How they soar, as if to see which shall go highest! And as high as the oak branches go, so high the gray moss follows.
Now I am at the fork of the road. My course is to the right. “Old Stage Road to Buckhead Bluff on the Tomoka River at the crossing of the ‘old King’s road’ to St. Augustine.” So the guideboard reads, with commendable particularity. “Old” is the word. Even the wind in the tree-tops seems to be whispering stories of things that happened long, long ago. And the trees answer, “Yes, so the fathers have told us.” To think of all those busy people! And every one of them dead!
Here is a bit of clearing where the sun strikes in. It feels good. This is the right kind of outdoor weather—shade not uncomfortable and the sun’s heat welcome. A white-eyed chewink, happy Floridian, is whistling from the brush. Holly trees are common, and the sweet-bay is everywhere. Its shining leaves are of a most salubrious odor, as if they might be for the healing of the nations. I am continually plucking them and rolling them in my fingers.
And yonder is the maker of the clearing—a colored man, standing beside a woodpile. I hail him to remark that it is a fine day, and he answers, “Yes, very nice.” Strange that when two men meet for the only time in their lives they should find nothing more important to communicate than that it rains, or that the sun is shining. But weather is the thing, after all, especially in Florida. Perhaps it deserves all that is said about it. Anyhow, the woodcutter and the stroller have expressed a feeling of neighborliness and have told each other no lies.
With every rod the wood changes from glory to glory. I remark with special joy a grove of tall, slender, smooth-barked water-oaks, every one in new leaf. Height rather than girth is their aim. “We must have the sun,” they say, “and we climb to get it.” How good the sun is, let their leaves testify; those millions on millions of shining leaves, every one new. Yes, every one new. I cannot write the word too often. And many times as I write it, the Northern reader will have but an insufficient sense of its meaning. Such freshness and greenness! Neither memory nor imagination can body it forth. Happy are the eyes that behold the miracle twice in a single spring. It is like doubling one’s year.
A Carolina wren whistles, near at hand, but invisible (invisibility is the wren’s trick), and a red-eyed vireo, farther away, has begun his reiterative, summer-long exhortation. I was taken by surprise, two or three days ago, when I heard the first of his kind in this same hammock; I was not looking for him so early. His irrepressible cousin, the white-eye, has been abundantly vocal for at least two months. At this very minute one is rehearsing a strain with a pretty and decidedly original quirk at the end. And, by the by, I notice that many white-eyes hereabout practice a deceptive imitation of the crested flycatcher’s loud whistle, while others, or perhaps the same ones, sometimes begin with a broken measure, such as I think I never heard from a Massachusetts white-eye, strongly suggestive of the summer tanager. Call him pert, saucy, a chatter-box, Old Volubility, what you will, the white-eye is indisputably a genius.
But for to-day, and for me, none of the birds sing quite so feelingly or so well as the wind in the tree-tops. I stop again and again to listen to it, and would stop oftener still but for the brevity of the afternoon and the uncertainty I am in as to the length of the walk before me.
Hickory nuts, split in halves and lying blackened in the sand, lead me to look upward. Yes, there are the trees, still with bare boughs. Their tender leafage does well to be late in sprouting, even in this Southern country. There is no tree but knows a thing or two. Every kind has a wisdom of its own. Experientia docet is true of them as of us.
And now I suddenly find myself nearing the railroad, and having consulted my watch conclude to go back over the sleepers. It will be my shortest course, and will have the further advantage of taking me past a swamp, on the edge of which I caught glimpses of sora rails a few days ago. This time I will be more cautious in my approaches.
A cardinal is whistling, a checkerback is chattering, many warblers are in the sunny tree-tops, and from somewhere in the depths of the forest comes the deep, oracular voice of an owl, though the sun is at least half an hour high. Whoo, whoo, who-who, he calls. I love to hear him. On the wire fence is a yellow jessamine vine, still sporting a few last blossoms, and for rods together the sandy railway embankment is draped with exquisite white “bramble roses,” the flowers of the creeping blackberry. Later comers will find berries on the vines, but perhaps I have the better part of the crop.