yet seen, this
wood answered to my idea of a semi-tropical forest: live-oaks,
magnolias, palmettos, sweet gums, maples, and hickories, with here and
there a long-leaved pine overtopping all the rest. The palmettos, most
distinctively Southern of them all, had been badly used by their hardier
neighbors; they looked stunted, and almost without exception had been
forced out of their normal perpendicular attitude. The live-oaks, on the
other hand, were noble specimens; lofty and wide-spreading, elm-like in
habit, it seemed to me, though not without the sturdiness which belongs
as by right to all oaks, and seldom or never to the American elm.

What gave its peculiar tropical character to the wood, however, was not
so much the trees as the profusion of plants that covered them and
depended from them: air-plants (_Tillandsia_), large and small,--like
pineapples, with which they claim a family relationship,--the exuberant
hanging moss, itself another air-plant, ferns, and vines. The ferns, a
species of polypody ("resurrection ferns," I heard them called),
completely covered the upper surface of many of the larger branches,
while the huge vines twisted about the trunks, or, quite as often,
dropped straight from the treetops to the ground.

In the very heart of this dense, dark forest (a forest primeval, I
should have said, but I was assured that the ground had been under
cultivation so recently that, to a practiced eye, the cotton-rows were
still visible) stood a grove of wild orange-trees, the handsome fruit
glowing like lamps amid the deep green foliage. There was little other
brightness. Here and there in the undergrowth were yellow jessamine
vines, but already--March 11--they were past flowering. Almost or quite
the only blossom just now in sight was the faithful round-leaved
houstonia, growing in small flat patches in the sand on the edge of the
road, with budding partridge-berry--a Yankee in Florida--to keep it
company. Warblers and titmice twittered in the leafy treetops, and
butterflies of several kinds, notably one gorgeous creature in yellow
and black, like a larger and more resplendent Turnus, went fluttering
through the underwoods. I could have believed myself in the heart of a
limitless forest; but Florida hammocks, so far as I have seen, are
seldom of great extent, and the road presently crossed another railway
track, and then, in a few rods more, came out into the sunny pine-woods,
as one might emerge from a cat