a nest in a small
water-oak at the edge of the sidewalk, on a street corner, just beyond
the reach of passers-by. In the roadside trees--all freshly planted,
like the city--were myrtle warblers, prairie warblers, and blue
yellowbacks, the two latter in song. Once, after a shower, I watched a
myrtle bird bathing on a branch among the wet leaves. The street gutters
were running with sulphur water, but he had waited for rain. I commended
his taste, being myself one of those to whom water and brimstone is a
combination as malodorous as it seems unscriptural. Noisy boat-tailed
grackles, or "jackdaws," were plentiful about the lakeside, monstrously
long in the tail, and almost as large as the fish crows, which were
often there with them. Over the broad lake swept purple martins and
white-breasted swallows, and nearer the shore fed peacefully a few
pied-billed grebes, or dabchicks, birds that I had seen only two or
three times before, and at which I looked more than once before I made
out what they were. They had every appearance of passing a winter of
content. At the tops of three or four stakes, which stood above the
water at wide intervals,--and at long distances from the shore,--sat
commonly as many cormorants, here, as everywhere, with plenty of idle
time upon their hands. On the other side of the city were orange groves,
large, well kept, thrifty looking; the fruit still on the trees (March
20, or thereabouts), or lying in heaps underneath, ready for the boxes.
One man's house, I remember, was surrounded by a fence overrun with
Cherokee rosebushes, a full quarter of a mile of white blossoms.

My best botanical stroll was along one of the railroads (Sanford is a
"railway centre," so called), through a dreary sand waste. Here I picked
a goodly number of novelties, including what looked like a beautiful
pink chicory, only the plant itself was much prettier (_Lygodesmia_); a
very curious sensitive-leaved plant (_Schrankia_), densely beset
throughout with curved prickles, and bearing globes of tiny pink-purple
flowers; a calopogon, quite as pretty as our Northern _pulchellus_; a
clematis (_Baldwinii_), which looked more like a bluebell than a
clematis till I commenced pulling it to pieces; and a great profusion of
one of the smaller papaws, or custard-apples, a low shrub, just then
full of large, odd-shaped, creamy-white, heavy-scented blossoms. I was
carrying a sprig of it in my hand when I met a negro. "What is this?" I
as