un melody. It should
have been a house wren, I thought (another was singing close by), only
its tune was several times too long.

At least four of my longer excursions into the surrounding country
(long, not intrinsically, but by reason of the heat) were made with a
view to possible ivory-billed woodpeckers. Just out of the town
northward, beyond what appeared to be the court end of Marion Street,
the principal business street of the city, I had accosted a gentleman in
a dooryard in front of a long, low, vine-covered, romantic-looking
house. He was evidently at home, and not so busy as to make an
interruption probably intrusive. I inquired the name of a tree, I
believe. At all events, I engaged him in conversation, and found him
most agreeable--an Ohio gentleman, a man of science, who had been in the
South long enough to have acquired large measures of Southern
_insouciance_ (there are times when a French word has a politer sound
than any English equivalent), which takes life as made for something
better than worry and pleasanter than hard work. He had seen
ivory-bills, he said, and thought I might be equally fortunate if I
would visit a certain swamp, about which he would tell me, or, better
still, if I would go out to Lake Bradford.

First, because it was nearer, I went to the swamp, taking an early
breakfast and setting forth in a fog that was almost a mist, to make as
much of the distance as possible before the sun came out. My course lay
westward, some four miles, along the railway track, which, thanks to
somebody, is provided with a comfortable footpath of hard clay covering
the sleepers midway between the rails. If all railroads were thus
furnished they might be recommended as among the best of routes for
walking naturalists, since they go straight through the wild country.
This one carried me by turns through woodland and cultivated field,
upland and swamp, pine land and hammock; and, happily, my expectations
of the ivory-bill were not lively enough to quicken my steps or render
me heedless of things along the way.

Here I was equally surprised and delighted by the sight of yellow
jessamine still in flower more than a month after I had seen the end of
its brief season, only a hundred miles further south. So great,
apparently, is the difference between the peninsula and this Tallahassee
hill-country, which by its physical geography seems rather to be a part
of Georgia than of Florida. Here, too, the pink azale