litical sense) might have envied him his sunny temper,
joined, as it was, to a good stock of native shrewdness. For something
in his eye made it plain that, with all his other qualities, our merry
greenbacker was a reasonably competent hand at a bargain; so that I was
not in the least surprised when his seat-mate told me afterward, in a
tone of much respect, that the "Colonel" owned a very comfortable
property at St. Augustine. But his best possession, I still thought, was
his humor and his own generous appreciation of it. To enjoy one's own
jokes is to have a pretty safe insurance against inward adversity.

Happily, I say, this good-humored talker sat within hearing. Happily,
too, it was now--April 4--the height of the season for flowering
dogwood, pink azalea, fringe-bushes, Cherokee roses, and water lilies.
All these had blossomed abundantly, and mile after mile the wilderness
and the solitary place were glad for them. Here and there, also, I
caught flying glimpses of some unknown plant bearing a long upright
raceme of creamy-white flowers. It might be a white lupine, I thought,
till at one of our stops between stations it happened to be growing
within reach. Then I guessed it to be a _Baptisia_, which guess was
afterward confirmed--to my regret; for the flowers lost at once all
their attractiveness. So ineffaceable (oftenest for good, but this time
for ill) is an early impression upon the least honorably esteemed of the
five senses! As a boy, it was one of my tasks to keep down with a scythe
the weeds and bushes in a rocky, thin-soiled cattle pasture. In that
task,--which, at the best, was a little too much like work--my most
troublesome enemy was the common wild indigo (_Baptisia tinctoria_),
partly from the wicked pertinacity with which it sprang up again after
every mowing, but especially from the fact that the cut or bruised stalk
exhaled what in my nostrils was a most abominable odor. Other people do
not find it so offensive, I suspect, but to me it was, and is, ten times
worse than the more pungent but comparatively salubrious perfume which a
certain handsome little black-and-white quadruped--handsome, but
impolite--is given to scattering upon the nocturnal breeze in moments of
extreme perturbation.

Somewhere beyond the Suwanee River (at which I looked as long as it
remained in sight--and thought of Christine Nilsson) there came a sudden
change in the aspect of the country, coincident with a change in the
na