Never before was a forest so green as that which this light penetrates till trunks and foliage bar it off. Never before were tree-trunks edged with such quivering rainbows and built of such corrugated gold. On any stump, once black and slimy with decay, now coruscating with jeweled light, might well sit a fairy with wand, transparent wings, and diaphanous garments of green and gold. You get to watch, breathless, for this as the rich circle slides on and on down the bank ahead or jumps like rainbowed lightning to another side or shoots far ahead along a straight stretch of river, perhaps firing with smokeless splendor some crazy dock or ancient river-bank house.
The scorching heat of the sun is gone and the river damp wraps all things in a coolness that is grateful to the wearied skin. The boat glides forward into white river mists, out of which fly wonderful winged creatures of the night. These, invisible in the darkness, become spirits of fire in the white shaft of the searchlight, up which they fly to the lantern itself, then vanish again. It is the moth and the flame, only there the moth is the flame itself, a winged, magical creature of gold, fluttering in a rainbow-tinted white light that has called it out of the black invisibility. It is no wonder that many of the travelers sit up all night. These have their reward, for they see the sudden sun flash all the white river mists with fire, through which they glide up to a magical city, which after all is only Jacksonville, the end of the route.
CHAPTER XXIV
HOLLY BLOSSOM TIME
A swoon of heat and blue tropic haze brings holly blossom time to northern Florida in mid-April. In this haze the distant shores of the St. Johns slip away until the silver gleam of the water seems to lift them and toss them over the horizon’s rim, out of sight, making a boundless sea of the placid river. The thermometer climbs with the day into the eighties and stays there till the sun is well on his way down again. The noon weather has the dog-day feel of a New England August and gives little invitation to exercise in the full sun.
It is then that one is apt to give thanks to the great oaks which grow upon all the high hammock land and whose glossy green leaves and pendent masses of gray moss shut out the sun. Here in a druidical twilight one may roam in safety and near-comfort following the quaint odor of the holly blooms to the trees themselves. The oaks are mighty of trunk but soon divide into proportionately mighty limbs that lean far over the road till the moss that swings down from them is like banners swung across city streets in holiday decorations. Often the wild grapes, now with tender, crinkle-edged leaves two-thirds grown, swing in stout ropes across the street too, from one oak to another, and all these are also hung with the moss flags till they make the gloom grayer and deeper and in spite of the festive suggestion one half expects in the duskier corners to see the stones, the flash of the sacrificial knife, and hear the eerie chant of the elder priests. It takes the cheerful holly to remove this impression.
Compared with the oaks the holly is a Noah’s ark tree, with one central shaft from roots to apex and numerous short, slender limbs that shape the outline into a modified cylinder. At Christmas time this cylinder was of dense, dark green with red berries giving it a ruddy glow in all shadows, as if ingle-nook embers glowed therein. The stiff, prickly-edged leaves stippled the whole into a delightful decoration that has become hallowed by conventional association.
Now the tree is different. The dark green of the Christmas foliage is still there, but from all twig tips have sprung shoots of new leaves that have not yet known their set prickers, but light the dark surface with a wayward sprinkling of tender color which is but the green of the old leaves grown joyous and youthful in the new. Sitting on the new wood are tiny clusters of flowers, each very prim and proper with four divisions of the white corolla, four stiff stamens set between and holding yellow heads at exact angles. All this should be as conventional as the Christmas decorations, but it is not. The waywardness of youth has got into the blood of the holly and the new sprigs are as jaunty and as airily conscious of the joy of living as any shrub you will find in a league of flat-woods and swamps.
Even the perfume of the holly blooms is wayward and just enough different in its originality to make you wonder if you will not come to dislike it, and then fall in love with it while you test it. The unobtrusiveness of the holly blooms is proof of their good taste, for this jaunty waywardness of the exultant spring does not appear till you come to know them well.
One looks in vain for the blooms of the jasmine in this region now. Six weeks ago they crowned all wild tangles with golden yellow and made cloth of gold all along the sunny forest aisles. Now all this bloom is gone and the jasmine, grown strangely wise and industrious, will do nothing in the fervid heat but climb in twining slenderness over new routes and plan flaunting displays of beauty for another winter-end. The wild cherokee roses, that shamed the gold with the purity of their white, have done better. There are hedgerows still starred with their beauty, but even these are passing and the stars are but single where once they marked a milky way of scintillant white. But the woods have other beauty to tempt the wayfarer into their aisles. In places they are green with the leaves of the partridge berry and the twin blossoms, I think a little larger than those I find on Northern hillsides in summer, send forth the same delicious scent.
In lower grounds the atamasco lilies have trooped forth to stroll here and there in the woodland shadows. Fairy lilies the people here call them, and Easter lilies. Fairy lilies they might well be. They spring from a bulb and show no leaves to the casual glance, only a dainty lily bloom that is pink in the bud, pure white in maturity, and pink again as it fades. The fairy lilies seem to thrive most where the cattlemen burn out the underbrush each winter. Their tender purity springing from the blackened stretches under the great pines is one of the dearest things imaginable. Sometimes you may stroll a mile with these stars tracing constellations on the dark vault at your feet.