ild-looking bird, if ever I saw one.

I was no sooner in St. Augustine, of course, than my eyes were open for
wild flowers. Perhaps I felt a little disappointed. Certainly the land
was not ablaze with color. In the grass about the old fort fhere was
plenty of the yellow oxalis and the creeping white houstonia; and from a
crevice in the wall, out of reach, leaned a stalk of goldenrod in full
bloom. The reader may smile, if he will, but this last flower was a
surprise and a stumbling-block. A vernal goldenrod! Dr. Chapman's Flora
made no mention of such an anomaly. Sow thistles, too, looked strangely
anachronistic. I had never thought of them as harbingers of springtime.
The truth did not break upon me till a week or so afterward. Then, on
the way to the beach at Daytona, where the pleasant peninsula road
traverses a thick forest of short-leaved pines, every tree of which
leans heavily inland at the same angle ("the leaning pines of Daytona,"
I always said to myself, as I passed), I came upon some white
beggar's-ticks,--like daisies; and as I stopped to see what they were,
I noticed the presence of ripe seeds. The plant had been in flower a
long time. And then I laughed at my own dullness. It fairly deserved a
medal. As if, even in Massachusetts, autumnal flowers--the groundsel,
at least--did not sometimes persist in blossoming far into the winter! A
day or two after this, I saw a mullein stalk still presenting arms, as
it were (the mullein, always looks the soldier to me), with one bright
flower. If I had found _that_ in St. Augustine, I flatter myself I
should have been less easily fooled.

There were no such last-year relics in the flat-woods, so far as I
remember, but spring blossoms were beginning to make their appearance
there by the middle of February, particularly along the
railroad,--violets in abundance (_Viola cucullata_), dwarf
orange-colored dandelions (_Krigia_), the Judas-tree, or redbud, St.
Peter's-wort, blackberry, the yellow star-flower (_Hypoxis juncea_), and
butterworts. I recall, too, in a swampy spot, a fine fresh tuft of the
golden club, with its gorgeous yellow spadix,--a plant that I had never
seen in bloom before, although I had once admired a Cape Cod "hollow"
full of the rank tropical leaves. St. Peter's-wort, a low shrub, thrives
everywhere in the pine barrens, and, without being especially
attractive, its rather sparse yellow flowers--not unlike the St.
John's-wort--do something to enliven