The great Florida heron that frequents my favorite swamp and with whom I am beginning to feel neighborly intimate takes on goblin traits with the rest of the witchery. Out in the shallows of the pearl river was a new stump, gray and waterworn, with a long branch sticking straight upward. Something uncanny about this stump made me watch it long. It was the deadest gray stump I ever saw, evidently a swollen cypress root with the bark long worn off. By and by this stump grew a head and the wood changed to gray-blue feathers in the twinkling of an eye. Thus goblins arrive from underground and dryads step from trees; but what should a rotten cypress stump produce? Here was a chimera of a bird with a neck three feet long, a bob of a head and a body like that of a gray goose that did not sit on the water but was suspended just above it as a mirage sits on the desert horizon, separated from everything by a gray mist of nothing. Then the bob of a head wiggled, turned, I suppose, and a big, sharp beak came into view, and my heron who was simply standing to the very top of his high, waterproof boots in water began to wade along.
Then I laughed, and I suppose that broke the spell, but it was enough to make anyone laugh, for the Florida heron, wading leg deep in the St. Johns River, has the same self-conscious dignity, the same absurd rhythmic hesitancy of motion as a wedding procession going up the aisle. I have seen a great many grooms wade in and I never saw anything a bit different.
The high road and high noon and I met in the heart of a pine wood where all things had forgotten the frost in a midsummer temperature, and short-horned grasshoppers made merry all about. In the thin treetops was no motion, not even the quiver of a bird’s wing. The long wood swooned in the golden haze that seemed impaled and held motionless on a thousand million spears of palmetto leaf points standing chin high, a motionless sea of deep green. The tall palmetto is a beautiful tree with the columnar trunk of a palm. It aspires and has sturdy dignity. The scrub palmetto crawls on its belly like a snake, its trunk strangely and horridly like one, though when you observe it closely enough you see that it roots all along this boa-constrictor trunk, as if it had changed its mind after all and decided to be an elephantine thousand-legged-worm. Then as if ashamed of its fallen and misshapen appearance it rears its head and spreads a great rosette of long-stalked, stiff green leaves to hide it all.
You can find no more distinctive Florida scene than this; the endless procession of rough-barked columnar trunks, topped with sparse limbs and tufted with needles a foot and more long, and beneath the lake of deep green, scrub palmetto with a surface infinitely diversified with the spatter of the split leaves. The three-foot stems of these leaves are so woody and the leaves themselves are so stiff that to ford the lake is difficult and your progress through the palmetto is accompanied by a wooden clatter that is like a parlor imitation of stage thunder.
Breathing deep the aroma of the pines, resting in the golden warmth and quiet of the place I saw little of wild life moving. All nature seems to take a mid-day siesta, even in winter, here. The place seemed to lend itself to dreams for which all the mystic witchery of the morning had prepared me. How deep into these I sank I cannot say, but I was aroused from them by the approach of a beast.
“The jabberwock with eyes of flame
Came whiffling through the tulgy wood
And burbled as he came.”
I think it was his burbling that I first noticed, a grumbling undertone as of something with a deep throat and very large teeth that talks to itself. Even here within twenty miles of Jacksonville, Florida, is yet a wilderness, criss-crossed with roads and spattered here and there with clearings, but yet a wilderness where deer and bear still linger. This sounded like a very large bear; one with a toothache and a morose disposition. I noticed for the first time a sort of path that crossed mine, an enlarged rabbit-run under the palmettos. Perhaps he was coming down that. I could hear the palmettos clatter in crescendo and the morose voice come rapidly nearer, and still I sat motionless. It is hard to believe in bears, until you have met a few. But I sat too long. Suddenly out of the path burst a black bulk, and I sprang to my feet with a shout of dismay. A big, black creature with a shambling gait, a long snout and little fierce eyes, was right upon me.
But my shout of dismay was nothing to the “woof” of terror and astonishment the jabberwock let out. He almost turned a somersault and, ignoring his path, went straight through the palmettos which waved about him, down the distance, with a noise like an anvil chorus played on many xylophones. It was really the biggest and fiercest razorback I have yet met. Razor-backs do not think it good to live alone. When they miss their fellows they gallop, mumbling and
