t, without
forethought or plan, I had dropped into the habit (and how pleasant it
is to think that some good habits _can_ be dropped into!) of making the
St. Augustine road my after-dinner sauntering-place. The morning was for
a walk: to Lake Bradford, perhaps, in search of a mythical ivory-billed
woodpecker, or westward on the railway for a few miles, with a view to
rare migratory warblers. But in the afternoon I did not walk,--I
loitered; and though I still minded the birds and flowers, I for the
most part forgot my botany and ornithology. In the cool of the day, then
(the phrase is an innocent euphemism), I climbed the hill, and after an
hour or two on the plateau strolled back again, facing the sunset
through a vista of moss-covered live-oaks and sweet gums. Those quiet,
incurious hours are among the pleasantest of all my Florida memories. A
cuckoo would be cooing, perhaps; or a quail, with cheerful ambiguity,--
such as belongs to weather predictions in general,--would be prophesying
"more wet" and "no more wet" in alternate breaths; or two or three
night-hawks would be sweeping back and forth high above the valley; or a
marsh hawk would be quartering over the big oatfield. The martins would
be cackling, in any event, and the kingbirds practicing their aerial
mock somersaults; and the mocking-bird would be singing, and the redbird
whistling. On the western slope, just below the oatfield, the Northern
woman who owned the pretty cottage there (the only one on the road) was
sure to be at work among her flowers. A laughing colored boy who did
chores for her (without injury to his health, I could warrant) told me
that she was a Northerner. But I knew it already; I needed no witness
but her beds of petunias. In the valley, as I crossed the railroad
track, a loggerhead shrike sat, almost of course, on the telegraph wire
in dignified silence; and just beyond, among the cabins, I had my choice
of mocking-birds and orchard orioles. And so, admiring the roses and the
pomegranates, the lantanas and the honeysuckles, or chatting with some
dusky fellow-pilgrim, I mounted the hill to the city, and likely as not
saw before me a red-headed woodpecker sitting on the roof of the State
House, calling attention to his patriotic self--in his tri-colored
dress--by occasional vigorous tattoos on the tinned ridgepole. I never
saw him there without gladness. The legislature had begun its session in
an economical mood,--as is more or less the h