My first stroll in Miami was taken under the pilotage of a lady who had already spent several winters here. In the course of it we came suddenly upon a colored man lying face downward in the grass, under a blazing sun, fast asleep. It was no uncommon happening, my friend remarked; she was always stumbling over such dusky sleepers. But in this Southern clime the luxury of physical inactivity is not appreciated by black people alone. I was walking away from the city at a rather brisk pace, one morning, when I passed a lonesome shanty. A white man sat upon the rude piazza, and another man and a boy stood near.
“Are you going to work to-day?” asked the boy of the occupant of the piazza.
“No,” was the answer, quick and pithy.
“Why not?”
“I ain’t got time.”
I laid the words up as a treasure; I do not expect to hear the philosophy of indolence more succinctly and pointedly stated if I live a thousand years.
But though we Northern visitors may sometimes envy our Southern brethren their gift of happy insouciance, it is not for our possessing. We were born under another star. Our lack is the precise opposite of theirs; even in our vacation hours we have seldom time to sit still.
So it happened that on a sultry, dog-day morning, with a south wind blowing, the sky partly clouded,—a comfort to the eyes,—the professor and the bird-gazer, after an early breakfast, set forth upon a reconnoissance of the Everglades. We took each a boat and an oarsman, planning to go up the Miami River, or rather its south branch, till we were among the “islands”—small pieces of hammock woods scattered amid the wilderness of saw-grass.
As each of us had his own boat, so each had his own errand, one botanical, the other lazily ornithological. The professor expected to see and learn much—especially about the adaptation of plants to their surroundings; his associate expected to see and learn little—little or nothing; and according to each man’s faith, so it was unto him.
For the first mile or so—as far as the tide runs, perhaps—the river is densely beset on either side by a shining green hedge of mangrove bushes, every branch sending down “aerial roots” of its own, till landing among them is an adventure hardly to be thought of. After the mangroves come taller hedges of the cocoa plum, leafier still, and equally shining.