Now, alas, Florida seems very far off. I am never likely to walk again under those New Smyrna live-oaks, nor to see again all that beauty of the Hillsborough. And yet, in a truer and better sense of the word, I do see it, and shall. What a heavenly light falls at this moment on the river and the island woods! Perhaps we must come back to Wordsworth, after all,—
"The light that never was, on sea or land."
A MORNING AT THE OLD SUGAR MILL.[7]
On the third or fourth day of my sojourn at the Live Oak Inn, the lady of the house, noticing my peripatetic habits, I suppose, asked whether I had been to the old sugar mill. The ruin is mentioned in the guide-books as one of the historic features of the ancient settlement of New Smyrna, but I had forgotten the fact, and was thankful to receive a description of the place, as well as of the road thither,—a rather blind road, my informant said, with no houses at which to inquire the way.
Two or three mornings afterward, I set out in the direction indicated. If the route proved to be half as vague as my good lady's account of it had sounded, I should probably never find the mill; but the walk would be pleasant, and that, after all, was the principal consideration, especially to a man who just then cared more, or thought he did, for a new bird or a new song than for an indefinite number of eighteenth-century relics.
For the first half-mile the road follows one of the old Turnbull canals dug through the coquina stone which underlies the soil hereabout; then, after crossing the railway, it strikes to the left through a piece of truly magnificent wood, known as the cotton-shed hammock, because, during the war, cotton was stored here in readiness for the blockade runners of Mosquito Inlet. Better than anything I had yet seen, this wood answered to my idea of a semi-tropical forest: live-oaks, magnolias, palmettos, sweet gums, maples, and hickories, with here and there a long-leaved pine overtopping all the rest. The palmettos, most distinctively Southern of them all, had been badly used by their hardier neighbors; they looked stunted, and almost without exception had been forced out of their normal perpendicular attitude. The live-oaks, on the other hand, were noble specimens; lofty and wide-spreading, elm-like in habit, it seemed to me, though not without the sturdiness which belongs as by right to all oaks, and seldom or never to the American elm.
What gave its peculiar tropical character to the wood, however, was not so much the trees as the profusion of plants that covered them and depended from them: air-plants (Tillandsia), large and small,—like pineapples, with which they claim a family relationship, —the exuberant hanging moss, itself another air-plant, ferns, and vines. The ferns, a species of polypody ("resurrection ferns," I heard them called), completely covered the upper surface of many of the larger branches, while the huge vines twisted about the trunks, or, quite as often, dropped straight from the treetops to the ground.
In the very heart of this dense, dark forest (a forest primeval, I should have said, but I was assured that the ground had been under cultivation so recently that, to a practiced eye, the cotton-rows were still visible) stood a grove of wild orange-trees, the handsome fruit glowing like lamps amid the deep green foliage. There was little other brightness. Here and there in the undergrowth were yellow jessamine vines, but already —March 11—they were past flowering. Almost or quite the only blossom just now in sight was the faithful round-leaved houstonia, growing in small flat patches in the sand on the edge of the road, with budding partridge-berry—a Yankee in Florida—to keep it company. Warblers and titmice twittered in the leafy treetops, and butterflies of several kinds, notably one gorgeous creature in yellow and black, like a larger and more resplendent Turnus, went fluttering through the underwoods. I could have believed myself in the heart of a limitless forest; but Florida hammocks, so far as I have seen, are seldom of great extent, and the road presently crossed another railway track, and then, in a few rods more, came out into the sunny pine-woods, as one might emerge from a cathedral into the open day. Two men were approaching in a wagon (except on Sunday, I am not certain that I ever met a foot passenger in the flat-woods), and I improved the opportunity to make sure of my course. "Go about fifty yards," said one of them, "and turn to the right; then about fifty yards more, and turn to the left. That road will take you to the mill." Here was a man who had traveled in the pine lands,—where, of all places, it is easy to get lost and hard to find yourself,—and not only appreciated the value of explicit instructions, but, being a Southerner, had leisure enough and politeness enough to give them. I thanked him, and sauntered on. The day was before me, and the place was lively with birds. Pine-wood sparrows, pine warblers, and red-winged blackbirds were in song; two red-shouldered hawks were screaming, a flicker was shouting, a red-bellied woodpecker cried kur-r-r-r, brown-headed nuthatches were gossiping in the distance, and suddenly I heard, what I never thought to hear in a pinery, the croak of a green heron. I turned quickly and saw him. It was indeed he. What a friend is ignorance, mother of all those happy surprises which brighten existence as they pass, like the butterflies of the wood. The heron was at home, and I was the stranger. For there was water near, as there is everywhere in Florida; and subsequently, in this very place, I met not only the green heron, but three of his relatives,—the great blue, the little blue, and the dainty Louisiana, more poetically known (and worthy to wear the name) as the "Lady of the Waters."
On this first occasion, however, the green heron was speedily forgotten; for just then I heard another note, unlike anything I had ever heard before,—as if a great Northern shrike had been struck with preternatural hoarseness, and, like so many other victims of the Northern winter, had betaken himself to a sunnier clime. I looked up. In the leafy top of a pine sat a boat-tailed grackle, splendidly iridescent, engaged in a musical performance which afterward became almost too familiar to me, but which now, as a novelty, was as interesting as it was grotesque. This, as well as I can describe it, is what the bird was doing. He opened his bill,—set it, as it were, wide apart,—and holding it thus, emitted four or five rather long and very loud grating, shrikish notes; then instantly shook his wings with an extraordinary flapping noise, and followed that with several highly curious and startling cries, the concluding one of which sometimes suggested the cackle of a robin. All this he repeated again and again with the utmost fervor. He could not have been more enthusiastic if he had been making the sweetest music in the world. And I confess that I thought he had reason to be proud of his work. The introduction of wing-made sounds in the middle of a vocal performance was of itself a stroke of something like genius. It put me in mind of the firing of cannons as an accompaniment to the Anvil Chorus. Why should a creature of such gifts be named for his bodily dimensions, or the shape of his tail? Why not Quiscalus gilmorius, Gilmore's grackle?