abit of legislatures, I
believe,--and was even considering a proposition to reduce the salary
and mileage of its members. Under such circumstances, it ought not to
have been a matter of surprise, perhaps, that no flag floated from the
cupola of the capitol. The people's money should not be wasted. And
possibly I should never have remarked the omission but for a certain
curiosity, natural, if not inevitable, on the part of a Northern
visitor, as to the real feeling of the South toward the national
government. Day after day I had seen a portly gentleman--with an air, or
with airs, as the spectator might choose to express it--going in and out
of the State House gate, dressed ostentatiously in a suit of Confederate
gray. He had worn nothing else since the war, I was told. But of course
the State of Florida was not to be judged by the freak of one man, and
he only a member of the "third house." And even when I went into the
governor's office, and saw the original "ordinance of secession" hanging
in a conspicuous place on the wall, as if it were an heirloom to be
proud of, I felt no stirring of sectional animosity, thorough-bred
Massachusetts Yankee and old-fashioned abolitionist as I am. A brave
people can hardly be expected or desired to forget its history,
especially when that history has to do with sacrifices and heroic deeds.
But these things, taken together, did no doubt prepare me to look upon
it as a happy coincidence when, one morning, I heard the familiar cry of
the red-headed woodpecker, for the first time in Florida, and looked up
to see him flying the national colors from the ridgepole of the State
House. I did not break out with "Three cheers for the red, white, and
blue!" I am naturally undemonstrative; but I said to myself that
_Melanerpes erythrocephalus_ was a very handsome bird.

ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLANTATION.

On one of my first jaunts into the suburbs of Tallahassee I noticed not
far from the road a bit of swamp,--shallow pools with muddy borders and
flats. It was a likely spot for "waders," and would be worth a visit. To
reach it, indeed, I must cross a planted field surrounded by a lofty
barbed-wire fence and placarded against trespassers; but there was no
one in sight, or no one who looked at all like a land-owner; and,
besides, it could hardly be accounted a trespass--defined by Blackstone
as an "_unwarranted_ entry on another's soil"--to step carefully over
the cotton rows on so legitim