hen between rows of negro cabins, each with its garden
of rosebushes, now (early April) in full bloom. The deep sides of the
gulches were draped with pendent lantana branches full of purple
flowers, or, more beautiful still, with a profusion of fragrant white
honeysuckle. On the roadside, between the wheel-track and the gulch,
grew brilliant Mexican poppies, with Venus's looking-glass, yellow
oxalis, and beds of blackberry vines. The woods of which my informant
had spoken lay a little beyond the railway, on the right hand of the
road, just as it began another ascent. I entered them at once, and after
a semicircular turn through the pleasant paths, amid live-oaks,
water-oaks, red oaks, chestnut oaks, magnolias, beeches, hickories,
hornbeams, sweet gums, sweet bays, and long-leaved and short-leaved
pines, came out into the road again a quarter of a mile farther up the
hill. They were the fairest of woods to stroll in, it seemed to me, with
paths enough, and not too many, and good enough, but not too good; that
is to say, they were footpaths, not roads, though afterwards, on a
Sunday afternoon, I met two young fellows riding through them on
bicycles. The wood was delightful, also, after my two months in eastern
Florida, for lying on a slope, and for having an undergrowth of loose
shrubbery instead of a jungle of scrub oak and saw palmetto. Blue jays
and crested flycatchers were doing their best to outscream one
another,--with the odds in favor of the flycatchers,--and a few smaller
birds were singing, especially two or three summer tanagers, as many
yellow-throated warblers, and a ruby-crowned kinglet. In one part of the
wood, near what I took to be an old city reservoir, I came upon a single
white-throated sparrow and a humming-bird,--the latter a strangely
uncommon sight in Tallahassee, where, of all the places I have ever
seen, it ought to find itself in clover. Here, too, were a pair of
Carolina wrens, just now in search of a building-site, and conducting
themselves exactly in the manner of bluebirds intent on such business;
peeping into every hole that offered itself, and then, after the
briefest interchange of opinion,--unfavorable on the female's part, if
we may guess,--concluding to look a little farther.

As I struck the road again, a man came along on horseback, and we fell
into conversation about the country. "A lovely country," he called it,
and I agreed with him. He inquired where I was from, and I mentioned
t