist, or only the sheerest dabbler in the science, it is literally true that in this sub-tropical forest I cannot guess at so much as the family relationship of one plant in twenty.

WAITING FOR THE MUSIC

I am impatient for the concert to begin. It is the 7th of February. For three weeks I have been in Miami; birds are plentiful; the country, one may almost say, is full of them; the weather, mostly a few shades too warm for a pedestrian’s comfort, seems to be all that birds could wish; but thus far there has been scarcely a sign of the grand vernal awakening. Warm or cold, for the birds it is still winter. Phœbes, to be sure, have sung ever since my arrival, I cannot help wondering why; and the same is true of white-eyed vireos. It is impossible to walk through the hammock woods without getting somewhat more than one’s fill of their saucily emphatic deliverances. For aught I can see, they are quite as loquacious now as they will be two or three months hence. Once in a while, hardly oftener than once a week, I should say, I have heard a mockingbird letting himself loose, and rather more frequently, especially during the last few days, cardinal grosbeaks have sweetened the air with their whistle; but for much the greater part the birds are dumb. On the morning of February 1, as I stepped out upon the piazza, a house wren sang from a live-oak by the kitchen door. I remembered the date. “Good!” said I to myself, “the time of the singing of birds is come.” But I was too much in haste. Since then I have heard plenty of wren chattering, but not another note of wren music.

Still the opening of the annual concert cannot be much longer delayed. When I was in Florida nine years ago, mockingbirds were in free song at St. Augustine, before the middle of February; and at this point, three hundred miles and more farther south, the season must be earlier rather than later.

Some of the more distinctively Southern of the birds about me I am especially desirous of hearing--the Florida yellow-throats, for example, a local race of the Maryland yellow-throat, so called. They are everywhere in sight (the dark brown of the flanks distinguishing them readily), and as their music is said to be very unlike that of their familiar Northern relative, I am naturally desirous of adding it to my (memorized) collection. It will be nothing great, presumably, but it will be something new.

Still more interesting will be the song of the painted bunting, or nonpareil, a beauty of beauties that I had never seen (a wild one, I mean) until this winter. About Miami it is decidedly common, though the green females show themselves ten times as often as the red, blue, and yellow-green males. What a superbly dressed creature the masculine nonpareil is! And he carries himself as if he knew it. “Dear me,” he seems always to be saying; “this Joseph’s coat of mine makes me so conspicuous! Some day it will be my undoing.” My readers will most likely have seen the gorgeous little creature in cages (I found one many years ago in the Boston Public Garden, I remember), though the chances are that they have never seen him in anything like his brightest and liveliest feather. A bird, like a butterfly, was born to be looked at out of doors with the sunlight on him. So far I have heard no note from the nonpareil except his rather soft chip. The birds frequent weedy tangles in open grounds, showing special fondness for patches of the white bur-marigold, and seem to be well scattered over the country.

Day after day I walk down through the hammock (I have spoken of it before, and most likely shall do so again) between Miami and Cocoanut Grove. Indeed, so constant are my peregrinations thither that I begin to find my innocent self treated as a kind of mysterious personage--one of the “features” of the place, so to speak, an “object of interest,” like the gumbo-limbos, the air-plants, and the blossoming lime trees. Three times, at least, I have overheard a driver describing me to his fares as “the man who comes down through this hammock _every day_”--with strong emphasis on the last two words. One passenger was good enough to surmise, quite audibly, that I might be a botanist, while another loudly proclaimed his belief that I must be “a sort of a bird fiend.” So much for being useful in one’s day and generation. The tourist mind--like the tourist stomach--abhors a vacuum. It must have something to browse upon. And the drivers know it. It is a bad day for the cow when she loses her cud.

In sober truth the hammock is well worth a daily visit; and almost as often as I am here it comes over me what a glorious concert hall it will be when all these thousands of birds find their voices, if they ever do; for it may be, I know, that the great majority will start on their journey northward before that happy day arrives. Here--to name only some of the more common species--here are mockingbirds, catbirds, cardinals, house wrens, Carolina wrens, ruby-crowned kinglets, palm warblers, myrtle warblers, parula warblers, prairie warblers, black-and-white warblers, Florida yellow-throats, oven-birds, blue-gray gnatcatchers (a host), white-eyed vireos (another host), solitary vireos, chewinks, painted buntings, phœbes, crested flycatchers, and blue jays. What a chorus there would be if the spring should get into all their throats at once! Might I be here to listen! Then, indeed, I could make a list, with the hearing to help the eyesight. Now I follow the road, and find only such birds as happen to be near it at the moment when I pass. Then it would be another story. I should need a stenographer. The names would crowd upon the pencil.

It is really an astonishing, unnatural-seeming thing--this multitude of birds, in this cloudless summer weather, with mating-time so close at hand, and no impulse to sing. Yet that expression is a trifle too strong, or at least too sweeping. This forenoon I heard a gnatcatcher warbling softly, as if to himself, tuning his instrument, it may be, or, more likely, dreaming. The cardinals, too, are certainly growing amorous. I see the bright males quarreling among themselves here and there (they are constantly in the road), and not infrequently, as I have said, they whistle with all sweetness. At that work there is no bird to excel them. How any female heart can resist such appeals is more than any bachelor’s heart can imagine. I rejoice in their numbers. I should love to walk through the hammock and hear them all whistling together, a chorus a good mile in length and no rod without a bird.

Loggerhead shrikes are paired or pairing. The other day I saw one fly up from the ground and feed another perched on a telegraph wire. He was doing no more than was meet, her cool-appearing, unresponsive manner seemed to say. Mockingbirds, also, though singing little, are beginning to manifest symptoms of jealousy. If all the mockers and all the cardinals should break into voice at once, the air itself would hardly contain the music.

Two pileated woodpeckers that I see every few days at a particular spot in the hammock have already come to an understanding, or so I fancy from certain bits of conduct that I have been privileged to witness. This morning I stood watching the female as she hammered to pieces a decayed branch close by me, when all at once her mate called in the distance. Instantly she held up her head, as much as to say, “Hark! Was that he?” and the next moment she was gone. Then I heard low conversational notes, followed presently by loud drumming on a resonant stub or branch. I thought of what I have heard preachers say, that Heaven is a state, not a place.

Pileated woodpeckers are birds good to look at, and, wild as they look, it is pleasant to find them so approachable. But in fact, this is most productive woodpecker country. Here are flickers in abundance, red-bellies almost as many, and along with them the red-headed, the red-cockaded (in the pine lands), the yellow-bellied (least common of all), the downy, and the hairy; all, in short, that could be expected, with the exception of the ivory-billed; and (such is human nature) I would give more to see him than all the rest together.

Well, I will not wish time away, as the saying is. I begin to perceive that I have none to spare. But I shall rejoice when some morning I go out and find the conductor’s arm lifted, and the chorus minding the beat.

PERIPATETIC BOTANY

When I called upon my friend the entomologist, a few evenings ago, she informed me that she had passed a very exciting day. While out on her usual insect-collecting expedition, along the bay shore, she had come suddenly upon an unknown plant growing among the mangrove bushes. A glance at the blossom showed that it must belong to the mallow family, and on getting back to the hotel and consulting the manual, she determined it at once as _Pavonia racemosa_,--“Miami and Key Biscayne.” Every collector knows the pleasure of discovering a plant or other specimen, the known habitat of which is entitled to this kind of exact specification.

“Very good,” said I, when she had finished the story, “I shall go down to-morrow and look at _Pavonia racemosa_ for myself.”

The next afternoon, therefore, saw me at the place; but it appeared that I had not sufficiently attended to my friend’s instructions. At all events, I could find nothing that looked like a _Malva_. In a country so richly and strangely furnished as this, however, a visitor cannot turn his eyes in any direction without putting them upon something he never saw before; and so it happened that while I hunted vainly for one thing I found another and better; or if it was not better in itself, it was more unexpected and interesting. This was a shrub, or small tree, bearing large, glossy, coriaceous leaves, clustered near the ends of the branches, from which depended long, smooth, pear-shaped or gourd-shaped buds. More careful search revealed a few faded flowers and a large pendent green fruit. And then, ten minutes afterward, as I was starting away, my eyes fell upon a clump of the rare _Pavonia_.

With that, of course, there was no room for difficulty. I had only to compare the specimen with the printed description, and check the name. But as for the strange shrub, of which I had bud, blossom, fruit, and leaf (what more could a man desire?), with that I was fairly beaten. Even a methodical, schoolboyish use of the “key” was without result. The signs brought me, or seemed to bring me, to the Bignonia family, and there came to nothing.

Happily a professor of botany in one of our great universities had arrived in town within the last twenty-four hours, and after supper I invited him to my room to help me with the puzzle. He set about the work just as I had done, only after a more workmanlike fashion, and him also the key led to the _Bignoniaceæ_, but no farther. As the common saying is, the trail had “run up a tree.” In short, with all the facts before us,--leaves, buds, blossom, fruit,--we were stumped. “It is some representative of the Bignonia family not included in Chapman’s Flora,” was the professor’s final verdict.

The next forenoon we had agreed to spend together in the big hammock, through which I had been sauntering by myself for the past five weeks. We should pass the Agricultural Experiment Station on the way, and I determined to carry the troublesome specimen along and submit it to the professor in charge. So said, so done; but as we stopped at the post office, there stood the man himself at the door. “What is this?” I asked, scarcely waiting to bid him good-morning. “_Crescentia_,” he answered promptly, “a plant of the Bignonia family.” So the other professor had been exactly right.

And now for the more dramatic part of the story. The day before--at noon of the day on which I found the plant in question--I received a letter from a Boston friend, himself a university professor of botany, to whom I had written, begging him to quit his desk, like a reasonable man, and join me in this botanical paradise. He replied that he could not come, and furthermore, that he wasn’t so very sorry. New England winter is to him a constant refreshment and exhilaration, it appears. Happy New Englander! “To-day is simply perfect,” he wrote, “and you can’t beat it in Miami.” As to that point I reserve my opinion. “How changed the place must be from what it was when I was there in the ’80’s,” he continued. “No railroad then within hundreds of miles, and none of your modern improvements. It is a great place for plants. I shan’t forget how delighted I was to find _Crescentia cucurbitina_ in flower. I had searched the whole range of Keys for it in vain.”

This very plant, of the existence of which I had never before heard, I had found, without knowing it, within two hours after receiving my friend’s letter.[6]

Winter botanizing by newcomers, in a country so foreign as this, where much the greater part of the shrubs and trees are West Indian, with no better help than Chapman’s Flora, is carried on under almost discouraging difficulties. “If we only had the blossoms!” the professor is continually exclaiming. And his pupil responds, “Yes, if we only had!” As it is, we content ourselves with finding out a few things daily, guessing at characters and relationships (no very bad practice, by the way), running down all sorts of clues, real or imaginary, like detectives on the hunt for a murderer, and even asking questions freely of chance passers-by, especially of the numerous class known by the white people hereabout as “Bahama niggers.” They, rather than their pale-faced superiors, seem to be observant of natural things. It is likely, too, that they or their forbears may have brought some traditionary knowledge of such matters from the islands where the plants are more at home. At all events, it is pleasant to notice how ready even the black children are, not only to answer questions, but to ask them as well, about any flowers that one happens to be carrying.

The other day I came suddenly upon a bush, the like of which I had seen and wondered over a hundred times since my arrival in Miami, remarking especially the highly peculiar, almost perpendicular carriage of its innumerable thick, brightly varnished leaves, a device, as the professor had suggested, for protecting them against the vertical rays of the sun. I had never seen either fruit or blossom, but here, on this particular plant, my eye fell upon a few scattered purplish drupes. Now, then, here was something to go upon. Now, possibly, with a sprinkling more of good luck, I might find the name of the bush. I was a mile or two from town, on the road to Alapattah Prairie, where there are many truck farms. A white man came along, one of the “truckers,” driving homeward from the city.

“Do you know what this is?” I inquired, showing him the specimen.

“No, sir,” he answered.

Soon I met another man, and proposed to him the same question, with the same result. A third attempt was no more successful. Then I overtook two colored men talking beside a quarry.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but can you tell me the name of this plant?”

“Yes, sir, it is cocoa plum,” answered one of them; and the other said, “Yes, cocoa plum.”

And so it was; for on referring to the manual I found the bush fully described under that name.

Another experiment in this kind of putting myself to school, it is fair to add, was less in the Bahama colored man’s favor. A tourist whom I happened upon resting beside the hammock road held in his hand two or three twigs, from each of which depended a large, stony, pear-shaped fruit, and seeing me curious about the novelty, he kindly offered me one. This, also, I forthwith carried into the city, stopping passengers by the way--like a natural-historical Socrates--to ask them about it. No one, white or black, could tell me anything till in a fruit shop I questioned a white boy. “It’s a seven-year apple,” he said. “Some foolish local name,” I thought. At all events it could do me no good, since it was not to be found in Chapman’s index. But that evening, on my showing the specimen to the entomologist, and telling her what the boy had said, she replied, “Certainly, that is right. The plant is _Genipa_, or seven-year apple.” And under the word “Genipa” I found it so spoken of in the Standard Dictionary. There the fruit is said to be edible, which seems to disprove the conjecture of another lady to whom I had shown it, that it derives its name from the fact that it would take an eater seven years to digest it. Apples, like men, are not fairly to be judged in the green state.

I have said that this guessing at characters and relationships is not a bad discipline. And no more is it the worst of fun. Of this I had only two days ago a strikingly happy proof. Everywhere in the hammock there grows a tall tree, noticeable for the peculiar color of its bark and its channeled and often fantastically contorted trunk. The leafy branches are always far overhead (a necessity in so crowded a place), and I had seen the purplish, globular drupes only as they had dropped one by one to the ground. At every opportunity I had made inquiries about the tree, but had received no light, nor, after much searching, had either the professor or myself been able to hit upon so much as a plausible conjecture as to its identity. Well, two days ago, as I say, we were walking together on the outskirts of the city, when we came to a tree of this kind growing in the open, the fruit-bearing branches of which hung within reach. We pulled one of them down, and I exclaimed at once, “Why, this should be related to the sea-grape!”--a most curious West Indian tree (_Coccoloba uvifera_, a member of the buckwheat family!) which grows freely along the shore of Biscayne Bay. “See the fruit,” said I, “for all the world like a bunch of grapes.” With that we began a detailed examination, and, to make a long story short, the tree proved to be another species of _Coccoloba_--_C. Floridana_.

That was pretty good guessing, based as it was on nothing better than an “external character,” as the professor rather slightingly called it. For five weeks my curiosity had been exercised over the puzzle, and in five seconds I had found the needed clue. Who will say that this was not better and more interesting, and withal more instructive, than to have been told the tree’s name on the first day I saw it?

A PEEP AT THE EVERGLADES

My first stroll in Miami was taken under the pilotage of a lady who had already spent several winters here. In the course of it we came suddenly upon a colored man lying face downward in the grass, under a blazing sun, fast asleep. It was no uncommon happening, my friend remarked; she was always stumbling over such dusky sleepers. But in this Southern clime the luxury of physical inactivity is not appreciated by black people alone. I was walking away from the city at a rather brisk pace, one morning, when I passed a lonesome shanty. A white man sat upon the rude piazza, and another man and a boy stood near.

“Are you going to work to-day?” asked the boy of the occupant of the piazza.

“No,” was the answer, quick and pithy.

“Why not?”

“I ain’t got time.”

I laid the words up as a treasure; I do not expect to hear the philosophy of indolence more succinctly and pointedly stated if I live a thousand years.

But though we Northern visitors may sometimes envy our Southern brethren their gift of happy _insouciance_, it is not for our possessing. We were born under another star. Our lack is the precise opposite of theirs; even in our vacation hours we have seldom time to sit still.

So it happened that on a sultry, dog-day morning, with a south wind blowing, the sky partly clouded,--a comfort to the eyes,--the professor and the bird-gazer, after an early breakfast, set forth upon a reconnoissance of the Everglades. We took each a boat and an oarsman, planning to go up the Miami River, or rather its south branch, till we were among the “islands”--small pieces of hammock woods scattered amid the wilderness of saw-grass.

As each of us had his own boat, so each had his own errand, one botanical, the other lazily ornithological. The professor expected to see and learn much--especially about the adaptation of plants to their surroundings; his associate expected to see and learn little--little or nothing; and according to each man’s faith, so it was unto him.

For the first mile or so--as far as the tide runs, perhaps--the river is densely beset on either side by a shining green hedge of mangrove bushes, every branch sending down “aerial roots” of its own, till landing among them is an adventure hardly to be thought of. After the mangroves come taller hedges of the cocoa plum, leafier still, and equally shining.

“Aren’t you glad you know what this bush is?” I shouted downstream to the professor.

“Indeed I am,” he shouted back.

Without this knowledge, which we had acquired within a few days, by a kind of accident, as before related, our present state of mind would have been pitiable. We were surprised to find the plant so fond of water, having noticed it heretofore in comparatively dry situations. Another example of the extreme adaptability of tropical plants, the professor remarked.

By and by we came to the first cypress trees, the only ones I have seen in this all but swampless Miami neighborhood; beautiful in their new dress of living green. I rejoiced at the sight. Under one of them we landed, admiring the “knees” that its roots had sent up till the ground was studded with them. These, the professor tells me (it is nothing new, by his account of the matter, but it is new to me), are believed to serve as breathing or aerating organs, supplying to the tree the oxygen for lack of which, standing in water, as it mostly does, it would otherwise drown. All visitors to Florida are impressed by the beauty and majesty of the cypress, and many have no doubt puzzled themselves over the meaning of these strange, apparently useless protuberances--as if nature had attempted something and failed--that are so constantly found underneath. “They never do grow to be trees,” my boatman said.

It was at this point, as nearly as I remember, that the stream grew narrow and shallow at once, till behold, we were laboring up what might fairly be called rapids. Here, between the awkward crowding of the banks and the swiftness of the current (it was good, I said to myself, to see water actually _running_ in Florida), the men were certainly earning their money. Fortunately, both proved equal to the task. Then a bend in the stream took us away from the neighborhood of the trees (not until, in one of the cypresses, I had remarked my first Miami nuthatch--a white-breast), and into the very midst of the saw-grass. This densely growing, sharp-edged, appropriately named grass, higher than a man’s head, standing to-day in two or three feet of water, is said to cover the Everglades. It must render them a frightful place in which to lose one’s way. “I should rather be lost at sea in a rowboat,” my oarsman declared.

All this while, of course, I had kept a lookout for birds, but, as I had expected, to comparatively little purpose. No doubt there were many about us, but not for our finding. The shallower and quieter edges of the river were covered here and there with broad leaves of the yellow lily, among which should have been at least a chance gallinule, it seemed to me; but neither gallinule nor rail showed itself. Here, as everywhere, buzzards and vultures were sailing overhead. Many white-breasted swallows, too, went hawking over the grass, and once a purple martin passed near me. Better still, he allowed me, in one brief note, to hear his welcome voice. Like the new leaves of the cypress, it prophesied of spring.

At intervals a heron of one kind or another started up far in advance. One was snow-white, but whether I was to call it an immature little blue heron or a white egret was more than could be made sure of at my distance. I recall, too, a flock of ducks, a cormorant or two, speeding through the air after their usual headlong manner, a solitary red-winged blackbird, astray from the flock, and the cries of killdeer plovers. Kingfishers were not infrequent, two or three ospreys came into sight, and once, at least, I made sure of a Louisiana heron. A lean showing, certainly, for what might have been thought so promising a place.

And now, as the grass grew shorter, so that we could survey the world about us, the water of a sudden turned shallow. The professor’s flat-bottomed boat still floated prosperously, but my own heavier, keeled craft speedily touched bottom. The rower put down the oars, took off his shoes and stockings, rolled up his trousers, and proceeded to lighten the boat of his weight, and drag it forward. This expedient answered for a rod or two. Then we stuck fast again, and the passenger followed his boatman’s example and took to the water. So we followed along, the water now deeper, now shallower, the bottom hard and slimy, till after a little we were at the end of our rope. If we were to go farther we must leave the boat behind us.

This was hardly worth while, especially as even in that way we could not hope to proceed far enough to see anything different from what we had seen already. “We will go back,” I said, “drifting with the current and stopping by the way.” And so we did, my boatman and I, leaving the professor--who, as it turned out, went but a few rods beyond us--to pursue his investigations unhindered.

After all, in spite of our indolent intentions, the return was faster than the upward journey, as almost of necessity happens, whether one is descending a river or a mountain. The time for loitering is in going up. One good thing we saw, nevertheless, though it was only for an instant.

“What’s that?” my man suddenly exclaimed, in the eagerest of tones. “Look! Right there!”

“Oh, yes,” I said; “a least bittern.”

It stood crosswise, so to speak, halfway up a tall reed, for all the world like a marsh wren. Then away it went on the wing, and was lost in the grass. It was a good bird to see, besides counting as “No. 91” in my Miami list.

“I never did see a bird like that,”[7] the boatman said. “Such a little fellow!” he called it. It was a pleasure to find him so enthusiastic.

The best thing of the whole trip, notwithstanding, was not the sight of any bird, but our lazy, careless, albeit too rapid gliding down the stream, with the world so bright and calm about us and above. Here and there, for our delight, was a tuft of fragrant white “lilies” (_Crinum_) standing amid a tuft of handsome upright green leaves. More than once, also, we passed boatloads of fishermen (and fisherwomen), white and black. One elderly and carefully dressed, city-coated gentleman I especially remember. He sat in the stern of the boat (his African boatman with a line out, also), watching the fluctuations of his bob as earnestly, I thought, as ever he could have watched the fluctuations of the stock market. His whole soul was centred upon that bit of cork and the possible fish below. He actually had a nibble as we passed! What cared he then for “coppers” or “industrials”? He must at some time or other have been a boy. The lucky man! By the look on his face he was happy. And happiness, if I am to judge by what I see, is one of the main things, in Florida. At all events, it was the main thing that I found in the Everglades.

THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING

Manifold are the perils of journalism. A few weeks ago I filled a letter with the praise, most sincerely felt, of a certain tropical hammock on the road from Miami to Cocoanut Grove, a place full of birds, and destined, so I hoped, to be equally full of music. This eulogy, it transpires, was read by a bird-loving enthusiast from New England, sojourning for the winter at the Hotel Ormond; and what should he do but send me word, a stranger, that he had packed his trunk and was coming down straightway (two hundred and fifty miles or more) to inspect the wonder.

In due course he arrived, and as soon as possible I led him out of the city, across the river, through a stretch of blazing sunshine, and at last into the heart of the hammock. It was a long jaunt, much longer than he was prepared for, the afternoon was hot, and to make matters worse the hammock showed almost no sign of that profusion of avian existence, with the anticipation of which my glowing periods had filled him.

Fortunately for my reputation, I had forewarned him that such would be the case. The birds, I explained, either because the season had advanced, or for some other reason, had pretty nearly deserted the jungle of West Indian trees, shrubs, and vines,--for such this particular hammock is,--and had betaken themselves to the more open country, especially to certain groves of newly clad live-oaks, whose sturdy, wide-spreading, rival-killing, trust-creating, monopolistic arms, by the time the trees are of middle age, have made for themselves a relatively sunny clearing.