the big, handsome, harmless reptile; "nobody shoots black
snakes or buzzards here. Slip your gun back quickly or Gray will
torment you."

However, Gray had seen, and kept up a running fire of sarcastic comment
which made Hamil laugh and Shiela indignant.

And so they rode along through the rich afternoon sunshine, now under
the clustered pines, now across glades where wild doves sprang up into
clattering flight displaying the four white feathers, or pretty little
ground doves ran fearlessly between the horses' legs.

Here and there a crimson cardinal, crest lifted, sat singing deliciously
on some green bough; now and then a summer tanager dropped like a live
coal into the deeper jungle. Great shiny blue, crestless jays flitted
over the scrub; shy black and white and chestnut chewinks flirted into
sight and out again among the heaps of dead brush; red-bellied
woodpeckers, sticking to the tree trunks, turned their heads calmly;
gray lizards, big, ugly red-headed lizards, swift slender lizards with
blue tails raced across the dry leaves or up tree trunks, making even
more fuss and clatter than the noisy cinnamon-tinted thrashers in the
underbrush.

Every step into the unknown was a new happiness; there was no silence
there for those who could hear, no solitude for those who could see. And
he was riding into it with a young companion who saw and heard and loved
and understood it all. Nothing escaped her; no frail air plant trailing
from the high water oaks, no school of tiny bass in the shallows where
their horses splashed through, no gopher burrow, no foot imprint of the
little wild things which haunt the water's edge in forests.

Her eyes missed nothing; her dainty close-set ears heard all--the short,
dry note of a chewink, the sweet, wholesome song of the cardinal, the
thrilling cries of native jays and woodpeckers, the heavenly outpoured
melody of the Florida wren, perched on some tiptop stem, throat swelling
under the long, delicate, upturned bill.

Void of self-consciousness, sweetly candid in her wisdom, sharing her
lore with him as naturally as she listened to his, small wonder that to
him the wilderness was paradise, and she with her soft full voice, a
native guide. For all around them lay an enchanted world as young as
they--the world is never older than the young!--and they "had eyes and
they saw; ears had they and they heard"--but not the dead echoes of that
warning voice, alas! calling through the ancient