It was a long wait in the dreary little station; or rather it would have been, had not the tedium of it been relieved by the presence of a newly married couple, whose honeymoon was just then at the full. Their delight in each other was exuberant, effervescent, beatific,—what shall I say?—quite beyond veiling or restraint. At first I bestowed upon them sidewise and cornerwise glances only, hiding bashfully behind my spectacles, as it were, and pretending to see nothing; but I soon perceived that I was to them of no more consequence than a fly on the wall. If they saw me, which sometimes seemed doubtful,—for love is blind,—they evidently thought me too sensible, or too old, to mind a little billing and cooing. And they were right in their opinion. What was I in Florida for, if not for the study of natural history? And truly, I have seldom seen, even among birds, a pair less sophisticated, less cabined and confined by that disastrous knowledge of good and evil which is commonly understood to have resulted from the eating of forbidden fruit, and which among prudish people goes by the name of modesty. It was refreshing. Charles Lamb himself would have enjoyed it, and, I should hope, would have added some qualifying footnotes to a certain unamiable essay of his concerning the behavior of married people.
ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD.
One of my first inquiries at Tallahassee was for the easiest way to the woods. The city is built on a hill, with other hills about it. These are mostly under cultivation, and such woods as lay within sight seemed to be pretty far off; and with the mercury at ninety in the shade, long tramps were almost out of the question. "Take the St. Augustine road," said the man to whom I had spoken; and he pointed out its beginning nearly opposite the state capitol. After breakfast I followed his advice, with results so pleasing that I found myself turning that corner again and again as long as I remained in Tallahassee.
The road goes abruptly downhill to the railway track, first between deep red gulches, and then between rows of negro cabins, each with its garden of rosebushes, now (early April) in full bloom. The deep sides of the gulches were draped with pendent lantana branches full of purple flowers, or, more beautiful still, with a profusion of fragrant white honeysuckle. On the roadside, between the wheel-track and the gulch, grew brilliant Mexican poppies, with Venus's looking-glass, yellow oxalis, and beds of blackberry vines. The woods of which my informant had spoken lay a little beyond the railway, on the right hand of the road, just as it began another ascent. I entered them at once, and after a semicircular turn through the pleasant paths, amid live-oaks, water-oaks, red oaks, chestnut oaks, magnolias, beeches, hickories, hornbeams, sweet gums, sweet bays, and long-leaved and short-leaved pines, came out into the road again a quarter of a mile farther up the hill. They were the fairest of woods to stroll in, it seemed to me, with paths enough, and not too many, and good enough, but not too good; that is to say, they were footpaths, not roads, though afterwards, on a Sunday afternoon, I met two young fellows riding through them on bicycles. The wood was delightful, also, after my two months in eastern Florida, for lying on a slope, and for having an undergrowth of loose shrubbery instead of a jungle of scrub oak and saw palmetto. Blue jays and crested flycatchers were doing their best to outscream one another,—with the odds in favor of the flycatchers,—and a few smaller birds were singing, especially two or three summer tanagers, as many yellow-throated warblers, and a ruby-crowned kinglet. In one part of the wood, near what I took to be an old city reservoir, I came upon a single white-throated sparrow and a humming-bird,—the latter a strangely uncommon sight in Tallahassee, where, of all the places I have ever seen, it ought to find itself in clover. Here, too, were a pair of Carolina wrens, just now in search of a building-site, and conducting themselves exactly in the manner of bluebirds intent on such business; peeping into every hole that offered itself, and then, after the briefest interchange of opinion,—unfavorable on the female's part, if we may guess,—concluding to look a little farther.
As I struck the road again, a man came along on horseback, and we fell into conversation about the country. "A lovely country," he called it, and I agreed with him. He inquired where I was from, and I mentioned that I had lately been in southern Florida, and found this region a strong contrast. "Yes," he returned; and, pointing to the grass, he remarked upon the richness of the soil. "This yere land would fertilize that," he said, speaking of southern Florida. "I shouldn't wonder," said I. I meant to be understood as concurring in his opinion, but such a qualified, Yankeefied assent seemed to him no assent at all. "Oh, it will, it will!" he responded, as if the point were one about which I must on no account be left unconvinced. He told me that the fine house at which I had looked, a little distance back, through a long vista of trees, was the residence of Captain H., who owned all the land along the road for a good distance. I inquired how far the road was pretty, like this. "For forty miles," he said. That was farther than I was ready to walk, and coming soon to the top of the hill, or, more exactly, of the plateau, I stopped in the shade of a china-tree, and looked at the pleasing prospect. Behind me was a plantation of young pear-trees, and before me, among the hills northward, lay broad, cultivated slopes, dotted here and there with cabins and tall, solitary trees. On the nearer slope, perhaps a sixteenth of a mile away, a negro was ploughing, with a single ox harnessed in some primitive manner, —with pieces of wood, for the most part, as well as I could make out through an opera-glass. The soil offered the least possible hindrance, and both he and the ox seemed to be having a literal "walk-over." Beyond him—a full half-mile away, perhaps—another man was ploughing with a mule; and in another direction a third was doing likewise, with a woman following in his wake. A colored boy of seventeen—I guessed his age at twenty-three—came up the road in a cart, and I stopped him to inquire about the crops and other matters. The land in front of me was planted with cotton, he said; and the men ploughing in the distance were getting ready to plant the same. They hired the land and the cabins of Captain H., paying him so much cotton (not so much an acre, but so much a mule, if I understood him rightly) by way of rent. We talked a long time about one thing and another. He had been south as far as the Indian River country, but was glad to be back again in Tallahassee, where he was born. I asked him about the road, how far it went. "They tell me it goes smack to St. Augustine," he replied; "I ain't tried it." It was an unlikely story, it seemed to me, but I was assured afterward that he was right; that the road actually runs across the country from Tallahassee to St. Augustine, a distance of about two hundred miles. With company of my own choosing, and in cooler weather, I thought I should like to walk its whole length.[9] My young man was in no haste. With the reins (made of rope, after a fashion much followed in Florida) lying on the forward axle of his cart, he seemed to have put himself entirely at my service. He had to the full that peculiar urbanity which I began after a while to look upon as characteristic of Tallahassee negroes,—a gentleness of speech, and a kindly, deferential air, neither forward nor servile, such as sits well on any man, whatever the color of his skin.
In that respect he was like another boy of about his own age, who lived in the cabin directly before us, but whom I did not see till I had been several times over the road. Then he happened to be at work near the edge of the field, and I beckoned him to me. He, too, was serious and manly in his bearing, and showed no disposition to go back to his hoe till I broke off the interview,—as if it were a point of good manners with him to await my pleasure. Yes, the plantation was a good one and easily cultivated, he said, in response to some remark of my own. There were five in the family, and they all worked. "We are all big enough to eat," he added, quite simply. He had never been North, but had lately declined the offer of a gentleman who wished to take him there,—him and "another fellow." He once went to Jacksonville, but couldn't stay. "You can get along without your father pretty well, but it's another thing to do without your mother." He never meant to leave home again as long as his mother lived; which was likely to be for some years, I thought, if she were still able to do her part in the cotton-field. As a general thing, the colored tenants of the cabins made out pretty well, he believed, unless something happened to the crops. As for the old servants of the H. family, they did n't have to work,—they were provided for; Captain H.'s father "left it so in his testimonial." I spoke of the purple martins which were flying back and forth over the field with many cheerful noises, and of the calabashes that hung from a tall pole in one corner of the cabin yard, for their accommodation. On my way South, I told him, I had noticed these dangling long-necked squashes everywhere, and had wondered what they were for. I had found out since that they were the colored man's martin-boxes, and was glad to see the people so fond of the birds. "Yes," he said, "there's no danger of hawks carrying off the chickens as long as the martins are round."
Twice afterward, as I went up the road, I found him ploughing between the cotton rows; but he was too far away to be accosted without shouting, and I did not feel justified in interrupting him at his work. Back and forth he went through the long furrow after the patient ox, the hens and chickens following. No doubt they thought the work was all for their benefit. Farther away, a man and two women were hoeing. The family deserved to prosper, I said to myself, as I lay under a big magnolia-tree (just beginning to open its large white flowers) and idly enjoyed the scene. And it was just here, by the bye, that I solved an interesting etymological puzzle, to wit, the origin and precise meaning of the word "baygall,"—a word which the visitor often hears upon the lips of Florida people. An old hunter in Smyrna, when I questioned him about it, told me that it meant a swampy piece of wood, and took its origin, he had always supposed, from the fact that bay-trees and gall-bushes commonly grew in such places. A Tallahassee gentleman agreed with this explanation, and promised to bring home some gall-berries the next time he came across any, that I might see what they were; but the berries were never forthcoming, and I was none the wiser, till, on one of my last trips up the St. Augustine road, as I stood under the large magnolia just mentioned, a colored man came along, hat in hand, and a bag of grain balanced on his head.
"That's a large magnolia," said I.
He assented.