Chapter IV: Part 4

I had been growing aware of this change in the face of things for a week or two, and now, when the newcomer has been three or four days in Miami, the reality of it is conclusively established. On two mornings of the present week, for example, I found in a few minutes’ stroll before breakfast a highly interesting flock of perhaps twenty kinds of birds in the live-oaks and other scattered trees on the very edge of the city, within a hundred rods of my own doorstep: fish crows, boat-tailed grackles, crow blackbirds, red-headed woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers, flickers, catbirds, mockingbirds, house wrens, cardinals, palm warblers, myrtle warblers, parula warblers, prairie warblers, black-and-white warblers, yellow-throated warblers, solitary vireos, yellow-throated vireos, blue jays, phœbes, ground doves, blue-gray gnatcatchers, ruby-crowned kinglets, a male nonpareil, a Baltimore oriole, a crested flycatcher, a hummingbird, and a hermit thrush. A varied bunch of feathers, and no mistake.

In the tropical hammock, on the other hand, during the same forenoons, I saw, as well as I remember, nothing but white-eyed vireos, phœbes, catbirds, cardinals, palm and myrtle warblers, crested flycatchers, nonpareils, and gnatcatchers. So completely has the condition of things been reversed with the change of season.

Other signs are not lacking that March has brought the spring. Mockingbirds are daily becoming more rhapsodical. The other afternoon, out among the cabins of the black suburb, I stood still while three sang at once on different sides. They are friends of the poor, as well as of the rich. This morning two yellow-throated vireos sang, chattered, and whistled; and a most delicious trilled whistle theirs is, soft, musical, full of sweet and happy feeling. Better still, almost (because more of a novelty), a yellow-throated warbler sang his dreamy tune over and over. This is one of the most exquisite birds ever made; of quiet, modest colors, bluish-black and white, with a single bright jewel to set them off--a gorget of brilliant yellow. To-day I have seen as many as ten such beauties, I think. Their feeding habits and their movements, as well as their black-and-white stripes, are surprisingly like those of the black-and-white creeper,--to which they ought to be more nearly related than the systematists allow,--while their song is in the manner of the indigo-bird.

Now, if the nonpareil buntings would only fall into line! Thus far they have not favored me with a note, and indifferent musicians as I know them to be, I believe there is no other bird in Miami that I am so desirous of hearing. Such feathers as they wear! Once in a while, of late, a male has been good enough to take a somewhat lofty perch and display himself. If there is a more gorgeous bird in the United States I should like to see him. Just now there are at least three enthusiasts in Miami--a Kentucky lady, a Rhode Island man, and a Massachusetts man--who are doing their best daily to get their fill of his loveliness.

Phœbes have sung much less of late than they did in January. Then they seemed to find existence a perpetual jubilee. Red-bellied woodpeckers, too, are far less talkative than they were a month ago. Most likely they are busier. And by the by, the Kentucky enthusiast above mentioned pleased me by calling this woodpecker the “checkerback,” a felicitous name, in common use in Kentucky, it appears, and perhaps elsewhere. I am happy to adopt it and pass it on.

If there were words wherewith to describe the indescribable, I should like to tell of a bluebird that I saw a week ago about one of the vegetable gardens out on the prairie. The blue of that creature’s back and wings is not to be imagined. The bluest sky never matched it. I would wager that he was Florida born. No Northern bird ever owned such a coat. In my recollection he will stand as one of the sights of the country, along with the “banyan trees,” the snaky green vanilla vines, and the tropical jungle.

These letters are of necessity written piecemeal. In this hospitable Southern country, where the weather and so many things beside are continually calling, “Come forth and enjoy us,” one cannot stay indoors very long at once. So it happened that at the conclusion of the last paragraph I put down my pencil and started out for another few minutes among the live-oaks. As I approached them I descried a man sitting upon a heap of coal-ashes dumped along the railway. He might have been Job himself, to look at him, but at a second glance I perceived that he was not actually sitting in the ashes, but on a board, and instead of bewailing his afflictions or his sins, was peacefully minding the New Testament injunction, “Behold the fowls of the air.” In short, he was the gentleman from Ormond, with his glass, as it happened, focused upon a handsome prairie warbler.

We passed the time of day, after the bird had flown,--for the field has its courtesies, and we respect them,--and he told me that in spite of the unfavorable north wind (one of our periodical cold spells is upon us, with the mercury in the forties) he had ventured out, and had been liberally rewarded. He had seen yellow-throated warblers, a parula, a prairie, and I forget what else, and, to take his word for it, was living in clover.

Presently a hawk swooped among the trees, and every small bird became invisible as if by magic. Then my companion proposed taking a turn beyond the fence. This we did, and just as we came suddenly upon a huge watch-dog (a great Dane, I suppose he would be called), formidable-looking and chained, but fawning upon us so eagerly that there was nothing for it but to pat him on the head and call him a good fellow--just as we approached him, I say, I nudged the second man to stop. There, straight before us, side by side on the rim of an iron kettle of water set under the trees for the dog’s benefit, stood a male cardinal and a male nonpareil. Perhaps they were not a glorious pair! Them also I shall remember, along with the miraculous bluebird.

Less brilliant, but even more memorable, was my one Bachman’s warbler. I had stopped under a live-oak,--on a return from the big hammock,--and was putting my glass upon one bird after another feeding among its blossoms (parulas, yellow-throats, ruby-crowns, gnatcatchers, and myrtle-birds), when in the very topmost spray I sighted a spot of coal-black set in bright yellow. Here was something new. From twig to twig the stranger went,--rather deliberately, for a warbler,--the glass following, till after submitting for perhaps ten minutes to my eager inspection he slipped away, as birds have a knack of doing, without my seeing him go. However, he had shown himself perfectly--the jet breastplate, the yellow forehead, the black crown, the lustrous olive of the upper parts, and the yellow patch upon the wing. He was a bird that I had never expected to see. Comparatively few ornithologists have been so happy.

This was on March 7. For two days we had noticed indications of a migratory movement, especially among parulas and yellow-throated warblers. Probably the Bachman had come from farther south. My thanks to him for treating me so handsomely, though he might have doubled the obligation, at no cost to himself, by singing me a tune.

FAIR ORMOND

After nearly two months in the extreme south of Florida I have turned my face northward, and here I am at Ormond, fair Ormond-on-the-Halifax. No more bewildering jungles of nameless West Indian trees and climbers, no more cocoanut palms, no more acres of wild morning-glory vines. It gave me a start of pleasurable surprise when, somewhere on this side of Palm Beach, I do not remember where, I saw from the car window a stately sweet-gum tree all freshly green. It had not occurred to me till then that I had found nothing at Miami of this handsome and characteristic Southerner, always one of my favorites.

Indeed, I have come to a different world. I am no longer in a foreign country. Here are lordly magnolias, not yet in blossom, to be sure, but proudly beautiful in the leaf. Here, too, are Cherokee roses, loveliest of all flowers, just coming into their kingdom. At sight of the first glossy-leaved bush, which happened to stand near a house, I made up to the door, not stopping twice to consider, and asked the privilege of picking a flower and a bud. The householder was generous, and the bush even more so. “Take another, and another,” it seemed to say, catching me again and again by the sleeve; “I have enough and to spare.” It was hard work for me to get away. Here, also, is the yellow jessamine, only less beautiful than the rose, hanging the tall forest trees full of golden, fragrant bells. And here, sprinkled along the wayside, are stores of blue violets. None of these things are to be seen on the shores of Biscayne Bay. Yes, I am glad to be here.

And the phlox, likewise, the pretty Drummond’s phlox of our Northern gardens, dear to me of old, let me not forget that. It is not indigenous to the country, I suppose, but, like the garden verbena, being here it makes itself most comfortably at home, delighting to overrun forsaken orange groves and similar unoccupied waste places. How sweetly it looks up at us with its innocent child’s face! Just now one of the guests of the hotel came in with a broad market-basket loaded with it, a good half-bushel, at the very least. “I have counted twenty-six varieties,” he said (he was thinking of diversities of color), and there must be somewhere near that number in the crowded vase that he has sent down to brighten my writing-table.

Here, too, is the Atlantic beach. In ten minutes I cross the peninsula and am on the sands; or, if I stroll up or down the river shore,--on the western side of the peninsula,--I can hear all the while the pounding of the surf.

I have been in Ormond two days,--two perfect days of temperate summer weather,--and have walked hither and thither, up the river, down the river, across the river, and on the beach, seeing comparatively little of the country as yet, but enough to be able to say that I have never found any place in Florida where a walking man should be better contented. There are paths and roads everywhere,--a convenience not to be taken for granted in this Southern country,--and be his states of mind never so variable, he may here suit the jaunt to the mood.

A visit to Ormond was not in my plans for the winter, and I left Miami with regret. Migratory birds were arriving, and I seemed to be running away just when there was most to detain me; those tropical plants, too, were certain to become more and more interesting as the season grew older; but, like the verbena and the phlox, being here I am thankful. If I have taken leave of some splendid birds (those painted buntings are in my eye as I write), I have found some old friends in their place. It is good to see brown thrashers again, with song sparrows, white-throats, and chickadees. One of a bird-loving man’s strangest sensations at Miami is the absence of chickadees and tufted titmice. I had never been in such a place before. (For eight weeks, let me say in passing, I have seen no English sparrows. Unfortunately I have not yet forgotten how they look.)

In my two days here I have counted but fifty kinds of birds. A goodly number that I know to be present, and even common, I have so far happened to miss. But in the middle of March even fifty birds make something like a festival. Mockers, cardinals, and Carolina wrens--the great Southern trio--are tuneful, of course. Even as I write, a wren is whistling an accompaniment to my pencil. If I could only put the music on the paper! If it would only “modulate my periods!” as Charles Lamb said. When I sit in the shade of a moss-hung live-oak, letting the sea breeze fan me, and listen to an assembly of red-winged blackbirds rehearsing their breezy _conkaree_ among the reeds along the Halifax (though it is not a simple _conkaree_, either, but _conkaree-dah_, the old tune with a new coda), I think of swamps in far Massachusetts where on this very 12th of March other redwings are opening the musical season in a very different atmosphere.

Chewinks of both kinds (red-eyes and white-eyes, Northerners and Southerners) are calling and singing. Blue yellow-backed warblers are musical after their manner (they hardly need to be singers, being so exquisite in color, form, and motion), and white-eyed vireos are numerous enough, though nothing like so plentiful as at Miami. Here, as there, they have no thought of hiding their light under a bushel.

It is like old times to see Florida jays sitting on the chimney-tops of the summer cottages along the dunes behind the beach. Thus it was that I saw them first, at Daytona, nine years ago. As a friend and I stopped this morning to rest in the shade of a piazza, one came and stood upon the railing and eyed us long and curiously. “Have you nothing edible about you?” he seemed to say. If we had had anything to offer the beggar, I am confident he would have hopped upon our knees.[8] As it was, he approached within five or six feet while we chirped and talked to him. Florida jays are strange creatures for tameness, and if it were thought worth while could readily be domesticated.

It seemed natural, also, to see pelicans flying in small flocks up the beach, just over the breakers, so that half the time they were invisible, lost in the trough of the sea; moving always in Indian file, flapping their wings and scaling by turns. And still another remembrancer of my previous visit to this part of Florida was the sight of a bald eagle robbing a fishhawk. The hawk made a stubborn defense, dodging this way and that, rising and falling, but in the end the eagle, an old white-headed fellow, was more than a match for his victim; for though they were far away, the motions of the contestants showed plainly enough how the struggle terminated.

On the beach, halfway to his knees in water, stood a great blue heron, leaning seaward, waiting for a fish. He might have been standing there for nine years. At all events I left him in the same position that length of time ago. “Ay, and you,” he might rejoin, “you haven’t changed, either. You have still nothing better to do than to go wandering up and down the earth, shooting birds with an opera-glass?” True enough. Heron and man, after nine years each is the same old sixpence. “The thing that hath been it is that which shall be, and there is nothing new under the sun.” Well, so be it. Only let me find new pleasure in the old places and the old pursuits.

A DAY IN THE WOODS

I was well within the truth when I said, a week ago, that there could not be many places in Florida where a walking man would find his wants so generously provided for as at Ormond. Here he may spend a half-day in idling over a round of a mile or two,--sea beach, river bank, and woodland,--or he may foot it as industriously as he pleases from morning till night; and the next day and the day after he will have plenty of invitations to “fresh woods,” though hardly to “pastures new.” Pastures, whether new or old, he may look for elsewhere.

But at Ormond a man may not only walk, he may drive; and this forenoon (March 19) a pair of horses have taken me over such a road as I do not expect soon to find the like of, either in Florida or anywhere else; a course of twelve or fifteen miles, the whole of it (as soon as the bridge over the Halifax was crossed) through most beautiful forest. The road was wide enough for the carriage and no more; soft as a carpet, so that the wheels made no noise, with big trunks of pines, palmettoes, oaks, sweet-gums, magnolias, and what not crowding upon the track so closely that we could almost put out our hands and touch them as we passed. In the whole distance, to the best of my recollection, we met neither carriage nor foot-passenger.

We drove as we pleased, stopped as we pleased, talked or kept silence, listened to the birds, admired the flowers and the new leafage (there are no words wherewith to intimate its freshness and beauty), and withal dreamed of the time when all the land about us was the scene of busy labors, when sugar and rice and cotton were cultivated here by hundreds of slaves, and those who owned the land, as they imagined, had no thought of a day when the forest should again claim all their fair possessions. We drove to Mount Oswald, so called, near the mouth of the Tomoka River, thence over the famous old causeway, set with palmettoes, to Buckhead Bluff, at which point the King’s road to St. Augustine is supposed (or known) to have crossed the river a hundred years ago. I was glad to see the river (I shall see more of it, if I live a day or two longer), but the great thing was the forest, with its present beauty and its whisperings of past romance.

Now it is afternoon, and I am in the same woods. No lover of wild life ever drove over a beautiful country road for the first time without saying to himself again and again, “I must come this way on foot.” A carriage is well enough in its place, but really to see things a man must be on his own legs. Immediately after luncheon, therefore, with a merry company of golfers (a flourishing sect in Florida), I took the little one-horse street-car to the railway station, and now, having crossed a narrow field and left the golfers at their afternoon devotions, I am in the Volusia road, in the noblest of hammock woods.

The first half-mile of the way I have walked over more than once already, and having in mind the shortness of the afternoon I quicken my steps. The doing so is no hardship. For the last forty-eight hours the wind has blown from the north; during the night the mercury settled to 38°; and though it is considerably warmer than that now, a pretty brisk movement is still not uncomfortable.

Here I pass a mournful sight--an old orange grove, of which nothing remains but the sandy soil and a few blackened stumps. The “great freeze” of six or seven years ago killed the trees to the roots. Nearly opposite, to add to the forlornness of the impression, stands a deserted house; and not far along is another, that looks only less unthrifty and disconsolate, with an old woman smoking a pipe on the piazza. It would be a strict moralist who should grudge her that one comfort.

Now I have left the last human habitation behind me, and in front stretches the narrow road arched with greenness, running away and away till it runs out of sight. What lofty oaks and sweet-gums! And what beautiful lichens cover them with wise-looking hieroglyphics! If we could only decipher their meaning! I note especially the ribbed, muscular-seeming trunks of the hornbeams, one of which, the largest, is riddled with uncountable perforations, the work of some sap-loving woodpecker; and I turn about more than once to admire the proportions of a magnificent magnolia, one of the largest I have ever seen. My thanks to the highway surveyor who went a few feet out of his way to leave it standing. A rod or two more, and I stop to look up at some exceptionally tall pines and live-oaks, a noticeable group, in the altitude of which I have before found a pleasure.

How they soar, as if to see which shall go highest! And as high as the oak branches go, so high the gray moss follows.

Now I am at the fork of the road. My course is to the right. “Old Stage Road to Buckhead Bluff on the Tomoka River at the crossing of the ‘old King’s road’ to St. Augustine.” So the guideboard reads, with commendable particularity. “Old” is the word. Even the wind in the tree-tops seems to be whispering stories of things that happened long, long ago. And the trees answer, “Yes, so the fathers have told us.” To think of all those busy people! And every one of them dead!

Here is a bit of clearing where the sun strikes in. It feels good. This is the right kind of outdoor weather--shade not uncomfortable and the sun’s heat welcome. A white-eyed chewink, happy Floridian, is whistling from the brush. Holly trees are common, and the sweet-bay is everywhere. Its shining leaves are of a most salubrious odor, as if they might be for the healing of the nations. I am continually plucking them and rolling them in my fingers.

And yonder is the maker of the clearing--a colored man, standing beside a woodpile. I hail him to remark that it is a fine day, and he answers, “Yes, very nice.” Strange that when two men meet for the only time in their lives they should find nothing more important to communicate than that it rains, or that the sun is shining. But weather is the thing, after all, especially in Florida. Perhaps it deserves all that is said about it. Anyhow, the woodcutter and the stroller have expressed a feeling of neighborliness and have told each other no lies.

With every rod the wood changes from glory to glory. I remark with special joy a grove of tall, slender, smooth-barked water-oaks, every one in new leaf. Height rather than girth is their aim. “We must have the sun,” they say, “and we climb to get it.” How good the sun is, let their leaves testify; those millions on millions of shining leaves, every one new. Yes, every one new. I cannot write the word too often. And many times as I write it, the Northern reader will have but an insufficient sense of its meaning. Such freshness and greenness! Neither memory nor imagination can body it forth. Happy are the eyes that behold the miracle twice in a single spring. It is like doubling one’s year.

A Carolina wren whistles, near at hand, but invisible (invisibility is the wren’s trick), and a red-eyed vireo, farther away, has begun his reiterative, summer-long exhortation. I was taken by surprise, two or three days ago, when I heard the first of his kind in this same hammock; I was not looking for him so early. His irrepressible cousin, the white-eye, has been abundantly vocal for at least two months. At this very minute one is rehearsing a strain with a pretty and decidedly original quirk at the end. And, by the by, I notice that many white-eyes hereabout practice a deceptive imitation of the crested flycatcher’s loud whistle, while others, or perhaps the same ones, sometimes begin with a broken measure, such as I think I never heard from a Massachusetts white-eye, strongly suggestive of the summer tanager. Call him pert, saucy, a chatter-box, Old Volubility, what you will, the white-eye is indisputably a genius.

But for to-day, and for me, none of the birds sing quite so feelingly or so well as the wind in the tree-tops. I stop again and again to listen to it, and would stop oftener still but for the brevity of the afternoon and the uncertainty I am in as to the length of the walk before me.

Hickory nuts, split in halves and lying blackened in the sand, lead me to look upward. Yes, there are the trees, still with bare boughs. Their tender leafage does well to be late in sprouting, even in this Southern country. There is no tree but knows a thing or two. Every kind has a wisdom of its own. _Experientia docet_ is true of them as of us.

And now I suddenly find myself nearing the railroad, and having consulted my watch conclude to go back over the sleepers. It will be my shortest course, and will have the further advantage of taking me past a swamp, on the edge of which I caught glimpses of sora rails a few days ago. This time I will be more cautious in my approaches.

A cardinal is whistling, a checkerback is chattering, many warblers are in the sunny tree-tops, and from somewhere in the depths of the forest comes the deep, oracular voice of an owl, though the sun is at least half an hour high. _Whoo, whoo, who-who_, he calls. I love to hear him. On the wire fence is a yellow jessamine vine, still sporting a few last blossoms, and for rods together the sandy railway embankment is draped with exquisite white “bramble roses,” the flowers of the creeping blackberry. Later comers will find berries on the vines, but perhaps I have the better part of the crop.

I am well satisfied, at all events, and am still feasting upon the sight when out of the tall grass on my left hand comes a rail’s voice--the voice of one crying in the wilderness. I am drawing near the swamp, and make haste to cover with my field-glass the spaces of open water among the dead flags. Yes, there are birds--one, two, three, four. But they are not rails. I see as much as that before I have finished my count. Three of them are swimming. They are gallinules; and when one of them turns, and the sunlight strikes him, I see the red plate on his forehead. They are Florida gallinules, my first ones for nine years. My glass follows their movements jealously till the thunder of an approaching train startles them and they fly to the shelter of the tall grass. I shall come this way again, and not only see but hear them. Their language is various and interesting, though most of it has the accent of the barnyard.

A pileated woodpecker crosses the track just before me, with all his colors flying, a pair of bluebirds sit in their accustomed place upon the telegraph wire, and from the neighboring pines I catch the finch-like twitters of a brown-headed nuthatch. This is close upon the railway station and the golf links. My afternoon is done, but the golf players are still making the most of daylight. I blush to confess it, but there are some enthusiasms with which even that of a strolling naturalist will hardly endure comparison.

PICTURE AND SONG

What seek we in Florida? The same that we seek everywhere--sensations. Life is made of them. In proportion as they are lively and pleasurable we find it good. The higher their quality, the nobler the part that feels them, the less physical they are, the less they have to do with eating and drinking and being clothed, the more truly we are alive and not dead.

Most of the people that we meet in Florida are vacationers like ourselves. At home they may be in the wool business, in shoes, or in dyestuffs; here they have no occupation but to amuse themselves. In the daytime they fish, play golf, drive, or lounge upon the hotel piazza. In the evening they sit in the lobby, listen (possibly) to the music, admire (or not) the gowns and jewels of the ladies (the self-sacrificing creatures are all on parade, like so many Queens of Sheba), take a hand at cards, or gossip about something or nothing with a traveling companion or a chance acquaintance. At the worst they dawdle over a newspaper or a novel, and consume the hour in smoke. To judge by appearances their sensations are not poignant, though the anglers and the golfers, and even the shuffle-board players, no doubt have their exciting moments; but on the whole the winter passes rather quickly. When there is nothing else to do, and the time drags, one can always cheer one’s self by thinking how intemperate the season is at home. The most refreshing parts of the Northern newspapers are their reports of snowstorms and blizzards.

For my own part, I admire the ladies’ gowns (in one sense or other of the word, who could help it?), but what my untutored mind is most taken with is the beauty of the natural world, the world as God made it, rather than as man, even the man-milliner, has improved it. I love to look up or down the moss-hung vista of the river road (I am still at Ormond), or, turning my head, to gaze across the smooth water at the freshly green, happy-looking oak woods and the overtopping pines. These are pictures that I hope never to forget.

The other day an old friend, a settler in these parts, rowed me down the river a few miles. There we took an untraveled road through the forest, and by and by came suddenly to a clearing, in the middle of which stood an abandoned house. The place had once been an orange orchard, I suppose; and even now, although there was hardly so much as a stump left to tell the tale, it remained in its own way a paradise of beauty. From end to end the five or six sandy acres were thickly overgrown with Drummond’s phlox, all in fullest bloom, a rosy wilderness.

It was a pretty show. We exclaimed over it, and gathered handfuls of the lovely flowers, but as we rowed homeward we were favored with a spectacle to which it would be a profanation to apply such epithets. The afternoon, which began doubtfully, had turned out a marvel of perfection. The wind had gone down, the river was like glass, and the level rays of the sun touched all the shore woods to an almost unearthly beauty. And withal, the sky was full of the softest, most exquisitely shaded, finely broken clouds. It was an hour such as comes once and is never repeated. In my mind the memory of it has already taken its place beside the memory of a sunset seen many years ago from a Massachusetts mountain-top. These are some of the “sensations” of which I spoke. They are the sufficient rewards of travel, though now and then, the Fates favoring, we may have them at home also, without money and without price.

The next day, or the next but one, I strolled about two miles up the river northward, to the house where, on my first day at Ormond, I had seen a Cherokee rosebush just breaking into flower. This time it was at the top of its glory, such a glory as I have no hope of describing. At a moderate calculation the mound of leafy stems must have borne four or five thousand roses, every one the very image of purity and sweetness. Those who are familiar with the Cherokee rose will perhaps be able to imagine the picture of loveliness here presented; and such readers will be glad to know that a lover of beauty (not an idle, time-killing tourist, but a man at home and at work), having heard my report of the bush, walked four or five miles on purpose to see it, and declared himself amply repaid for his labor. “The poetry of earth is never dead;” and there is never wanting some poet’s soul to enjoy it, and so to make it twice alive.

Though it is near the end of March there is comparatively little sign of bird migration. Chuck-will’s-widows--Southern whippoorwills, if one chooses to call them so--have arrived and are abundantly in voice. The nights are scarcely long enough for all they have to say. I hear of a cottager who is awakened by one so persistently and so early in the morning that he is devising means to kill it. I hope he will not succeed, although if the bird is close to his open window and begins to unburden himself at half-past two, as one does within hearing from my bed, I cannot very seriously blame him for the attempt. He goes out in his night-clothes, I am told, and tries to “shoo” it away; but the bird has a message, as truly as Poe’s raven, and is bound to deliver it, whether men will hear or forbear.

On the morning of March 26, in an ante-breakfast stroll, I found among the pines immediately in the rear of the hotel the first summer tanager of the season. The splendid creature, bright red throughout, was flitting from tree to tree, singing a measure or two from each. He acted as if he were happy to be back in Ormond, and I did not wonder. A red-eyed vireo was singing on the 15th, and since then birds of the same kind have become moderately common. Considering that the red-eye is not supposed to winter anywhere in the United States (I saw nothing of it at Miami), and arrives so late in New England, it seems to have reached Ormond surprisingly early.

For some time the woods have been alive in spots with busy crowds of warblers. Parulas especially have been present in enormous force, and have sung literally in chorus. I have seen many yellow-throated warblers also, and many myrtles, with a fair sprinkling of prairies and black-and-white creepers. But the birds that have sung best--after the mocker and the thrasher, perhaps--are not spring comers, but our faithful winter friends, the cardinal grosbeak and the Carolina wren. Indeed, of all Southern songsters I believe that the cardinal stands first in my affections. Sweetness, tenderness, affectionateness, and variety, these are his gifts, and they are good ones, even if they are not the highest.

Out in the flatwoods, a few days ago, we suddenly heard, coming from a thicket of dwarf palmetto on the edge of water, a quite unexpected strain, a loud, short trill. “What was that?” asked my companions, as we looked at one another; for there were three pairs of field-glasses in the carriage. “It sounded like a swamp sparrow,” said I, with doubt in my voice. At that moment the measure was given out again, prefaced this time by a peculiar indrawn whistle. Then the truth flashed upon me. It was the song of a pine-wood sparrow. I had not heard it for many years. In the same place meadow larks were in tune, bluebirds warbled, and pine warblers and brown-headed nuthatches were in voice among the pine trees. Here, too, I was glad to hear, for the first time in Florida, the caw of a real crow, a bird with a roof to his mouth and a voice that sounded like home.

Such are some of a bird-loving man’s early spring pleasures in this Southern country. I do not mean to praise the season unduly. New England can beat it when the time comes; at least, I know one New Englander who thinks so; but not in March.

TEXAS AND ARIZONA

IN OLD SAN ANTONIO

After three days and four nights in a sleeping-car it is good to breathe air again. Not that I mean to speak ill of the modern necessity known in railway offices as a “sleeper”; it has done me too many a service; but, for all that,--though it is a bridge that has carried me over,--well, as I said, it is a luxury to breathe air again.

So I thought this January afternoon as I sat upon the top rail (a pretty thin board) of a tall fence at the summit of what I take to be one of the highest elevations (it would be exceeding the truth, perhaps, to call it a hill) in the immediate neighborhood of this venerable but young and vigorous Texas city, known in geographies and gazetteers as San Antonio, but among railroad men, with whom time and breath are precious, as “San Antone.”

The city itself lay all before me, and an excellent showing it made, with its many stately and handsome buildings and its general air of prosperity; but for the most part my eyes traveled beyond it, or in other directions. The landscape was wide, whichever way I turned, and the transparency of the atmosphere, of a kind never enjoyed in New England except on some half-dozen days in a year, made it the wider and more alluring. It surprised me to see imposing public buildings scattered about over the country. The nearest must have been several miles from the town, and each, so far as I could see, stood entirely by itself. Here and there, also, miles apart, were fine dwelling-houses, with outbuildings and windmills; each, like the public institutions just mentioned, standing alone, as if its proprietor were also the proprietor of the entire tract of country roundabout. Rich men’s ranches, they should perhaps be called. All these, or most of them, would have been invisible from my fence-rail perch, but for the fact, which really made the strangeness of the whole spectacle to a New England man’s eyes, that the rolling land is all unwooded--a broad landscape, stretching away and away, north, south, east, and west, and no forest! The slopes look, at a little distance,--just as the one on which I was now sitting had looked to me half a mile back,--as if they might be planted with young peach orchards. They are really covered loosely with wild shrubs ten or fifteen feet high, now budded and in pale green leaf (Huisache, I understand their Mexican name to be,[9] though I may err in the spelling), with lower shrubs of different sorts, mostly thorny, scattered loosely among them, the whole constituting (or so I suppose) what is known in this part of the world as chaparral; which is very like what in our Northern country we speak of, less respectfully, as “scrub.”

It is a godsend to a man on my errand, that chaparral, as it grows about San Antonio, at all events, is not a dense thicket. It can be walked through or ridden through in all directions with perfect ease, though one cannot keep a straight course for more than a rod or two together.

I had been strolling over exactly such a hill half an hour before, circling one cluster of shrubs after another, opera-glass in hand, on the alert for any bird that might show itself (it was likely as not to be a stranger), when all at once--how it came about I shall never be able to tell--there, just before me on the ground, twenty or thirty feet away, stood one of the birds that I had most desired to see in this novel Southwestern world--a road-runner. I have found some puzzles since my arrival at San Antonio, three days ago, but this was not one of them. As our good common saying is, the fellow looked “as natural as life.” Mr. Fuertes’s drawing had stepped out of the book. I could have shouted with pleasure.

The bird was true to his name. There was no road, to be sure, but he knew what was expected of him, and started off at once at a lively trot; then, within ten or fifteen feet, he stopped short, lifted his ridiculously long tail till it stood at right angles with his body,--the white “thumb-marks” at the ends of the feathers making a brave show, in spite of the almost indecent absurdity of his attitude,--and after a moment started on again. Two or three times he repeated these manœuvres; and then, without my knowing how he did it, he escaped me altogether, although the bit of shrubbery into which he had vanished was only a few feet in diameter. “Never mind,” I thought, “I have seen him.” And he was every whit as oddly behaved a piece as my fancy had painted him.

The road-runner, it should be said, is an overgrown member of the cuckoo family. Its length from the tip of its bill to the end of its tail is about two feet. It wears what may be described as a frightened-looking crest, its plumage is conspicuously mottled, and, what gives it its special character, its tail is a foot long. As Mrs. Bailey well says, it is “one of the most original and entertaining of Western birds. The newcomer is amazed when the long-tailed creature darts out of the brush and races the horses down the road, easily keeping ahead as they trot, and when tired turns out into the brush and throws his tail over his back to stop himself.”

My bird’s performance was less theatrical than that, perhaps because I was on foot, perhaps because the day was Sunday, perhaps because of the absence of a thoroughfare; but I was well pleased.

It is noticeable how birds, not less than men, tend to become specialists. To accomplish one thing supremely well,--that is certainly the way to make one’s self famous. And that is what the road-runner does. He has chosen a hobby, and he rides it. His legs are proportionally no longer than other birds’, but that does not matter. Such as they are, he will make the most of them.

He is like a certain Maine farmer of whom I have heard, a plain tiller of the soil, who feels, nevertheless, that he was born for better things; not for a cart-horse, if you please, but for a race-horse. He may be working on his farm, at the plough, we will say; suddenly the impulse comes upon him, as inspiration is said to come upon a poet; there is nothing for it but he must start and run; and so he does. Once every summer he travels from Maine to Mount Washington, for the great event of the year. When he appears at the Summit House, every one knows what is to happen. So-and-so is going to run down the mountain. The daily newspaper chronicles his arrival and announces the hour of the annual event. Then, at the minute agreed upon, all hands gather before the door, a man appointed for the purpose holds the watch and gives the signal, and down the steep road starts the farmer, his invariable “tall hat” on his head, and his coat-tails flying. At the Half-Way House, and again at the base, his time is taken. If it is shorter than last year’s, so much the more glory. If it is longer,--well, he has run; and presumably, like Cincinnatus before him, he goes back to his plough contented.

The road-runner, I suspect (the running cuckoo!), is subject to the same irresistible ambulatory impulses, and by a curious coincidence he, too, wears what we may term a “tall hat.” I should like to see him racing down the Mount Washington road, putting on the brakes now and then, at the sharper turns, by a sudden cocking of his tail!

The temperature here--for temperature must always be mentioned in writing of one’s travels--has thus far been pretty comfortable for a walker, though not without something of the contradictoriness which seems to belong to weather conditions everywhere and always: roses in all the gardens, and steam in the radiators; children, black and white, paddling about in the mud barefooted and barelegged, and gentlemen with heavy overcoats on, and, not unlikely, collars turned up. Concerning such things, here in “San Antone,” you take your choice. For myself I have compromised the matter, keeping my boots on and wearing, except when the sun has been more than commonly persuasive, the lightest of spring overcoats.

The great drawback to a walking man’s comfort, and just now the most impressive “feature” of the city,--more impressive by far than the old Spanish missions, the most famous of which, the Alamo, is directly at my door,--has been the mud; deep and black, and more adhesive than glue. If you go outside the city your shoes gather it as a rolling snowball gathers snow (“to him that hath shall be given,” you repeat to yourself), and it is like one of the labors of Hercules to get it off. I walk about, scuffing and kicking, with pounds of it on either overshoe, like a dark fringe, and fancy I know how it feels to drag a ball and chain. However, conditions are bettering in this respect, and in any case, things might easily be worse. Yesterday morning, seeing the sky clouded, I remarked to the elevator boy on my way down to breakfast, that I believed it was going to rain; and I added, sententiously, “More rain, more mud.” “Yes,” said the boy, quick to resent an imputation upon the climate of Texas, “and the more rain, the better crops.” The State, it appears, has suffered greatly from drought for the past few seasons, and no doubt its people can well afford to play the mud-lark for a week now and then in winter. It makes a difference whether you are a selfish, pleasure-seeking tourist, thinking only of to-day’s comfort, or a man with his living to make out of a cotton plantation or a market garden.

For the present, if the tourist wishes, as I do, to walk in the country, he may do worse than betake himself to one of the numerous railroad tracks.[10] These have carried me into good places and shown me many interesting birds; but they would be more convenient if they were not walled in, mile after mile, except as a highway or a plantation road crosses them, by an excessively high and close barbed-wire fence. Yet even this hateful obstruction has served me one slight good turn.

A man of something like my own age and build was trudging along the track in front of me, a day or two ago (by his gait and general appearance he was used to trudging), when I saw him approach the fence as if he meant in some way to force a passage. “You’ll never do it,” I thought. Really, there seemed not to be space enough between the wires, even if they had not been barbed, for a human body to squeeze through; but to my astonishment the fellow slipped between them without the slightest fumbling or hesitation, and without so much as a barb’s touching him. He must have been a specialist, I am sure. I could not have followed suit without tearing my clothing to tatters, if all the wealth of the East, “barbaric pearl and gold,” had been spread out before my itching fingers on the farther side. I have not yet ceased wondering at the rogue’s address. Such practice as he must have had! I hope he was never in jail. It was like the neatest of Japanese jugglery, or the famous passage through the eye of a needle. Behold, said I, the compensations of poverty. No rich man could have done it.

The greater part of the passengers that one meets in such out-of-the-way places are short, swarthy Mexicans. Usually they are able to bid you “good-morning,” or to ask how you “do,” but now and then you will hear a “_buenos dias_.” In the city one finds them at every corner selling peculiar-looking confections. Whether one likes their wares or not,--and for myself, I must confess that “my own particular lip” has not yet made up its mind to try the experiment,--their presence gives one an agreeable sense of being far from home. Two days ago I was wandering about San Pedro Park at noon, and noticed for the first time a few butterflies on the wing. Most of them were much like our common yellow one,--evidently some species of Colias,--but by and by I noticed a dark one, showing a touch of red as it flew. I took chase, and came up with it just as it dropped to rest directly in front of two Mexicans seated upon the grass. I stepped near to see it (a common red admiral, for aught I could discover), and perceiving that the men were inquisitive, I pointed to it with my finger. One of them imitated the gesture, as much as to say “That, do you mean?” I nodded, and he said, with a smile, “_Mariposa_.” “Yes,” said I, “a butterfly.” That was beyond him, and he repeated his incomparably prettier word, “_mariposa_.” “Very good,” said I to myself, “I am glad to find that I understand Spanish when I hear it spoken!” A solitary traveler, of all men, should know how to amuse himself with trifles.

A BIRD-GAZER’S PUZZLES

The days of my youth have come back to me. I am again at the foot of the ladder, a boy in the primary school, a speller of a-b-abs. The experience is pleasant, but not unmixedly so; it is sweet, with a suggestion of bitter. I am finding out daily that one is never too old to be mistaken. I knew it before, of course; but I am still finding it out; for the two things are not incompatible. One may know a thing, and still have need to learn it. It is possible that the most erudite scholar has never more than begun to apprehend his own ignorance; nay, that he would never make more than a beginning in that salutary study were he to burn the midnight oil for a thousand years. In that time he might square the circle and discover the philosopher’s stone, but he would not discover how little he knew. In that respect, in respect to what we do not know, human capacity is unlimited. Finite creatures that we are, we are endowed with a kind of negative infinity. And, for one, I wish to make the most of my greatest gift. It shall not be “lodged with me useless,” if I can help it.

I saw a strange warbler the other day. That is to say, I thought I saw one. I had been wandering for a whole forenoon amid the chaparral just outside the city of San Antonio, and had enjoyed a good number of novel sensations, when suddenly (such things always come suddenly, but it seems necessary to repeat the word) a tiny bird moved in a low bush directly before me. “A gray warbler with no wing-marks,” I said; and the next instant I saw that its crown was light yellow. It moved again, and the forward parts came into view. Its throat also was yellow. At that moment it was eating a yellow berry. Its ground color was near the shade worn by a juvenile chestnut-sided warbler, and the yellow of the crown and throat was very lightly laid on over the gray, so to express it, just as it is in the chestnut-side’s case.

Now what kind of warbler can this be? I asked myself: a gray warbler with a yellow crown and a yellow throat, and no other adornments. And with the question there came into my mind, as by the effect of immediate inspiration, the word Calaveras. Whether it was Calaveras or something else, there could be no doubt of my being able to clear up the question, once I should have a book in my hand.

I resumed my peregrinations, therefore, the bird having moved on, as birds do, being provided with wings for that very purpose, and by and by, walking at a venture round one clump of bushes after another, I came again upon the stranger, who, it should be said, was of a peculiarly unsuspicious disposition, and this time was swallowing piecemeal what seemed to my New England mind a very unseasonable caterpillar. And now I made a further discovery: the shoulder of the bird’s wing was edged with a line of pretty bright red, of a shade between chestnut and carmine! Surely, it was only a matter of surviving to reach the hotel and the mystery would be solved. Calaveras or what not, it was impossible that there should be two warblers marked in this singular manner.

Well, I got back to my room, and sure enough, not only were there not two warblers thus marked, there was not even one. Calaveras was nothing to the purpose. My inspiration must have come from the wrong place. At any rate, it was unprofitable for instruction. It wasn’t far to go, you may say, but I was at my wits’ end.

That evening I had occasion to answer a letter from an eminent ornithologist, who has herself worked much in the Southwest, and besides has at her elbow the best of American bird collections. She would be able to help me out of my difficulty. In all innocence, therefore, I stated my case. It was possible, I admitted (thrice lucky admission--it is always politic to seem modest, however one may feel), that the bird was not a warbler, after all, though, if it were not, I had no idea what it could be.