conversational notes, followed presently by loud drumming on a resonant
stub or branch. I thought of what I have heard preachers say, that
Heaven is a state, not a place.

Pileated woodpeckers are birds good to look at, and, wild as they
look, it is pleasant to find them so approachable. But in fact, this
is most productive woodpecker country. Here are flickers in abundance,
red-bellies almost as many, and along with them the red-headed, the
red-cockaded (in the pine lands), the yellow-bellied (least common of
all), the downy, and the hairy; all, in short, that could be expected,
with the exception of the ivory-billed; and (such is human nature) I
would give more to see him than all the rest together.

Well, I will not wish time away, as the saying is. I begin to perceive
that I have none to spare. But I shall rejoice when some morning I go
out and find the conductor’s arm lifted, and the chorus minding the
beat.

PERIPATETIC BOTANY

When I called upon my friend the entomologist, a few evenings ago,
she informed me that she had passed a very exciting day. While out on
her usual insect-collecting expedition, along the bay shore, she had
come suddenly upon an unknown plant growing among the mangrove bushes.
A glance at the blossom showed that it must belong to the mallow
family, and on getting back to the hotel and consulting the manual, she
determined it at once as _Pavonia racemosa_,--“Miami and Key Biscayne.”
Every collector knows the pleasure of discovering a plant or other
specimen, the known habitat of which is entitled to this kind of exact
specification.

“Very good,” said I, when she had finished the story, “I shall go down
to-morrow and look at _Pavonia racemosa_ for myself.”

The next afternoon, therefore, saw me at the place; but it appeared
that I had not sufficiently attended to my friend’s instructions.
At all events, I could find nothing that looked like a _Malva_. In
a country so richly and strangely furnished as this, however, a
visitor cannot turn his eyes in any direction without putting them
upon something he never saw before; and so it happened that while I
hunted vainly for one thing I found another and better; or if it was
not better in itself, it was more unexpected and interesting. This
was a shrub, or small tree, bearing large, glossy, coriaceous leaves,
clustered near the ends of the branches, from which depended long,
smooth, pear-shaped or gourd-shaped buds. More careful search revealed
a few faded flowers and a large pendent green fruit. And then, ten
minutes afterward, as I was starting away, my eyes fell upon a clump of
the rare _Pavonia_.

With that, of course, there was no room for difficulty. I had only to
compare the specimen with the printed description, and check the name.
But as for the strange shrub, of which I had bud, blossom, fruit, and
leaf (what more could a man desire?), with that I was fairly beaten.
Even a methodical, schoolboyish use of the “key” was without result.
The signs brought me, or seemed to bring me, to the Bignonia family,
and there came to nothing.

Happily a professor of botany in one of our great universities had
arrived in town within the last twenty-four hours, and after supper I
invited him to my room to help me with the puzzle. He set about the
work just as I had done, only after a more workmanlike fashion, and
him also the key led to the _Bignoniaceæ_, but no farther. As the
common saying is, the trail had “run up a tree.” In short, with all the
facts before us,--leaves, buds, blossom, fruit,--we were stumped. “It
is some representative of the Bignonia family not included in Chapman’s
Flora,” was the professor’s final verdict.

The next forenoon we had agreed to spend together in the big hammock,
through which I had been sauntering by myself for the past five weeks.
We should pass the Agricultural Experiment Station on the way, and I
determined to carry the troublesome specimen along and submit it to
the professor in charge. So said, so done; but as we stopped at the
post office, there stood the man himself at the door. “What is this?”
I asked, scarcely waiting to bid him good-morning. “_Crescentia_,”
he answered promptly, “a plant of the Bignonia family.” So the other
professor had been exactly right.

And now for the more dramatic part of the story. The day before--at
noon of the day on which I found the plant in question--I received a
letter from a Boston friend, himself a university professor of botany,
to whom I had written, begging him to quit his desk, like a reasonable
man, and join me in this botanical paradise. He replied that he could
not come, and furthermore, that he wasn’t so very sorry. New England
winter is to him a constant refreshment and exhilaration, it appears.
Happy New Englander! “To-day is simply perfect,” he wrote, “and you
can’t beat it in Miami.” As to that point I reserve my opinion. “How
changed the place must be from what it was when I was there in the
’80’s,” he continued. “No railroad then within hundreds of miles, and
none of your modern improvements. It is a great place for plants. I
shan’t forget how delighted I was to find _Crescentia cucurbitina_ in
flower. I had searched the whole range of Keys for it in vain.”

This very plant, of the existence of which I had never before heard,
I had found, without knowing it, within two hours after receiving my
friend’s letter.[6]

Winter botanizing by newcomers, in a country so foreign as this,
where much the greater part of the shrubs and trees are West Indian,
with no better help than Chapman’s Flora, is carried on under almost
discouraging difficulties. “If we only had the blossoms!” the professor
is continually exclaiming. And his pupil responds, “Yes, if we only
had!” As it is, we content ourselves with finding out a few things
daily, guessing at characters and relationships (no very bad practice,
by the way), running down all sorts of clues, real or imaginary, like
detectives on the hunt for a murderer, and even asking questions
freely of chance passers-by, especially of the numerous class known
by the white people hereabout as “Bahama niggers.” They, rather than
their pale-faced superiors, seem to be observant of natural things.
It is likely, too, that they or their forbears may have brought some
traditionary knowledge of such matters from the islands where the
plants are more at home. At all events, it is pleasant to notice how
ready even the black children are, not only to answer questions, but to
ask them as well, about any flowers that one happens to be carrying.

The other day I came suddenly upon a bush, the like of which I had
seen and wondered over a hundred times since my arrival in Miami,
remarking especially the highly peculiar, almost perpendicular carriage
of its innumerable thick, brightly varnished leaves, a device, as the
professor had suggested, for protecting them against the vertical
rays of the sun. I had never seen either fruit or blossom, but here,
on this particular plant, my eye fell upon a few scattered purplish
drupes. Now, then, here was something to go upon. Now, possibly, with a
sprinkling more of good luck, I might find the name of the bush. I was
a mile or two from town, on the road to Alapattah Prairie, where there
are many truck farms. A white man came along, one of the “truckers,”
driving homeward from the city.

“Do you know what this is?” I inquired, showing him the specimen.

“No, sir,” he answered.

Soon I met another man, and proposed to him the same question, with the
same result. A third attempt was no more successful. Then I overtook
two colored men talking beside a quarry.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but can you tell me the name of this plant?”

“Yes, sir, it is cocoa plum,” answered one of them; and the other said,
“Yes, cocoa plum.”

And so it was; for on referring to the manual I found the bush fully
described under that name.

Another experiment in this kind of putting myself to school, it is fair
to add, was less in the Bahama colored man’s favor. A tourist whom I
happened upon resting beside the hammock road held in his hand two or
three twigs, from each of which depended a large, stony, pear-shaped
fruit, and seeing me curious about the novelty, he kindly offered me
one. This, also, I forthwith carried into the city, stopping passengers
by the way--like a natural-historical Socrates--to ask them about it.
No one, white or black, could tell me anything till in a fruit shop
I questioned a white boy. “It’s a seven-year apple,” he said. “Some
foolish local name,” I thought. At all events it could do me no good,
since it was not to be found in Chapman’s index. But that evening, on
my showing the specimen to the entomologist, and telling her what the
boy had said, she replied, “Certainly, that is right. The plant is
_Genipa_, or seven-year apple.” And under the word “Genipa” I found it
so spoken of in the Standard Dictionary. There the fruit is said to
be edible, which seems to disprove the conjecture of another lady to
whom I had shown it, that it derives its name from the fact that it
would take an eater seven years to digest it. Apples, like men, are not
fairly to be judged in the green state.

I have said that this guessing at characters and relationships is not
a bad discipline. And no more is it the worst of fun. Of this I had
only two days ago a strikingly happy proof. Everywhere in the hammock
there grows a tall tree, noticeable for the peculiar color of its bark
and its channeled and often fantastically contorted trunk. The leafy
branches are always far overhead (a necessity in so crowded a place),
and I had seen the purplish, globular drupes only as they had dropped
one by one to the ground. At every opportunity I had made inquiries
about the tree, but had received no light, nor, after much searching,
had either the professor or myself been able to hit upon so much as a
plausible conjecture as to its identity. Well, two days ago, as I say,
we were walking together on the outskirts of the city, when we came to
a tree of this kind growing in the open, the fruit-bearing branches of
which hung within reach. We pulled one of them down, and I exclaimed at
once, “Why, this should be related to the sea-grape!”--a most curious
West Indian tree (_Coccoloba uvifera_, a member of the buckwheat
family!) which grows freely along the shore of Biscayne Bay. “See the
fruit,” said I, “for all the world like a bunch of grapes.” With that
we began a detailed examination, and, to make a long story short, the
tree proved to be another species of _Coccoloba_--_C. Floridana_.

That was pretty good guessing, based as it was on nothing better than
an “external character,” as the professor rather slightingly called it.
For five weeks my curiosity had been exercised over the puzzle, and in
five seconds I had found the needed clue. Who will say that this was
not better and more interesting, and withal more instructive, than to
have been told the tree’s name on the first day I saw it?

A PEEP AT THE EVERGLADES

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.

“Aren’t you glad you know what this bush is?” I shouted downstream to
the professor.

“Indeed I am,” he shouted back.

Without this knowledge, which we had acquired within a few days, by a
kind of accident, as before related, our present state of mind would
have been pitiable. We were surprised to find the plant so fond of
water, having noticed it heretofore in comparatively dry situations.
Another example of the extreme adaptability of tropical plants, the
professor remarked.

By and by we came to the first cypress trees, the only ones I have seen
in this all but swampless Miami neighborhood; beautiful in their new
dress of living green. I rejoiced at the sight. Under one of them we
landed, admiring the “knees” that its roots had sent up till the ground
was studded with them. These, the professor tells me (it is nothing
new, by his account of the matter, but it is new to me), are believed
to serve as breathing or aerating organs, supplying to the tree the
oxygen for lack of which, standing in water, as it mostly does, it
would otherwise drown. All visitors to Florida are impressed by the
beauty and majesty of the cypress, and many have no doubt puzzled
themselves over the meaning of these strange, apparently useless
protuberances--as if nature had attempted something and failed--that
are so constantly found underneath. “They never do grow to be trees,”
my boatman said.

It was at this point, as nearly as I remember, that the stream grew
narrow and shallow at once, till behold, we were laboring up what might
fairly be called rapids. Here, between the awkward crowding of the
banks and the swiftness of the current (it was good, I said to myself,
to see water actually _running_ in Florida), the men were certainly
earning their money. Fortunately, both proved equal to the task. Then
a bend in the stream took us away from the neighborhood of the trees
(not until, in one of the cypresses, I had remarked my first Miami
nuthatch--a white-breast), and into the very midst of the saw-grass.
This densely growing, sharp-edged, appropriately named grass, higher
than a man’s head, standing to-day in two or three feet of water, is
said to cover the Everglades. It must render them a frightful place in
which to lose one’s way. “I should rather be lost at sea in a rowboat,”
my oarsman declared.

All this while, of course, I had kept a lookout for birds, but, as I
had expected, to comparatively little purpose. No doubt there were many
about us, but not for our finding. The shallower and quieter edges of
the river were covered here and there with broad leaves of the yellow
lily, among which should have been at least a chance gallinule, it
seemed to me; but neither gallinule nor rail showed itself. Here,
as everywhere, buzzards and vultures were sailing overhead. Many
white-breasted swallows, too, went hawking over the grass, and once a
purple martin passed near me. Better still, he allowed me, in one brief
note, to hear his welcome voice. Like the new leaves of the cypress, it
prophesied of spring.

At intervals a heron of one kind or another started up far in advance.
One was snow-white, but whether I was to call it an immature little
blue heron or a white egret was more than could be made sure of at
my distance. I recall, too, a flock of ducks, a cormorant or two,
speeding through the air after their usual headlong manner, a solitary
red-winged blackbird, astray from the flock, and the cries of killdeer
plovers. Kingfishers were not infrequent, two or three ospreys came
into sight, and once, at least, I made sure of a Louisiana heron. A
lean showing, certainly, for what might have been thought so promising
a place.

And now, as the grass grew shorter, so that we could survey the world
about us, the water of a sudden turned shallow. The professor’s
flat-bottomed boat still floated prosperously, but my own heavier,
keeled craft speedily touched bottom. The rower put down the oars, took
off his shoes and stockings, rolled up his trousers, and proceeded to
lighten the boat of his weight, and drag it forward. This expedient
answered for a rod or two. Then we stuck fast again, and the passenger
followed his boatman’s example and took to the water. So we followed
along, the water now deeper, now shallower, the bottom hard and slimy,
till after a little we were at the end of our rope. If we were to go
farther we must leave the boat behind us.

This was hardly worth while, especially as even in that way we could
not hope to proceed far enough to see anything different from what we
had seen already. “We will go back,” I said, “drifting with the current
and stopping by the way.” And so we did, my boatman and I, leaving the
professor--who, as it turned out, went but a few rods beyond us--to
pursue his investigations unhindered.

After all, in spite of our indolent intentions, the return was faster
than the upward journey, as almost of necessity happens, whether one is
descending a river or a mountain. The time for loitering is in going
up. One good thing we saw, nevertheless, though it was only for an
instant.

“What’s that?” my man suddenly exclaimed, in the eagerest of tones.
“Look! Right there!”

“Oh, yes,” I said; “a least bittern.”

It stood crosswise, so to speak, halfway up a tall reed, for all the
world like a marsh wren. Then away it went on the wing, and was lost in
the grass. It was a good bird to see, besides counting as “No. 91” in
my Miami list.

“I never did see a bird like that,”[7] the boatman said. “Such a little
fellow!” he called it. It was a pleasure to find him so enthusiastic.

The best thing of the whole trip, notwithstanding, was not the sight
of any bird, but our lazy, careless, albeit too rapid gliding down the
stream, with the world so bright and calm about us and above. Here
and there, for our delight, was a tuft of fragrant white “lilies”
(_Crinum_) standing amid a tuft of handsome upright green leaves. More
than once, also, we passed boatloads of fishermen (and fisherwomen),
white and black. One elderly and carefully dressed, city-coated
gentleman I especially remember. He sat in the stern of the boat (his
African boatman with a line out, also), watching the fluctuations of
his bob as earnestly, I thought, as ever he could have watched the
fluctuations of the stock market. His whole soul was centred upon that
bit of cork and the possible fish below. He actually had a nibble as
we passed! What cared he then for “coppers” or “industrials”? He must
at some time or other have been a boy. The lucky man! By the look on
his face he was happy. And happiness, if I am to judge by what I see,
is one of the main things, in Florida. At all events, it was the main
thing that I found in the Everglades.

THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING

Manifold are the perils of journalism. A few weeks ago I filled a
letter with the praise, most sincerely felt, of a certain tropical
hammock on the road from Miami to Cocoanut Grove, a place full of
birds, and destined, so I hoped, to be equally full of music. This
eulogy, it transpires, was read by a bird-loving enthusiast from New
England, sojourning for the winter at the Hotel Ormond; and what should
he do but send me word, a stranger, that he had packed his trunk and
was coming down straightway (two hundred and fifty miles or more) to
inspect the wonder.

In due course he arrived, and as soon as possible I led him out of the
city, across the river, through a stretch of blazing sunshine, and at
last into the heart of the hammock. It was a long jaunt, much longer
than he was prepared for, the afternoon was hot, and to make matters
worse the hammock showed almost no sign of that profusion of avian
existence, with the anticipation of which my glowing periods had filled
him.

Fortunately for my reputation, I had forewarned him that such would
be the case. The birds, I explained, either because the season
had advanced, or for some other reason, had pretty nearly deserted
the jungle of West Indian trees, shrubs, and vines,--for such this
particular hammock is,--and had betaken themselves to the more open
country, especially to certain groves of newly clad live-oaks, whose
sturdy, wide-spreading, rival-killing, trust-creating, monopolistic
arms, by the time the trees are of middle age, have made for themselves
a relatively sunny clearing.

I had been growing aware of this change in the face of things for a
week or two, and now, when the newcomer has been three or four days in
Miami, the reality of it is conclusively established. On two mornings
of the present week, for example, I found in a few minutes’ stroll
before breakfast a highly interesting flock of perhaps twenty kinds
of birds in the live-oaks and other scattered trees on the very edge
of the city, within a hundred rods of my own doorstep: fish crows,
boat-tailed grackles, crow blackbirds, red-headed woodpeckers, downy
woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers, flickers, catbirds, mockingbirds,
house wrens, cardinals, palm warblers, myrtle warblers, parula
warblers, prairie warblers, black-and-white warblers, yellow-throated
warblers, solitary vireos, yellow-throated vireos, blue jays, phœbes,
ground doves, blue-gray gnatcatchers, ruby-crowned kinglets, a male
nonpareil, a Baltimore oriole, a crested flycatcher, a hummingbird, and
a hermit thrush. A varied bunch of feathers, and no mistake.

In the tropical hammock, on the other hand, during the same forenoons,
I saw, as well as I remember, nothing but white-eyed vireos, phœbes,
catbirds, cardinals, palm and myrtle warblers, crested flycatchers,
nonpareils, and gnatcatchers. So completely has the condition of things
been reversed with the change of season.

Other signs are not lacking that March has brought the spring.
Mockingbirds are daily becoming more rhapsodical. The other afternoon,
out among the cabins of the black suburb, I stood still while three
sang at once on different sides. They are friends of the poor, as
well as of the rich. This morning two yellow-throated vireos sang,
chattered, and whistled; and a most delicious trilled whistle theirs
is, soft, musical, full of sweet and happy feeling. Better still,
almost (because more of a novelty), a yellow-throated warbler sang his
dreamy tune over and over. This is one of the most exquisite birds ever
made; of quiet, modest colors, bluish-black and white, with a single
bright jewel to set them off--a gorget of brilliant yellow. To-day I
have seen as many as ten such beauties, I think. Their feeding habits
and their movements, as well as their black-and-white stripes, are
surprisingly like those of the black-and-white creeper,--to which they
ought to be more nearly related than the systematists allow,--while
their song is in the manner of the indigo-bird.

Now, if the nonpareil buntings would only fall into line! Thus far they
have not favored me with a note, and indifferent musicians as I know
them to be, I believe there is no other bird in Miami that I am so
desirous of hearing. Such feathers as they wear! Once in a while, of
late, a male has been good enough to take a somewhat lofty perch and
display himself. If there is a more gorgeous bird in the United States
I should like to see him. Just now there are at least three enthusiasts
in Miami--a Kentucky lady, a Rhode Island man, and a Massachusetts
man--who are doing their best daily to get their fill of his loveliness.

Phœbes have sung much less of late than they did in January. Then they
seemed to find existence a perpetual jubilee. Red-bellied woodpeckers,
too, are far less talkative than they were a month ago. Most likely
they are busier. And by the by, the Kentucky enthusiast above mentioned
pleased me by calling this woodpecker the “checkerback,” a felicitous
name, in common use in Kentucky, it appears, and perhaps elsewhere. I
am happy to adopt it and pass it on.

If there were words wherewith to describe the indescribable, I should
like to tell of a bluebird that I saw a week ago about one of the
vegetable gardens out on the prairie. The blue of that creature’s back
and wings is not to be imagined. The bluest sky never matched it. I
would wager that he was Florida born. No Northern bird ever owned such
a coat. In my recollection he will stand as one of the sights of the
country, along with the “banyan trees,” the snaky green vanilla vines,
and the tropical jungle.

These letters are of necessity written piecemeal. In this hospitable
Southern country, where the weather and so many things beside are
continually calling, “Come forth and enjoy us,” one cannot stay indoors
very long at once. So it happened that at the conclusion of the last
paragraph I put down my pencil and started out for another few minutes
among the live-oaks. As I approached them I descried a man sitting upon
a heap of coal-ashes dumped along the railway. He might have been Job
himself, to look at him, but at a second glance I perceived that he
was not actually sitting in the ashes, but on a board, and instead of
bewailing his afflictions or his sins, was peacefully minding the New
Testament injunction, “Behold the fowls of the air.” In short, he was
the gentleman from Ormond, with his glass, as it happened, focused upon
a handsome prairie warbler.

We passed the time of day, after the bird had flown,--for the field has
its courtesies, and we respect them,--and he told me that in spite of
the unfavorable north wind (one of our periodical cold spells is upon
us, with the mercury in the forties) he had ventured out, and had been
liberally rewarded. He had seen yellow-throated warblers, a parula,
a prairie, and I forget what else, and, to take his word for it, was
living in clover.

Presently a hawk swooped among the trees, and every small bird
became invisible as if by magic. Then my companion proposed taking
a turn beyond the fence. This we did, and just as we came suddenly
upon a huge watch-dog (a great Dane, I suppose he would be called),
formidable-looking and chained, but fawning upon us so eagerly that
there was nothing for it but to pat him on the head and call him a good
fellow--just as we approached him, I say, I nudged the second man to
stop. There, straight before us, side by side on the rim of an iron
kettle of water set under the trees for the dog’s benefit, stood a
male cardinal and a male nonpareil. Perhaps they were not a glorious
pair! Them also I shall remember, along with the miraculous bluebird.

Less brilliant, but even more memorable, was my one Bachman’s warbler.
I had stopped under a live-oak,--on a return from the big hammock,--and
was putting my glass upon one bird after another feeding among its
blossoms (parulas, yellow-throats, ruby-crowns, gnatcatchers, and
myrtle-birds), when in the very topmost spray I sighted a spot of
coal-black set in bright yellow. Here was something new. From twig to
twig the stranger went,--rather deliberately, for a warbler,--the glass
following, till after submitting for perhaps ten minutes to my eager
inspection he slipped away, as birds have a knack of doing, without
my seeing him go. However, he had shown himself perfectly--the jet
breastplate, the yellow forehead, the black crown, the lustrous olive
of the upper parts, and the yellow patch upon the wing. He was a bird
that I had never expected to see. Comparatively few ornithologists have
been so happy.

This was on March 7. For two days we had noticed indications of a
migratory movement, especially among parulas and yellow-throated
warblers. Probably the Bachman had come from farther south. My thanks
to him for treating me so handsomely, though he might have doubled the
obligation, at no cost to himself, by singing me a tune.

FAIR ORMOND

After nearly two months in the extreme south of Florida I have turned
my face northward, and here I am at Ormond, fair Ormond-on-the-Halifax.
No more bewildering jungles of nameless West Indian trees and climbers,
no more cocoanut palms, no more acres of wild morning-glory vines. It
gave me a start of pleasurable surprise when, somewhere on this side
of Palm Beach, I do not remember where, I saw from the car window
a stately sweet-gum tree all freshly green. It had not occurred to
me till then that I had found nothing at Miami of this handsome and
characteristic Southerner, always one of my favorites.

Indeed, I have come to a different world. I am no longer in a foreign
country. Here are lordly magnolias, not yet in blossom, to be sure, but
proudly beautiful in the leaf. Here, too, are Cherokee roses, loveliest
of all flowers, just coming into their kingdom. At sight of the first
glossy-leaved bush, which happened to stand near a house, I made up to
the door, not stopping twice to consider, and asked the privilege of
picking a flower and a bud. The householder was generous, and the bush
even more so. “Take another, and another,” it seemed to say, catching
me again and again by the sleeve; “I have enough and to spare.” It was
hard work for me to get away. Here, also, is the yellow jessamine,
only less beautiful than the rose, hanging the tall forest trees full
of golden, fragrant bells. And here, sprinkled along the wayside, are
stores of blue violets. None of these things are to be seen on the
shores of Biscayne Bay. Yes, I am glad to be here.

And the phlox, likewise, the pretty Drummond’s phlox of our Northern
gardens, dear to me of old, let me not forget that. It is not
indigenous to the country, I suppose, but, like the garden verbena,
being here it makes itself most comfortably at home, delighting to
overrun forsaken orange groves and similar unoccupied waste places.
How sweetly it looks up at us with its innocent child’s face! Just
now one of the guests of the hotel came in with a broad market-basket
loaded with it, a good half-bushel, at the very least. “I have counted
twenty-six varieties,” he said (he was thinking of diversities of
color), and there must be somewhere near that number in the crowded
vase that he has sent down to brighten my writing-table.

Here, too, is the Atlantic beach. In ten minutes I cross the peninsula
and am on the sands; or, if I stroll up or down the river shore,--on
the western side of the peninsula,--I can hear all the while the
pounding of the surf.

I have been in Ormond two days,--two perfect days of temperate summer
weather,--and have walked hither and thither, up the river, down
the river, across the river, and on the beach, seeing comparatively
little of the country as yet, but enough to be able to say that I have
never found any place in Florida where a walking man should be better
contented. There are paths and roads everywhere,--a convenience not to
be taken for granted in this Southern country,--and be his states of
mind never so variable, he may here suit the jaunt to the mood.

A visit to Ormond was not in my plans for the winter, and I left Miami
with regret. Migratory birds were arriving, and I seemed to be running
away just when there was most to detain me; those tropical plants, too,
were certain to become more and more interesting as the season grew
older; but, like the verbena and the phlox, being here I am thankful.
If I have taken leave of some splendid birds (those painted buntings
are in my eye as I write), I have found some old friends in their
place. It is good to see brown thrashers again, with song sparrows,
white-throats, and chickadees. One of a bird-loving man’s strangest
sensations at Miami is the absence of chickadees and tufted titmice. I
had never been in such a place before. (For eight weeks, let me say in
passing, I have seen no English sparrows. Unfortunately I have not yet
forgotten how they look.)

In my two days here I have counted but fifty kinds of birds. A goodly
number that I know to be present, and even common, I have so far
happened to miss. But in the middle of March even fifty birds make
something like a festival. Mockers, cardinals, and Carolina wrens--the
great Southern trio--are tuneful, of course. Even as I write, a wren
is whistling an accompaniment to my pencil. If I could only put the
music on the paper! If it would only “modulate my periods!” as Charles
Lamb said. When I sit in the shade of a moss-hung live-oak, letting the
sea breeze fan me, and listen to an assembly of red-winged blackbirds
rehearsing their breezy _conkaree_ among the reeds along the Halifax
(though it is not a simple _conkaree_, either, but _conkaree-dah_,
the old tune with a new coda), I think of swamps in far Massachusetts
where on this very 12th of March other redwings are opening the musical
season in a very different atmosphere.

Chewinks of both kinds (red-eyes and white-eyes, Northerners and
Southerners) are calling and singing. Blue yellow-backed warblers are
musical after their manner (they hardly need to be singers, being
so exquisite in color, form, and motion), and white-eyed vireos are
numerous enough, though nothing like so plentiful as at Miami. Here, as
there, they have no thought of hiding their light under a bushel.

It is like old times to see Florida jays sitting on the chimney-tops of
the summer cottages along the dunes behind the beach. Thus it was that
I saw them first, at Daytona, nine years ago. As a friend and I stopped
this morning to rest in the shade of a piazza, one came and stood upon
the railing and eyed us long and curiously. “Have you nothing edible
about you?” he seemed to say. If we had had anything to offer the
beggar, I am confident he would have hopped upon our knees.[8] As it
was, he approached within five or six feet while we chirped and talked
to him. Florida jays are strange creatures for tameness, and if it were
thought worth while could readily be domesticated.

It seemed natural, also, to see pelicans flying in small flocks up
the beach, just over the breakers, so that half the time they were
invisible, lost in the trough of the sea; moving always in Indian
file, flapping their wings and scaling by turns. And still another
remembrancer of my previous visit to this part of Florida was the
sight of a bald eagle robbing a fishhawk. The hawk made a stubborn
defense, dodging this way and that, rising and falling, but in the end
the eagle, an old white-headed fellow, was more than a match for his
victim; for though they were far away, the motions of the contestants
showed plainly enough how the struggle terminated.

On the beach, halfway to his knees in water, stood a great blue heron,
leaning seaward, waiting for a fish. He might have been standing
there for nine years. At all events I left him in the same position
that length of time ago. “Ay, and you,” he might rejoin, “you haven’t
changed, either. You have still nothing better to do than to go
wandering up and down the earth, shooting birds with an opera-glass?”
True enough. Heron and man, after nine years each is the same old
sixpence. “The thing that hath been it is that which shall be, and
there is nothing new under the sun.” Well, so be it. Only let me find
new pleasure in the old places and the old pursuits.

A DAY IN THE WOODS

I was well within the truth when I said, a week ago, that there could
not be many places in Florida where a walking man would find his wants
so generously provided for as at Ormond. Here he may spend a half-day
in idling over a round of a mile or two,--sea beach, river bank, and
woodland,--or he may foot it as industriously as he pleases from
morning till night; and the next day and the day after he will have
plenty of invitations to “fresh woods,” though hardly to “pastures
new.” Pastures, whether new or old, he may look for elsewhere.

But at Ormond a man may not only walk, he may drive; and this forenoon
(March 19) a pair of horses have taken me over such a road as I do not
expect soon to find the like of, either in Florida or anywhere else;
a course of twelve or fifteen miles, the whole of it (as soon as the
bridge over the Halifax was crossed) through most beautiful forest. The
road was wide enough for the carriage and no more; soft as a carpet, so
that the wheels made no noise, with big trunks of pines, palmettoes,
oaks, sweet-gums, magnolias, and what not crowding upon the track so
closely that we could almost put out our hands and touch them as we
passed. In the whole distance, to the best of my recollection, we met
neither carriage nor foot-passenger.

We drove as we pleased, stopped as we pleased, talked or kept silence,
listened to the birds, admired the flowers and the new leafage (there
are no words wherewith to intimate its freshness and beauty), and
withal dreamed of the time when all the land about us was the scene of
busy labors, when sugar and rice and cotton were cultivated here by
hundreds of slaves, and those who owned the land, as they imagined, had
no thought of a day when the forest should again claim all their fair
possessions. We drove to Mount Oswald, so called, near the mouth of the
Tomoka River, thence over the famous old causeway, set with palmettoes,
to Buckhead Bluff, at which point the King’s road to St. Augustine is
supposed (or known) to have crossed the river a hundred years ago. I
was glad to see the river (I shall see more of it, if I live a day
or two longer), but the great thing was the forest, with its present
beauty and its whisperings of past romance.

Now it is afternoon, and I am in the same woods. No lover of wild life
ever drove over a beautiful country road for the first time without
saying to himself again and again, “I must come this way on foot.”
A carriage is well enough in its place, but really to see things a
man must be on his own legs. Immediately after luncheon, therefore,
with a merry company of golfers (a flourishing sect in Florida), I
took the little one-horse street-car to the railway station, and now,
having crossed a narrow field and left the golfers at their afternoon
devotions, I am in the Volusia road, in the noblest of hammock woods.

The first half-mile of the way I have walked over more than once
already, and having in mind the shortness of the afternoon I quicken my
steps. The doing so is no hardship. For the last forty-eight hours the
wind has blown from the north; during the night the mercury settled to
38°; and though it is considerably warmer than that now, a pretty brisk
movement is still not uncomfortable.

Here I pass a mournful sight--an old orange grove, of which nothing
remains but the sandy soil and a few blackened stumps. The “great
freeze” of six or seven years ago killed the trees to the roots.
Nearly opposite, to add to the forlornness of the impression, stands
a deserted house; and not far along is another, that looks only less
unthrifty and disconsolate, with an old woman smoking a pipe on the
piazza. It would be a strict moralist who should grudge her that one
comfort.

Now I have left the last human habitation behind me, and in front
stretches the narrow road arched with greenness, running away and
away till it runs out of sight. What lofty oaks and sweet-gums! And
what beautiful lichens cover them with wise-looking hieroglyphics! If
we could only decipher their meaning! I note especially the ribbed,
muscular-seeming trunks of the hornbeams, one of which, the largest,
is riddled with uncountable perforations, the work of some sap-loving
woodpecker; and I turn about more than once to admire the proportions
of a magnificent magnolia, one of the largest I have ever seen. My
thanks to the highway surveyor who went a few feet out of his way to
leave it standing. A rod or two more, and I stop to look up at some
exceptionally tall pines and live-oaks, a noticeable group, in the
altitude of which I have before found a pleasure.

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.

I am well satisfied, at all events, and am still feasting upon the
sight when out of the tall grass on my left hand comes a rail’s
voice--the voice of one crying in the wilderness. I am drawing near
the swamp, and make haste to cover with my field-glass the spaces of
open water among the dead flags. Yes, there are birds--one, two, three,
four. But they are not rails. I see as much as that before I have
finished my count. Three of them are swimming. They are gallinules; and
when one of them turns, and the sunlight strikes him, I see the red
plate on his forehead. They are Florida gallinules, my first ones for
nine years. My glass follows their movements jealously till the thunder
of an approaching train startles them and they fly to the shelter of
the tall grass. I shall come this way again, and not only see but hear
them. Their language is various and interesting, though most of it has
the accent of the barnyard.

A pileated woodpecker crosses the track just before me, with all his
colors flying, a pair of bluebirds sit in their accustomed place
upon the telegraph wire, and from the neighboring pines I catch the
finch-like twitters of a brown-headed nuthatch. This is close upon the
railway station and the golf links. My afternoon is done, but the golf
players are still making the most of daylight. I blush to confess it,
but there are some enthusiasms with which even that of a strolling
naturalist will hardly endure comparison.

PICTURE AND SONG

What seek we in Florida? The same that we seek everywhere--sensations.
Life is made of them. In proportion as they are lively and pleasurable
we find it good. The higher their quality, the nobler the part that
feels them, the less physical they are, the less they have to do with
eating and drinking and being clothed, the more truly we are alive and
not dead.

Most of the people that we meet in Florida are vacationers like
ourselves. At home they may be in the wool business, in shoes, or in
dyestuffs; here they have no occupation but to amuse themselves. In
the daytime they fish, play golf, drive, or lounge upon the hotel
piazza. In the evening they sit in the lobby, listen (possibly) to
the music, admire (or not) the gowns and jewels of the ladies (the
self-sacrificing creatures are all on parade, like so many Queens of
Sheba), take a hand at cards, or gossip about something or nothing
with a traveling companion or a chance acquaintance. At the worst they
dawdle over a newspaper or a novel, and consume the hour in smoke. To
judge by appearances their sensations are not poignant, though the
anglers and the golfers, and even the shuffle-board players, no doubt
have their exciting moments; but on the whole the winter passes rather
quickly. When there is nothing else to do, and the time drags, one can
always cheer one’s self by thinking how intemperate the season is at
home. The most refreshing parts of the Northern newspapers are their
reports of snowstorms and blizzards.

For my own part, I admire the ladies’ gowns (in one sense or other of
the word, who could help it?), but what my untutored mind is most taken
with is the beauty of the natural world, the world as God made it,
rather than as man, even the man-milliner, has improved it. I love to
look up or down the moss-hung vista of the river road (I am still at
Ormond), or, turning my head, to gaze across the smooth water at the
freshly green, happy-looking oak woods and the overtopping pines. These
are pictures that I hope never to forget.

The other day an old friend, a settler in these parts, rowed me down
the river a few miles. There we took an untraveled road through the
forest, and by and by came suddenly to a clearing, in the middle of
which stood an abandoned house. The place had once been an orange
orchard, I suppose; and even now, although there was hardly so much
as a stump left to tell the tale, it remained in its own way a
paradise of beauty. From end to end the five or six sandy acres were
thickly overgrown with Drummond’s phlox, all in fullest bloom, a rosy
wilderness.

It was a pretty show. We exclaimed over it, and gathered handfuls of
the lovely flowers, but as we rowed homeward we were favored with a
spectacle to which it would be a profanation to apply such epithets.
The afternoon, which began doubtfully, had turned out a marvel of
perfection. The wind had gone down, the river was like glass, and
the level rays of the sun touched all the shore woods to an almost
unearthly beauty. And withal, the sky was full of the softest, most
exquisitely shaded, finely broken clouds. It was an hour such as comes
once and is never repeated. In my mind the memory of it has already
taken its place beside the memory of a sunset seen many years ago from
a Massachusetts mountain-top. These are some of the “sensations” of
which I spoke. They are the sufficient rewards of travel, though now
and then, the Fates favoring, we may have them at home also, without
money and without price.

The next day, or the next but one, I strolled about two miles up the
river northward, to the house where, on my first day at Ormond, I had
seen a Cherokee rosebush just breaking into flower. This time it was at
the top of its glory, such a glory as I have no hope of describing. At
a moderate calculation the mound of leafy stems must have borne four or
five thousand roses, every one the very image of purity and sweetness.
Those who are familiar with the Cherokee rose will perhaps be able to
imagine the picture of loveliness here presented; and such readers
will be glad to know that a lover of beauty (not an idle, time-killing
tourist, but a man at home and at work), having heard my report of the
bush, walked four or five miles on purpose to see it, and declared
himself amply repaid for his labor. “The poetry of earth is never
dead;” and there is never wanting some poet’s soul to enjoy it, and so
to make it twice alive.

Though it is near the end of March there is comparatively little sign
of bird migration. Chuck-will’s-widows--Southern whippoorwills, if one
chooses to call them so--have arrived and are abundantly in voice.
The nights are scarcely long enough for all they have to say. I hear
of a cottager who is awakened by one so persistently and so early in
the morning that he is devising means to kill it. I hope he will not
succeed, although if the bird is close to his open window and begins to
unburden himself at half-past two, as one does within hearing from my
bed, I cannot very seriously blame him for the attempt. He goes out in
his night-clothes, I am told, and tries to “shoo” it away; but the bird
has a message, as truly as Poe’s raven, and is bound to deliver it,
whether men will hear or forbear.

On the morning of March 26, in an ante-breakfast stroll, I found
among the pines immediately in the rear of the hotel the first summer
tanager of the season. The splendid creature, bright red throughout,
was flitting from tree to tree, singing a measure or two from each. He
acted as if he were happy to be back in Ormond, and I did not wonder.
A red-eyed vireo was singing on the 15th, and since then birds of the
same kind have become moderately common. Considering that the red-eye
is not supposed to winter anywhere in the United States (I saw nothing
of it at Miami), and arrives so late in New England, it seems to have
reached Ormond surprisingly early.

For some time the woods have been alive in spots with busy crowds of
warblers. Parulas especially have been present in enormous force,
and have sung literally in chorus. I have seen many yellow-throated
warblers also, and many myrtles, with a fair sprinkling of prairies
and black-and-white creepers. But the birds that have sung best--after
the mocker and the thrasher, perhaps--are not spring comers, but our
faithful winter friends, the cardinal grosbeak and the Carolina wren.
Indeed, of all Southern songsters I believe that the cardinal stands
first in my affections. Sweetness, tenderness, affectionateness, and
variety, these are his gifts, and they are good ones, even if they are
not the highest.

Out in the flatwoods, a few days ago, we suddenly heard, coming from
a thicket of dwarf palmetto on the edge of water, a quite unexpected
strain, a loud, short trill. “What was that?” asked my companions, as
we looked at one another; for there were three pairs of field-glasses
in the carriage. “It sounded like a swamp sparrow,” said I, with doubt
in my voice. At that moment the measure was given out again, prefaced
this time by a peculiar indrawn whistle. Then the truth flashed upon
me. It was the song of a pine-wood sparrow. I had not heard it for many
years. In the same place meadow larks were in tune, bluebirds warbled,
and pine warblers and brown-headed nuthatches were in voice among
the pine trees. Here, too, I was glad to hear, for the first time in
Florida, the caw of a real crow, a bird with a roof to his mouth and a
voice that sounded like home.

Such are some of a bird-loving man’s early spring pleasures in this
Southern country. I do not mean to praise the season unduly. New
England can beat it when the time comes; at least, I know one New
Englander who thinks so; but not in March.

TEXAS AND ARIZONA

IN OLD SAN ANTONIO

After three days and four nights in a sleeping-car it is good to
breathe air again. Not that I mean to speak ill of the modern necessity
known in railway offices as a “sleeper”; it has done me too many a
service; but, for all that,--though it is a bridge that has carried me
over,--well, as I said, it is a luxury to breathe air again.

So I thought this January afternoon as I sat upon the top rail (a
pretty thin board) of a tall fence at the summit of what I take to
be one of the highest elevations (it would be exceeding the truth,
perhaps, to call it a hill) in the immediate neighborhood of this
venerable but young and vigorous Texas city, known in geographies and
gazetteers as San Antonio, but among railroad men, with whom time and
breath are precious, as “San Antone.”

The city itself lay all before me, and an excellent showing it made,
with its many stately and handsome buildings and its general air of
prosperity; but for the most part my eyes traveled beyond it, or in
other directions. The landscape was wide, whichever way I turned, and
the transparency of the atmosphere, of a kind never enjoyed in New
England except on some half-dozen days in a year, made it the wider
and more alluring. It surprised me to see imposing public buildings
scattered about over the country. The nearest must have been several
miles from the town, and each, so far as I could see, stood entirely by
itself. Here and there, also, miles apart, were fine dwelling-houses,
with outbuildings and windmills; each, like the public institutions
just mentioned, standing alone, as if its proprietor were also the
proprietor of the entire tract of country roundabout. Rich men’s
ranches, they should perhaps be called. All these, or most of them,
would have been invisible from my fence-rail perch, but for the fact,
which really made the strangeness of the whole spectacle to a New
England man’s eyes, that the rolling land is all unwooded--a broad
landscape, stretching away and away, north, south, east, and west,
and no forest! The slopes look, at a little distance,--just as the
one on which I was now sitting had looked to me half a mile back,--as
if they might be planted with young peach orchards. They are really
covered loosely with wild shrubs ten or fifteen feet high, now budded
and in pale green leaf (Huisache, I understand their Mexican name
to be,[9] though I may err in the spelling), with lower shrubs of
different sorts, mostly thorny, scattered loosely among them, the whole
constituting (or so I suppose) what is known in this part of the world
as chaparral; which is very like what in our Northern country we speak
of, less respectfully, as “scrub.”

It is a godsend to a man on my errand, that chaparral, as it grows
about San Antonio, at all events, is not a dense thicket. It can be
walked through or ridden through in all directions with perfect ease,
though one cannot keep a straight course for more than a rod or two
together.

I had been strolling over exactly such a hill half an hour before,
circling one cluster of shrubs after another, opera-glass in hand, on
the alert for any bird that might show itself (it was likely as not to
be a stranger), when all at once--how it came about I shall never be
able to tell--there, just before me on the ground, twenty or thirty
feet away, stood one of the birds that I had most desired to see in
this novel Southwestern world--a road-runner. I have found some puzzles
since my arrival at San Antonio, three days ago, but this was not one
of them. As our good common saying is, the fellow looked “as natural
as life.” Mr. Fuertes’s drawing had stepped out of the book. I could
have shouted with pleasure.

The bird was true to his name. There was no road, to be sure, but he
knew what was expected of him, and started off at once at a lively
trot; then, within ten or fifteen feet, he stopped short, lifted
his ridiculously long tail till it stood at right angles with his
body,--the white “thumb-marks” at the ends of the feathers making
a brave show, in spite of the almost indecent absurdity of his
attitude,--and after a moment started on again. Two or three times he
repeated these manœuvres; and then, without my knowing how he did it,
he escaped me altogether, although the bit of shrubbery into which he
had vanished was only a few feet in diameter. “Never mind,” I thought,
“I have seen him.” And he was every whit as oddly behaved a piece as my
fancy had painted him.

The road-runner, it should be said, is an overgrown member of the
cuckoo family. Its length from the tip of its bill to the end of
its tail is about two feet. It wears what may be described as a
frightened-looking crest, its plumage is conspicuously mottled, and,
what gives it its special character, its tail is a foot long. As Mrs.
Bailey well says, it is “one of the most original and entertaining of
Western birds. The newcomer is amazed when the long-tailed creature
darts out of the brush and races the horses down the road, easily
keeping ahead as they trot, and when tired turns out into the brush and
throws his tail over his back to stop himself.”

My bird’s performance was less theatrical than that, perhaps because I
was on foot, perhaps because the day was Sunday, perhaps because of the
absence of a thoroughfare; but I was well pleased.

It is noticeable how birds, not less than men, tend to become
specialists. To accomplish one thing supremely well,--that is
certainly the way to make one’s self famous. And that is what the
road-runner does. He has chosen a hobby, and he rides it. His legs are
proportionally no longer than other birds’, but that does not matter.
Such as they are, he will make the most of them.

He is like a certain Maine farmer of whom I have heard, a plain tiller
of the soil, who feels, nevertheless, that he was born for better
things; not for a cart-horse, if you please, but for a race-horse. He
may be working on his farm, at the plough, we will say; suddenly the
impulse comes upon him, as inspiration is said to come upon a poet;
there is nothing for it but he must start and run; and so he does.
Once every summer he travels from Maine to Mount Washington, for
the great event of the year. When he appears at the Summit House,
every one knows what is to happen. So-and-so is going to run down the
mountain. The daily newspaper chronicles his arrival and announces the
hour of the annual event. Then, at the minute agreed upon, all hands
gather before the door, a man appointed for the purpose holds the
watch and gives the signal, and down the steep road starts the farmer,
his invariable “tall hat” on his head, and his coat-tails flying.
At the Half-Way House, and again at the base, his time is taken. If
it is shorter than last year’s, so much the more glory. If it is
longer,--well, he has run; and presumably, like Cincinnatus before him,
he goes back to his plough contented.

The road-runner, I suspect (the running cuckoo!), is subject to the
same irresistible ambulatory impulses, and by a curious coincidence
he, too, wears what we may term a “tall hat.” I should like to see him
racing down the Mount Washington road, putting on the brakes now and
then, at the sharper turns, by a sudden cocking of his tail!

The temperature here--for temperature must always be mentioned in
writing of one’s travels--has thus far been pretty comfortable for a
walker, though not without something of the contradictoriness which
seems to belong to weather conditions everywhere and always: roses in
all the gardens, and steam in the radiators; children, black and white,
paddling about in the mud barefooted and barelegged, and gentlemen with
heavy overcoats on, and, not unlikely, collars turned up. Concerning
such things, here in “San Antone,” you take your choice. For myself I
have compromised the matter, keeping my boots on and wearing, except
when the sun has been more than commonly persuasive, the lightest of
spring overcoats.

The great drawback to a walking man’s comfort, and just now the most
impressive “feature” of the city,--more impressive by far than the old
Spanish missions, the most famous of which, the Alamo, is directly at
my door,--has been the mud; deep and black, and more adhesive than
glue. If you go outside the city your shoes gather it as a rolling
snowball gathers snow (“to him that hath shall be given,” you repeat
to yourself), and it is like one of the labors of Hercules to get it
off. I walk about, scuffing and kicking, with pounds of it on either
overshoe, like a dark fringe, and fancy I know how it feels to drag
a ball and chain. However, conditions are bettering in this respect,
and in any case, things might easily be worse. Yesterday morning,
seeing the sky clouded, I remarked to the elevator boy on my way
down to breakfast, that I believed it was going to rain; and I added,
sententiously, “More rain, more mud.” “Yes,” said the boy, quick to
resent an imputation upon the climate of Texas, “and the more rain,
the better crops.” The State, it appears, has suffered greatly from
drought for the past few seasons, and no doubt its people can well
afford to play the mud-lark for a week now and then in winter. It makes
a difference whether you are a selfish, pleasure-seeking tourist,
thinking only of to-day’s comfort, or a man with his living to make out
of a cotton plantation or a market garden.

For the present, if the tourist wishes, as I do, to walk in the
country, he may do worse than betake himself to one of the numerous
railroad tracks.[10] These have carried me into good places and
shown me many interesting birds; but they would be more convenient
if they were not walled in, mile after mile, except as a highway or
a plantation road crosses them, by an excessively high and close
barbed-wire fence. Yet even this hateful obstruction has served me one
slight good turn.

A man of something like my own age and build was trudging along
the track in front of me, a day or two ago (by his gait and general
appearance he was used to trudging), when I saw him approach the fence
as if he meant in some way to force a passage. “You’ll never do it,”
I thought. Really, there seemed not to be space enough between the
wires, even if they had not been barbed, for a human body to squeeze
through; but to my astonishment the fellow slipped between them without
the slightest fumbling or hesitation, and without so much as a barb’s
touching him. He must have been a specialist, I am sure. I could not
have followed suit without tearing my clothing to tatters, if all the
wealth of the East, “barbaric pearl and gold,” had been spread out
before my itching fingers on the farther side. I have not yet ceased
wondering at the rogue’s address. Such practice as he must have had!
I hope he was never in jail. It was like the neatest of Japanese
jugglery, or the famous passage through the eye of a needle. Behold,
said I, the compensations of poverty. No rich man could have done it.

The greater part of the passengers that one meets in such
out-of-the-way places are short, swarthy Mexicans. Usually they are
able to bid you “good-morning,” or to ask how you “do,” but now
and then you will hear a “_buenos dias_.” In the city one finds
them at every corner selling peculiar-looking confections. Whether
one likes their wares or not,--and for myself, I must confess that
“my own particular lip” has not yet made up its mind to try the
experiment,--their presence gives one an agreeable sense of being far
from home. Two days ago I was wandering about San Pedro Park at noon,
and noticed for the first time a few butterflies on the wing. Most of
them were much like our common yellow one,--evidently some species of
Colias,--but by and by I noticed a dark one, showing a touch of red as
it flew. I took chase, and came up with it just as it dropped to rest
directly in front of two Mexicans seated upon the grass. I stepped
near to see it (a common red admiral, for aught I could discover),
and perceiving that the men were inquisitive, I pointed to it with my
finger. One of them imitated the gesture, as much as to say “That,
do you mean?” I nodded, and he said, with a smile, “_Mariposa_.”
“Yes,” said I, “a butterfly.” That was beyond him, and he repeated
his incomparably prettier word, “_mariposa_.” “Very good,” said I to
myself, “I am glad to find that I understand Spanish when I hear it
spoken!” A solitary traveler, of all men, should know how to amuse
himself with trifles.

A BIRD-GAZER’S PUZZLES

The days of my youth have come back to me. I am again at the foot of
the ladder, a boy in the primary school, a speller of a-b-abs. The
experience is pleasant, but not unmixedly so; it is sweet, with a
suggestion of bitter. I am finding out daily that one is never too old
to be mistaken. I knew it before, of course; but I am still finding it
out; for the two things are not incompatible. One may know a thing,
and still have need to learn it. It is possible that the most erudite
scholar has never more than begun to apprehend his own ignorance; nay,
that he would never make more than a beginning in that salutary study
were he to burn the midnight oil for a thousand years. In that time he
might square the circle and discover the philosopher’s stone, but he
would not discover how little he knew. In that respect, in respect to
what we do not know, human capacity is unlimited. Finite creatures that
we are, we are endowed with a kind of negative infinity. And, for one,
I wish to make the most of my greatest gift. It shall not be “lodged
with me useless,” if I can help it.

I saw a strange warbler the other day. That is to say, I thought I
saw one. I had been wandering for a whole forenoon amid the chaparral
just outside the city of San Antonio, and had enjoyed a good number of
novel sensations, when suddenly (such things always come suddenly, but
it seems necessary to repeat the word) a tiny bird moved in a low bush
directly before me. “A gray warbler with no wing-marks,” I said; and
the next instant I saw that its crown was light yellow. It moved again,
and the forward parts came into view. Its throat also was yellow. At
that moment it was eating a yellow berry. Its ground color was near the
shade worn by a juvenile chestnut-sided warbler, and the yellow of the
crown and throat was very lightly laid on over the gray, so to express
it, just as it is in the chestnut-side’s case.

Now what kind of warbler can this be? I asked myself: a gray warbler
with a yellow crown and a yellow throat, and no other adornments.
And with the question there came into my mind, as by the effect of
immediate inspiration, the word Calaveras. Whether it was Calaveras or
something else, there could be no doubt of my being able to clear up
the question, once I should have a book in my hand.

I resumed my peregrinations, therefore, the bird having moved on,
as birds do, being provided with wings for that very purpose, and by
and by, walking at a venture round one clump of bushes after another,
I came again upon the stranger, who, it should be said, was of a
peculiarly unsuspicious disposition, and this time was swallowing
piecemeal what seemed to my New England mind a very unseasonable
caterpillar. And now I made a further discovery: the shoulder of the
bird’s wing was edged with a line of pretty bright red, of a shade
between chestnut and carmine! Surely, it was only a matter of surviving
to reach the hotel and the mystery would be solved. Calaveras or what
not, it was impossible that there should be two warblers marked in this
singular manner.

Well, I got back to my room, and sure enough, not only were there not
two warblers thus marked, there was not even one. Calaveras was nothing
to the purpose. My inspiration must have come from the wrong place. At
any rate, it was unprofitable for instruction. It wasn’t far to go, you
may say, but I was at my wits’ end.

That evening I had occasion to answer a letter from an eminent
ornithologist, who has herself worked much in the Southwest, and
besides has at her elbow the best of American bird collections. She
would be able to help me out of my difficulty. In all innocence,
therefore, I stated my case. It was possible, I admitted (thrice lucky
admission--it is always politic to seem modest, however one may feel),
that the bird was not a warbler, after all, though, if it were not, I
had no idea what it could be.

Well, the next day I was out in the country again, this time in a
pecan grove, with tall seed-bearing weeds standing by the acre under
the tall, leafless trees (a paradise for sparrows), when I heard a
chickadee whistling his four notes in the distance. “How closely his
music resembles that of his relative as we hear it in Florida,” I said
to myself. And this reflection set me asking, “Where is that odd little
titmouse, the verdin, that was said to be common about San Antonio at
all seasons?” And then, like a flash, came the answer: “Why, man, that
was a verdin you saw yesterday, out in the chaparral, and mistook for a
warbler.” And so it turned out. Red shoulder-strap and all, everything
suited. The verdin, by the by, is a distinctively Southwestern species,
not _Parus_, but _Auriparus_. My bird had been a female, I suppose,
showing less yellow than her mate would have done. Perhaps if I had
seen him instead of her, I should not have been so befooled.

No sooner was the puzzle thus satisfactorily solved, than I began to
meditate, with something less of satisfaction, upon the letter I had
written the evening before. I thought, too, of the many more or less
foolish letters that I had myself received (and sometimes smiled at,
I fear) in the past twenty years, letters in which eager searchers
after ornithological knowledge had confided to me marvelous accounts
of the wonders they had seen afield, and by an unhappy fate could find
no description of when they returned to the study. Not many of these
correspondents, as well as I could now remember, had ever mistaken a
titmouse for a warbler! I must dispatch a postscript to my letter by
the earliest mail. And so I did, ostensibly, of course, to save my
friend the trouble of a reply, but really to prove to her that, though
I was capable of blundering, I was also capable of a second thought.

And now, having made my confession, I am bound to add that some who
may laugh at me would possibly have been little wiser than I, had they
stood in my shoes; for the verdin does not look the least in the world
like anything that goes by the name of titmouse or chickadee up in our
Northern country. I hope to see more of it, and especially to hear its
song, which is said to be of surprising volume.

Really (and this is why I have told this not very exciting tale at
such length), it is the chief delight of bird-gazing in a strange
country that one has to begin, as it were, all one’s studies over
again; as I have seen a professor of botany in similar circumstances
fingering the leaves of the manual like the veriest schoolboy, as for
the time being he was. It is not the proudest way of renewing one’s
youth, but it will answer. And conditions being as they are, nothing
else will answer.

Such is my present case here in Texas. Even now, in the dead of winter,
with the number of species greatly reduced, the novelties seen in one
walk are so many that the man who uses no gun, and so can take no
specimens home with him for inspection, is often put to his trumps
when he comes to run over his day’s notes. Though he may have done his
best, he is certain to have overlooked or forgotten some detail which,
with the book before him, turns out to be all important. What a pity
he did not note with more exactness the proportion of white on the
tail feathers, or the position of a certain black spot on the side of
the head! He must go out again, and--if he is fortunate enough to find
the bird--secure a stricter and more intelligent observation. It is
plaguing fun, but it is fun, nevertheless, and good practice, besides;
and withal, it leaves work for to-morrow.

It must be admitted, moreover, if the truth is to be told,--and it is
sometimes better to tell it,--that no amount of observation in the
field will be likely, in a month or two, at any rate, to settle all
the nice questions that confront the student in a new region in these
latter days; especially if the region happens to be, like this about
San Antonio, one in which Eastern and Western forms of the same species
are to be found overlapping each other. It was very well for Emerson
to speak, poetically, of naming all the birds without a gun. He lived
before the day of trinomials; or if that be not quite true, before our
younger brood of ambitious closet ornithologists had set themselves
so zealously at the work of dividing and subdividing. Time was when a
song sparrow was a song sparrow, and there was an end of it. Now to
call a bird by that name is only the beginning of sorrows. What kind
of song sparrow is it? My Western handbook enumerates about fifteen
sub-species, and the differences, I suspect, are many of them almost
too fine for opera-glass determination. For what I know, a microscope
might be more to the purpose.

The man who refuses a gun must accept the limitations that go with that
refusal. Time and repeated observation will do much; a good ear will
help--in some cases it will do the larger half of the work; but he
must not expect to accomplish with a glass and patience exactly what
another man accomplishes with powder and shot and a pair of dividers.
In the study of ornithology, as elsewhere, there are diversities of
operations, and possibly not the same spirit.

If I cannot be certain whether the vesper sparrows I saw to-day were
light-colored enough to pass for _Poœcetes gramineus confinis_, or were
probably nothing but plain _Poœcetes gramineus_, I must put up with my
ignorance, distressing as it is. Possibly, if I were to see species and
sub-species side by side, even in the field, I could tell them apart;
possibly I could not. Whether their songs differ, is a point concerning
which my book, after the manner of books, has nothing to offer; and as
the birds are now dumb, there is nothing for me to do but to call them
vesper sparrows, and await developments.

And some things can be settled, even in Texas, with no weapon but a
field-glass. I know, for example, that I have to-day seen Mexican
goldfinches, and Arctic towhees, and red-shafted flickers. That is more
than half a loaf, by a good deal, and several times better than no
bread.

LUCK ON THE PRAIRIE

A well-groomed hobby will carry its rider comfortably over many a
slough.

I was on my way westward to El Paso, and knowing that the train was due
there before daylight, I left my berth early, and had gone out upon the
porch of the observation car to catch a bite of fresh air and enjoy
the first faint flushes of the dawn, when a train-hand, passing in the
semi-darkness, informed me that the wreck of a freight train was on
the track in front of us, and that we should probably not be able to
move for eight or nine hours. I had noticed that we were standing still
upon a “siding,” but such halts are not infrequent on a single-track
road, and having my mind upon pleasanter themes, I had passed the
circumstance by without further thought.

The news of our trouble spread, as one passenger after another made
his unhandsome, half-civilized appearance from behind the curtains,
and though we proved to be a pretty philosophical company, as
transcontinental travelers have need to be, the general run of comment
was not hilarious.

A turn outside, as it grew lighter, showed that we were at a station
called San Elizario (a pleasing name, surely), some three thousand two
hundred feet above sea-level. The westerly breeze was a refreshment,
and three or four ranges of jagged mountains glorified the horizon. If
we must be delayed, the Fates had chosen a favorable place for us.

I, for one, soon began to feel reconciled to the turn affairs had
taken, and went back to the car for an opera-glass. It must be a dull
day in Texas when a tender-footed bird-gazer cannot find at least one
novelty, and till the “first call for breakfast” I would be out trying
my luck.

An adobe building, windowless and unoccupied, stood not far off, and
near it was a cottonwood tree, still holding, in spite of all those
Texas winds, part of its last season’s crop of dry leaves. I walked
in that direction, and at the moment three birds, with musical,
goldfinch-like twitters, flew into the tree. A glance showed them to be
not goldfinches, but small birds of the purple finch group, very bright
and rosy (the two males), and thickly streaked underneath. “The house
finch!” I exclaimed.

This is a Western beauty, greatly beloved for its color, its music, and
its engaging familiarity, by all to whom it is a neighbor. I had read
of its charms, and had freshly in mind an enthusiastic eulogy of it by
an old friend, now a resident of Colorado, whom I had chanced to fall
in with a fortnight before in a railway car. With those three lovely
creatures talking to me, I felt that the day was saved.

A Say’s phœbe was near by, in a pear orchard (for the piece of prairie
land on which we so unexpectedly found ourselves was under irrigation),
and as I had met it first only forty-eight hours before--at Del Rio--I
was glad to see more of its very demure and pretty habits, especially
of its clever trick of hovering at considerable length just over the
grass. The rather bright buff of its under-parts is one of its striking
characteristics, and now, when I caught sight of it in the distance, I
had for a moment thoughts of some unfamiliar kind of oriole.

There was barely time to pay my respects to the phœbe before a flash of
blue wings made me aware of something more interesting still, a bevy
of bluebirds. It would be good fortune, surely, if they should turn
out to be of one of the several Western forms that I had never seen. I
drew near, therefore, with all carefulness, and needed but one look to
assure myself that such was indeed the case. Their backs were not blue,
but of a chestnut shade. The blue of the wings, moreover, was not
quite the same as that of our common Eastern _Sialia_.

Whatever they were, the color of the backs would probably be enough to
name them, and I returned to the car for breakfast and, first of all,
to make sure of my new birds’ identity. A consultation of the handbook
showed it to be reasonably certain that they were of the sub-species
_Sialia mexicana bairdi_, the chestnut-backed bluebird; but I had
failed to observe one important mark: the throat should have been
“purplish blue.” I wished very much to see them again, but they had
disappeared. Doubtless they were migrants or stragglers, and by this
time were far away. A pity I had not been more painstaking while I had
the opportunity. The one safe rule is to note everything, though it is
a rule more easily laid down than lived up to, to be sure, especially
in a new place, with many distractions. Anyhow, the birds must be of
the chestnut-backed sub-species, I reassured myself, for the sufficient
reason that it was impossible, here in western Texas, that they should
be anything else.

Allaying my scruples thus, I started across a field toward a farmhouse,
and on the way noticed a crow flying over. It was the first one I had
seen since reaching San Antonio,--the chaparral country not favoring
birds of the crow-jay tribe,[11]--and I remarked it with pleasure. And
then, remembering something I had lately read of Arizona, I thought,
“But is it a crow, after all? Isn’t it one of the white-necked ravens
that are set down as so common and familiar in this part of the world?”
And, in fact, it was; for the next moment it began calling in a voice
that put the possibility of its being a common American crow, the only
one that could possibly be met with in all this region, quite out of
the account. Another new bird! The third within half an hour! Surely
this was better than getting into El Paso on schedule time. Let El Paso
wait. It would probably last the day out.

But the story was not yet done, for after a little the meadow larks, of
which there were many in the fields (with large flocks of horned larks,
also), began singing. I was disappointed in the song, of the beauty of
which I had formed the most exalted expectations, but consoled myself
with believing that the birds were not Western meadow larks proper,
but the Texan sub-species; otherwise I must conclude that their voices
were still somewhat winter-bound, or at least, not yet keyed up to
concert pitch.

A sparrow hawk beside the farmhouse before mentioned allowed me
to stand almost under his low tree before he took wing, and when
at last he did so I had a feeling that he was rather surprisingly
long. I thought nothing more of the matter at the moment, but later,
discovering by a reference to the handbook that a variety of _Falco
sparverius_, somewhat larger and with a longer tail, had been described
from this region, I concluded it probable, not to say certain, that
my impression had been correct, and that the bird was not my old
acquaintance of the East, but _Falco sparverius deserticola_. That
would make the new birds of the morning four instead of three.

All this while, it must be understood, there was always the possibility
that the train might start at any moment, no positive information upon
that point being obtainable, so that I could move about only within
a narrowly limited area. For a man thus tethered I was doing pretty
well, whatever my unornithological fellow-travelers might think of my
peculiar movements and attitudes. And to increase my enthusiasm, as I
turned to go back to the train for dinner, in crossing an irrigation
ditch (now dry), bordered with a dense thicket of low shrubs, I caught
the tinkle of junco voices and presently a glimpse of white tail
feathers. Now, then, since luck was the order of the day, it was as
likely as not that these were not simple _Junco hyemalis_ such as I had
found at San Antonio, but one of several Western kinds that might, for
aught I was aware, be looked for hereabout.

And so it proved. The birds were amazingly shy and secretive, but
with patience I had three or four of them under my glass one after
another; and they were noticeably different from our Eastern junco, and
belonged, as the book’s description made clear, to the variety _Junco
hyemalis connectens_, the intermediate junco, so (not very poetically)
called.

I went to dinner with an excellent appetite, and afterward, the delay
of the train still continuing, though with rumors that its end was
near, I took one more turn in the field, and this time happened upon
still another stranger, the handsomest of the day, so wonderfully
handsome, though “handsome” is too cheap a word, that a man would have
to go far to beat it--an Arizona _Pyrrhuloxia_; a bird--related to the
cardinal grosbeak group--having no representative in the East. It would
be a shame to attempt a description of it here at the end of a hurried
sketch, but it made a glorious sixth in my list of the day’s findings.
I shall see more of it, I trust, when I reach the territory to which it
more distinctively belongs.

One other piece of good fortune I must not fail to chronicle, though I
have omitted to do so in its proper place. Late in the forenoon, after
I had given the bluebirds up for lost, I discovered them sitting, the
six together, a lovely company, among the leaves of a cottonwood tree,
as if they had taken shelter from the wind; and the book’s description
was borne out: their throats were “purplish blue.”

The nine hours--for so long the embargo lasted--passed all too soon. If
I could have had two or three hours of free wandering, who knows what
other bright names I might have brought back? I went so far, indeed,
as to inquire of the postmaster and variety storekeeper--a genial,
smiling German--whether there was any place in the neighborhood where a
stranger could be put up for the night; but he thought not, and advised
me, not at all inhospitably, to stick to the train. And possibly, after
all, I had found more rather than less for being compelled to beat a
small space over again and again, instead of ranging farther afield. At
all events, I had discovered a new use for ornithological enthusiasm,
and I might almost add for railway accidents. I do not expect to find
many birdier places, no matter where my wanderings take me, than that
piece of dry, winter-bleached prairie about San Elizario.

OVER THE BORDER

On my first morning at El Paso, where, by good luck, as already
explained, I arrived nine or ten hours behind time, I made an early
start for Juarez, the Mexican city on the opposite bank of the Rio
Grande. As I waited for the car at the corner of the street, a rosy
house finch stood on the top of a telegraph pole overhead, singing
ecstatically. The pretty creature, it is evident, is very much at home
in this bustling city, at least in winter, for I was hardly in my room
on the afternoon of my arrival before I heard its warble, and looking
out of the window beheld the bird perched upon the eaves of a building
across the way, where more than once since then I have heard and seen
it. I am sorry to add that the English sparrow, its most unworthy
rival, is here also, though for the moment in small numbers.

When the car came along, it proved to be an open one.

“A rather cold morning for open cars,” I said to the youthful conductor.

“Oh, we run open cars all winter,” he answered. “But I suppose we
don’t mind the cold so much,” he continued, emphasizing the pronoun,
“because we are out of doors all the time.”

A Northern tenderfoot might naturally be less inured to frigidity,
he seemed to imply; but I remarked that he wore the heaviest of
overcoats with the collar up. Warm days (much like New England June),
cool nights, clear skies, constant winds, dryness and dust--such is
the January climate of El Paso, if my four days have given me a fair
impression of its quality.

Presently we crossed a short bridge.

“Was that the river?” I asked my seatmate, a minute afterward, a sudden
suspicion coming over me, though it seemed so absurd that I was half
ashamed to betray it.

“Yes, sir; that was the Rio Grande. You’re in Mexico now,” he answered.

Yes, and that must have been the Mexican Custom House officer whom I
had seen step out of the door of a small building on the southern bank
of the river and salute our conductor so politely. None of us looked
like smugglers, I suppose. At all events, the car was not “held up,” as
happened at the other end of the bridge, a day or two later, while two
rather boisterous young fellows on the rear seat made themselves merry
over the attempt of Uncle Sam’s official representative to collect a
duty. International travel, even in an electric street-car, is liable
to complications.

As for the river, it was practically dry. Pedestrians were crossing
it--to save toll--on a few small stepping-stones at a point where the
current could not have been ten feet wide nor more than half of ten
inches deep. My seatmate explained that so much water was drawn off
above this point for irrigation purposes that the river had little left
for its own use; and in fact, more than once afterward I saw its bed
absolutely dry, so that even the stepping-stones had for the day gone
out of business. Yet it is a real _rio grande_, for all that, and the
life of a long, long strip of Texas.

Drought is the mark of this country. A friendly citizen (of whom, in my
ignorance, I had inquired about “suburban trains”!) warned me earnestly
against wandering far out of the town. If some Mexican did not kill me
“for the sake of the clothes I had on” (an ignoble death, surely), I
might get lost (an easy matter, by my adviser’s tell), in which event,
if nothing more serious happened to me, I should infallibly perish of
thirst.

The car took me through the compact little _ciudad_ (a five-minute
passage, perhaps), and I struck out for the country, along the line
of the Mexican Central Railroad, in the direction of the mountains,
heading my course for a cemetery out on the slope, in the midst of
the chaparral. White-necked ravens were foraging beside the track, as
little disturbed by human approach as so many English sparrows might
have been. “How soon the strange becomes familiar!” I thought. I had
never seen a white-necked raven (there is no whiteness visible,[12]
the bird being a very imp of darkness to look at it) till less than
twenty-four hours ago, and already I was passing it with something
like indifference. I was far from indifferent, however, two afternoons
later, when for the first time I watched a flock of several hundred
soaring in mazy circles high overhead, after the manner of buzzards or
sea-gulls.

No other birds showed themselves till I drew near the cemetery gate,
when suddenly the bushes just in front, straight between me and the
sun, were alive with sparrows. My eyes, dazzled as they were by the
sunshine, caught sight of one lark bunting as the flock took wing. I
must see more of it,--it was my first one,--and started eagerly in
pursuit. But the creatures were timid beyond all calculation, and
though I pursued them with cautious haste for some distance, I could
never come up with them. Wherever I looked, there was nothing but
white-crowned sparrows; handsome birds, the sight of which is almost an
event in Massachusetts, but so abundant in Texas at this time of the
year--as Lincoln finches are, also--that I have begun to turn away from
them as almost a nuisance. It becomes vexatious to a man in search of
novelties when even an old favorite keeps itself too persistently under
his glass. As the proverb has it, there is reason in all things.

While I was beating the chaparral over, still in search of those
missing white wing-patches, I noticed a funeral procession coming
from the city. Heading the cortege was what in a Massachusetts town
would be called a “depot carriage.” It served the purpose of a hearse,
I suppose, and in it sat two men bareheaded. It seemed a neighborly
and Christian act to accompany a brother mortal to the grave in this
fraternal manner. The second carriage was an open buggy, drawn by a
white horse.

These things I took note of while the procession was still a long way
off (a military band, still farther away, at the barracks, no doubt,
was playing a march), and meantime I went up to the cemetery fence and
looked over. The monuments were mostly, if not wholly, wooden crosses,
with the ordinary run of affectionate epitaphs. A man, who appeared to
be the keeper of the place, came out of the one house near at hand, and
asked me something in Spanish, to which I replied in English. We were
unable to communicate with each other till finally I said, “_No sabe._”
It was not precisely what I intended to tell him; but it was all one.
He saw for himself that I spoke no Spanish, and with that left me to
myself.

I returned to El Paso on foot, and as I reached the northern end of the
bridge, walking, as it happened, on the far side of the road, with my
overcoat on my arm, as careless as could be, I was hailed by an officer
in uniform. I halted, and he approached. Then he waited. It was my
place to speak first, as it seemed, and I began:

“Do you wish to inspect me?”

“Well, what did you buy in Mexico?” he asked.

“A postal-card, and mailed it.”

“Was that all you bought?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

The souvenir postal-card industry, though comparatively infantile,
is not “protected,” it appears, although, if I had brought the
five-cents’ worth away with me, I might, for aught I positively know,
have been called upon for duty. The rights of American laboring men
must by all means be looked after. To think what ruin might befall
this great republic if its people, with all the rest of their freedom,
should in some fit of madness insist upon the freedom to buy and sell!

That was three days ago. Since then I have been to Juarez twice,
pushing a little farther each time into the country southward. On
both visits I found lark buntings in plenty. They move about--and sit
about--in peculiarly dense flocks. One such, that I saw this morning,
might have numbered a thousand birds. If disturbed, they rise in a
cloud, and on coming to rest again every one seems to desire a perch
at the very tip of a bush. As they must all alight in the same one or
two bunches of scrub, however, though there are hundreds of others
exactly like them all about, there are by no means top seats enough
to go round, and there is a deal of preliminary hovering, accompanied
by a grand confusion of formless twittering, during which--the white
patches of the quivering wings and outspread tails showing through--the
spectacle is most animated and pleasing.

As for the city itself, it is squalid, but well worth a visit; having
so strange and other-worldish a look that one seems to have crossed at
least an ocean rather than a trickling streamlet. The white church; the
little shops, with their curious wares; the game cocks in the street,
tethered each by a yard of cord to a peg driven into the ground on the
edge of the sidewalk, crowing defiance to each other, and regarded
proudly by their owners, who now and then take them up in their arms,
caressing them fondly, or shaking one in the face of another, to see
the feathers of their necks bristle; the bust of Bonito Juarez in the
fenced plaza, the bust itself of a size to adorn a parlor mantel, while
the marble pedestal is ten or fifteen feet high and at least ten feet
square at the base; the Spanish signboards and placards; best of all,
the people themselves, men, women, and children--the children, some
of them, half naked, even on a cold, windy forenoon, while the men
saunter about, or lean against an adobe wall in the sun, wrapped in
thick, bright-colored blankets (I shall think of a Mexican, as long as
I live, as leaning against the side of a house)--all these go to make a
memorable picture for a Yankee on his travels.

FIRST DAYS IN TUCSON

What is more fickle than New England weather? Nothing, perhaps, or
nothing inanimate, unless it be the weather of some Southern winter
resort, say in Florida or Arizona.

I reached Tucson in the evening of January 31, a stop at El Paso having
saved me from participation in a railroad accident, as a result of
which many passengers (nobody knows how many) were burned to death. The
first of February was bright and warm; so that in a long forenoon jaunt
over the desert a very light overcoat quickly became burdensome. The
next morning, therefore, it was left at home.

My course this time was into the valley of the Santa Cruz, where
farmers live by irrigation and barley fields are already green. I
had crossed the river, pausing on the bridge to enjoy the sight of
my first black phœbe,--a handsome, highly presentable fellow with a
jet-black waistcoat,--when all at once the dusty road before me was
seen to be fast becoming inundated. Beside the fence, wading in mud and
water, the owner of the fields, having taken up arms--a long-handled
spade--against this sea of troubles, appeared to have been working hard
to repair the mischief. At that moment, however, he had given over
the attempt in despair and was lifting his boots, first one, then the
other, out of the mire and scraping them, rather ineffectually, with
the spade.

I ought to have known better, but it is easy to see the comical side of
other people’s misfortunes, and I remarked in a cheerful tone:

“Well, well, you seem to have water to burn.”

Thereupon other floodgates were opened, and out poured a stream of
language, the greater part of it too “colloquial” for print. The
substance of it all was that a Mexican (the opprobrious word being
dwelt upon and forcibly qualified) had come in the night and let on the
water, without giving him, the farmer, any notice of the unseasonable
action. Now the water was all over the road, and all over the yard, and
close up to the back door of the house. He had sent for a man to help
him.

Seeing nothing better to do, I picked my steps among the dust-bounded
streams as best I was able, and passed by on the other side. I
had always understood irrigation to be a kind of predictable and
controllable rain, but it appeared that, if this were the rule, the
rule had exceptions. The sight set me thinking that possibly if the
general management of the weather were put into human hands, as the
least presumptuous of us are more or less in the habit of wishing were
possible, it might still be found difficult to escape an occasional
fault of administration. As for my farmer’s emphatic language, I held
it excusable. He certainly had provocation, and as the Scripture says,
with commendable toleration, there is a time for everything under the
sun.

The river valley is narrow, like the river itself, and on the farther
side is bounded sharply by steep foothills, behind which are high
mountains. I was barely beginning to climb the nearest hill, over its
loose covering of small stones, when some bird broke into voice a
little above me; one of those peculiar voices, I said to myself, that
at a first hearing afford almost no indication as to the size of their
owners.

My uncertainty lasted for some minutes, while I made my way cautiously
upwards, a step or two at a time. The bird proved to be a small
wren,--the rock wren, so called,--said to be “more or less abundant” in
this region; “more” rather than “less,” I hope, for I fell in love with
the creature immediately.

One of the birds,--for there were two, talking “back and forth,” as
we say,--his fit of nervousness over, dropped into a lyrical mood,
and regaled me with a very pleasing bit of simple music, all in brief
phrases, but with a surprisingly wide range of pitch. Some of the
measures had a peculiar vibrant quality suggestive of the finest work
of our common Eastern snowbird. But withal, I received the impression
that the musician was rather trying his instrument than aiming at a
serious performance.

While I stood listening, a bunch of a dozen Mexican house finches, more
than half the number in rosy plumage, happened along with the usual
chorus of twitters, and alighted in a very peculiar and graceful shrub
(_ocotillo_, I am told is its Mexican name), which grows in clusters of
a dozen or so of slender, angular stems, leaning away from one another
in all directions and covered sparsely with reddish leaves, which look
for all the world like the autumnal foliage of the common barberry.
The rosy finches, perched upon this group of slanting, wandlike,
fountain-like stems,[13] were exceedingly pretty to look at.

All about me stood tall, fluted columns of the giant cactus, fifteen
or twenty feet in height, and large enough for telegraph poles. On
the day before, my first day in the city, I had turned a field-glass
in this direction, and to my surprise had seen the hills covered with
verdure. “Why,” said I, noticing what I took for the trunks of trees
amid the green, “those hills are forested.” Now I discovered that
the greenness was mostly that of the desert-loving creosote bush (a
low shrub, noticeable for being thornless, which covers thousands on
thousands of acres hereabouts, and just now is putting forth small
yellow blossoms), while the boles of trees were nothing but giant cacti.

Among the stones at my feet grew flowers of various unknown sorts,
especially a large yellow one, apparently an evening primrose, rising
no more than two inches from the ground, with a tuft of leaves at
the base of the stem, or rather at the bottom of the calyx. The only
flower of them all that I could certainly name was a pretty blue
lupine, smaller than our New England species, both in blossom and leaf,
but so exactly like it in other respects that for old acquaintance’
sake, though the lupine was never one of my particular favorites, I
plucked it for my buttonhole. I believe it is the only natural-looking,
familiar-looking wild plant that I have so far seen in this desert
country.

The wrens having become silent, and the finches flown away, I descended
the hill and took the road running along its base northward. It must
lead, I thought, to another road across the valley, and would make a
round of my forenoon’s walk. And so it did; but first it brought me
to a large building which proved to be St. Mary’s Sanatorium, more
commonly known as the Sisters’ Hospital. I had just passed this and
turned the corner, facing the town, when all in a moment, so far at
least as my perception of events was concerned, the sky was covered
with black clouds, and an icy north wind changed the day from summer to
winter as in the twinkling of an eye.

No more loitering by the way. I did at once what every other creature
was already doing--I hurried. “Now if I only had that overcoat!” I
thought; but speed also is an extra garment, and I put it on.

No more loitering, I said; but I did stop once. Halfway across the
valley a flock of blackbirds were feeding beside a barn, and I turned
into the yard to look at them.

“I want to see what kind of blackbirds these are,” I explained to the
man of the house, who came out of the door at that moment.

“Oh, they’re the same kind that is all over the universe,” he answered,
smiling.

But his generalization was hasty, as generalizations are apt to be.
They were Brewer’s blackbirds--the handsomest of grackles; birds that
I had seen for the first time, at Del Rio, only the week before. I
did not stay to admire their iridescence, but declining an invitation
to ride (it was too cold for that, though the man was just going to
harness up, he said), I buttoned another button and hastened on. The
two or three persons I met each had something to say about the weather,
but nobody stopped for prolonged comment. Short speeches and quick
steps, or another crack at the mule, were the order of the day. Even
at the South a man will generally hurry a little rather than freeze to
death.

Well, the experience was more amusing than uncomfortable, after all,
and I reached the hotel door just as rain began falling. Before night
snow was mingled with the rain, and the next morning I saw a small boy,
his eyes dancing with brightness, making a tiny snow image to stand
upon the front-yard fence, while the mountains--that fairly surround
the city, as they do the Holy City in the Hebrew psalm--were dazzling
white. The mud was beyond belief, the walking laborious; but as I
paused now and then for breath or to recover my footing, and saw all
that glory about me, I thanked my stars that I was here. I was glad
to see that even in this arid zone (_arida zona_, as the Mexicans are
supposed to have begun by calling it) it still knew how both to rain
and to snow.

“Well, now, this was a surprise, wasn’t it?” I remarked to a German
whom I met in the valley road.

“You bet,” he answered; and then, with a smile, he added: “but it won’t
last only a couple of days; that’s all.”

His mastery of American idiom recalls what another German farmer said
on the same forenoon. He had been living here and in California since
’82, he told me.

“Which place do you like best?” I inquired.

“Oh, Arizona,” he answered, without hesitation. “Things are freer
here,” he went on. “In Los Angeles, now, you have to dress up once in
a while; but here, if you dress up, or if you don’t dress up, it don’t
cut no ice.”

My first man’s confident “couple of days” was a trifle too confident.
Twice two days have passed. In that time we have had summer weather (at
noon), a pretty hard freeze (at night), and another rain and another
snowfall, both heavier than the first.

The winter visitors, of whom there are many, the greater part, alas,
ordered here for “lung trouble,” have naturally been put out,--the
more recent arrivals among them greatly astonished; they thought
they were coming to a dry climate; but the residents proper, if not
jubilant, have seemed at least reasonably well contented with the turn
of affairs. There has been a general agreement, to be sure (one heard
it on all hands), that it was “pretty muddy;” the wayfaring man, though
a fool, could not dispute the statement; but so far as the prosperity
of Arizona is concerned, there is no probability of an excessive
rainfall. The more the better. So much is evident, even to an itinerant
ornithologist, who may stand, if you will, for the wayfaring man before
mentioned. What is not so clear to his darkened understanding is why
the weather, no matter where one goes, should be every season so
strangely exceptional, so utterly different from everything that the
oldest inhabitant can remember.

MOBBED IN ARIZONA

I have never known a city more orderly seeming, more evidently peaceful
and law-abiding than Tucson. Nowhere have I felt safer in wandering
about by myself in all sorts of places, whether within the city proper
or in the surrounding country. Here is a town, I have said to myself,
where the citizen has small need of the policeman. And yet I know a
man, most discreet and inoffensive (not to be shame-faced about it, let
me admit that I speak of the bird-gazer himself), who a few days ago,
for no assignable reason, was violently set upon, or, to speak plainly,
mobbed, just outside the city limits.

Tucson, it should be premised, is a thriving, rapidly growing, modern
city--though it has an antiquity to boast of, as well--in the midst of
a desert. Its own site was originally part of the desert. The nearest
large city is Los Angeles, California, five hundred miles distant; the
nearest village, from what I hear, must be fifty or sixty miles away.
Many roads run out of the town, but only to ranches scattered here and
there along the two watercourses, or to mining camps farther off in
the mountains. How a city ever came to grow up in a place so isolated,
so seemingly destitute of anything like local advantages, is a riddle
beyond my reading; but here it is, a city in the desert. North, south,
east, or west, you may start where you will and go in what direction
you please, and in fifteen minutes you will be out among the creosote
bushes and the cacti, with nothing but a world of creosote and
cactus--with perhaps a windmill and a roof rising above them somewhere
in the distance--between you and the mountain range that bounds the
horizon.

Well, this was exactly what I myself did one fine morning a week ago. I
walked up the main street of the city, turned to the right, passed the
territorial university buildings, and, taking a course northward toward
the Santa Catalinas, sauntered carelessly forward, field-glass in hand,
to see what might be stirring in the chaparral.

There would not be much, I knew. By daylight, at least, and in the
winter season, the desert is not a stirring place. In the tracts where
the creosote occupies the ground alone there proved, as usual, to be
nothing; but presently I came to a place where two or three kinds of
cactus were sprinkled among the creosote bushes, and newly sprung
bluish-green grass (I call it grass, provisionally, although, like
almost everything else hereabout, it has an unaccustomed look) carpeted
or half-carpeted the ground. Here were the almost inevitable two cactus
wrens (how overjoyed I was at the unexpected sight of my first one,
at San Antonio, only three weeks ago, and how soon they have become
an old story!) perched, one here, one there, at the top of branching
cactus trees five or six feet high, calling antiphonally, as their
habit is, in a coarse, unmusical, wearisome voice--the same churlish
phase over and over and over. Nothing but the lonesomeness of the
desert, surely, could ever make that grating, repetitive monotony a
pleasure-giving sound. What the birds will do in the way of song when
their musical season arrives, if it ever does,[14] is more than I know;
but, belonging to be so musical a family, they ought to be capable of
something better than this, for music, of all gifts, is a thing that
runs in the blood. It would be a strange wren that could not express
his happiness in some really lyrical manner.

In the same neighborhood, as has happened on several occasions, were
a group of five or six sage thrashers. It was in this very place,
indeed, that I first formed their acquaintance; and a sorely puzzled
novelty-seeker I was on that eventful afternoon. The whole desert had
seemed to be devoid of animal existence, I remember, when of a sudden
there stood those strange birds on the ground before me. At the first
instant they gave me an impression of overgrown titlarks. Then, when I
watched them running at full speed over the grass, all at once pulling
themselves up and standing erect with a snap of the tail, I said: “Why,
they must be thrushes of some sort.” In attitude and action they were
almost exactly like so many robins. The only striking characteristic of
their plumage was the peculiarly dense streaking of the under-parts.

The mystery was heightened for me by the fact that they maintained an
absolute silence. Indeed, although I have seen them many times since
then, I have yet to hear them utter the first syllable. For aught I can
positively affirm, they may every one be mutes. I chased them about for
half an hour, scrutinizing the least detail of their dress, all the
while wondering what on earth to call them, till finally it came over
me, I could never tell how, that they must be sage thrashers.

“Yes,” I said, “_Oroscoptes!_ I remember that that bird is described as
having a short bill.”

It was a true guess; and in a strange country a man makes so many poor
guesses that he may reasonably boast a little over every good one. To
this day, I am bound to add, the birds, with their short bills, their
extraordinary quickness upon their feet, and their upright carriage,
have to my eye very little the appearance of thrashers. Perhaps when I
hear them sing, my feeling may alter.

There is at least one real thrasher in the desert, however, and usually
in the same places that Oroscoptes affects, places such as I have
mentioned, where cacti are mingled with the omnipresent creosote.
This is Palmer’s thrasher, so called, a grayish-brown bird, with
the characteristic thrasher make-up--long bill, long body, and long
tail. He is one of the common birds about Tucson, both in the river
valley and on the desert, and one of the few that are already in song.
Even he, I suspect, is not really letting himself go as yet, but he
is in tune daily; not so versatile a performer, seemingly, as our
Eastern reddish-brown bird; with much less range of voice, and more
given to repeating the same phrase half a dozen times in succession,
so that his music has less the air of a strict improvisation; but a
genuine thrasher, nevertheless, with a thrasher’s song. As the season
progresses he will probably grow more ecstatic, though to hear him
now, one would not expect him ever to become so mad a rhapsodist as
the crazy bird that we admire, and sometimes smile at, in the Eastern
country.

Whether the thrasher was seen on the day I am supposed to be
describing, I do not now remember, but in all probability he was,
for I never walk far in the desert without seeing or hearing him. If
he does not sing, he salutes me with volleys of sharp, whip-snapping
whistles in the style of the wood thrush and the robin. Like the wren,
he prefers a perch at the top of a cactus. He prefers it, I say; but in
truth it is almost Hobson’s choice with him, since the topmost spray
of a creosote bush, the only other thing he _could_ perch on, would
hardly support his weight. There he stands, at all events, perfectly at
his ease among the closely set spines, sharp as the sharpest needles,
though how he manages the ticklish feat so adroitly is more than I can
imagine.

I may have seen two or three desert sparrows, also; the black-throated
sparrow, that is, with some slight variations, imperceptible in the
bush, that make him, in the language of science, _Amphispiza bilineata
deserticola_; and possibly, though this is somewhat less to be taken
for granted, his long-tailed relative, the sage sparrow (_Amphispiza
belli nevadensis_), may have teased me by his shyness. Both these birds
are said to be famous enliveners of the desert,--though neither of them
in their present silent state quite lives up to his reputation,--and
will doubtless become prime favorites with me if I remain here long
enough really to know them. Where should simple, hearty melodies find
appreciation, if not in the desert?

I am slow in coming to the point of my story; and with reason. It is
not pleasant to be mobbed; there is nothing to boast of in such an
adventure; nothing to flatter one’s sense of personal importance; one
is not apt to speak of it _con amore_, as we say. Some things are best
slipped over in silence. So I have noticed that men who have served
their country in prison will always contrive by one path or another to
go round the name of that unpopular institution. But I have begun, and
there is nothing for it but to finish.

Well, then, I had walked perhaps a mile and a half beyond the
university buildings, which is the same as to say beyond the limits
of the town, and found myself approaching a lonely ranch, when a
flock of ravens, white-necked ravens, which abound hereabout--“the
multitudinous raven,” I have caught myself saying[15]--rose from the
scrub not far in advance, with the invariable hoarse chorus of _quark_,
_quark_. I thought nothing of it, the sight being so much an every-day
matter, till after a little I began to be aware that the whole flock
seemed to be concentrating its attention upon my unsuspecting,
inoffensive self. There must have been fifty of the big black birds.
Round and round they went in circles, just above my head, moving
forward as I moved, vociferating every one as he came near, “quark,
quark.”

At first I was amused; it was something new and interesting. I recalled
the time when I walked miles on miles over the North Carolina mountains
in hope of seeing one raven, and here were half a hundred almost within
hand’s reach; I chaffed them as they passed, calling them names and
quarking back to them in derision. But before very long the novelty of
the thing wore off; the persecution grew tiresome. Enough is as good
as a feast; and I had had enough. “Quark, quark,” they yelled, all the
while settling nearer,--or so I fancied,--till it seemed as if they
actually meant violence. They were doing precisely what a flock of
crows does to an owl or a hawk: they were mobbing me. “Quark, quark!
Hit him, there! Hit him! Pick his eyes out!”

The commotion lasted for at least half a mile. Then the birds wearied
of it, and went off about their business. All but one of them, I mean
to say. He had no such notion. For ten minutes longer he stayed by. His
persistency was devilish. It became almost unbearable. The single voice
was more exasperating even than the chorus. If the famous albatross
carried on after any such outrageous fashion, I have no stones to throw
at the Ancient Mariner. He acted well within his rights. If I had had
a crossbow, and had been as good a marksman as he was,--with “his
glittering eye,”--there would have been one less raven in Arizona, and
no questions asked. If a dead calm had succeeded, so much the better.
“Quark, quark!” the black villain cried, wagging his impish head, and
swooping low to spit the insult into my ear.

But all things have an end, as leaves have their time to fall, and even
a raven’s perseverance will wear out at last. Perhaps the bird grew
hungry. At all events he gave over the assault, stillness fell upon the
desert, and an innocent foot-passenger went on his way in peace.

And this is how I was mobbed in Arizona. I could never have believed
it.

AN IDLE AFTERNOON

I have heard of a man who invariably begins his letters, whether of
friendship or business, with a bulletin of the day’s weather: it rains,
or it shines; it is cold or warm; and to my way of thinking it is far
from certain that the custom is not commendable. It is fair to sender
and receiver alike that the mental conditions under which an epistle
is written should be understood; and there is no man--or no ordinary
man, such as most of us have the happiness to deal with--whose thoughts
and language are not more or less colored by those skyey influences
the sum of which we designate by the interrogative name of weather. I
say “interrogative,” because I assume, although, having no dictionary
by me, I cannot verify the assumption, that the word “weather” is only
a corruption or variant of the older word “whether;” the thing itself
being an entity so variable and doubtful that remarks about it fall
naturally, and almost of necessity, into a discussion of probabilities,
in other words, of “whether.”

As to the weather here in Tucson, I could fill all my letters with
it, and still leave a world of things unsaid. Its fluctuations are so
constant that they tend to become monotonous; as Thoreau said of one of
his Concord days, that it was so wet you might almost call it dry.

Three or four mornings ago, for example, I started early for a
seven-mile tramp across the desert. I wore overcoat and woolen gloves,
and needed them. It was so cool, indeed, that I left word for an extra
garment to be put into the carriage that was to come out and fetch me
back at noon.

That same afternoon I walked down into the valley of the Santa Cruz.
The sun was blazing, and the heat intense. The few cottonwood trees
scattered along the road were still leafless (I had left my umbrella
at home--for the last time) and the only shelter to be found was on
the northeasterly side of the telegraph poles. I believe I never
before complained of such obstructions that they were not big enough;
but everything comes round in its turn. My thoughts ran back to the
time when a boy of my acquaintance used to trudge homeward from
berry-picking excursions on burning July noons. Also I thought of that
comfortable Hebrew text about the “shadow of a great rock in a weary
land.” The man who wrote that might have lived in Arizona. Finally,
out of sheer desperation, I stepped into the yard of a little adobe
house, and being obliged to walk almost to the door, said to the
motherly-looking woman who came forward to see what was wanted, “Excuse
me, please, but I only wish to stand a few minutes in the shade of your
house.” She looked surprised, as well she might. No doubt she took me
for an invalid, as Arizona people say, a “lunger.” Probably, sitting
indoors, and used to summer temperature in these parts, she had been
thinking of the day as rather cool, not to say wintry. Wouldn’t I come
in and sit awhile? She was sure I should be welcome. But I answered no;
I only desired to stand a few minutes in the shade. And two or three
hours afterward, within five minutes after the sun went down,--though
it had been shining in at my west window,--I needed a fire.

Forty-eight hours later we had a snowfall,--the third within ten
days,--the whole world white, with “storm rubbers” barely equal to the
emergency; and the next morning, the snow having gone, ice was thick in
a big tub of water outside my door.

“Cold?” said an Illinois gentleman, with whom I fell into conversation
yesterday, “I’ve been here three weeks, and in that time I’ve suffered
more from cold than in all my forty years.”

I suspect that he exaggerated. For my own part, I haven’t suffered from
cold. It is the occasional heat that makes me fearful of homesickness.
Three days like that one afternoon would set me packing. All of which
may seem not very important to a chance reader; but unless he is of a
hopelessly unimaginative turn he can perhaps conceive how interesting
and important it must be to the parties directly concerned, especially
if he remembers that this is a winter resort, where weather is the one
thing needful.

But what a perfect afternoon we had yesterday!--cool, yet not too cool;
and warm, yet not too warm; with a softness and yet a gently bracing,
uplifting, pulse-quickening, life-reviving quality in the air; and the
sky, too, clear, but not too clear, so that wisps of cloud floated here
and there over the bare, steep sides of the Santa Catalinas, giving
them beauty. I was out upon the desert in a mood of absolute indolence,
contented to walk a mile an hour, and breathe and breathe, and look. At
such times it seems hardly too much to say, strange as the words may
sound, that I am falling in love with the desert, a desert bounded only
by mountains. Already I can believe that men are fascinated by it (the
right men), and having once been here cannot long stay away.

Looking and dreaming, the bird-gazer within me pretty well laid asleep,
suddenly I heard a strange voice in the air, thin, insect-like,
unknown. By the time it had sounded twice the sleeper was wide-awake,
with his opera-glass in play. The voice came from yonder thin clump of
creosote bushes. Yes, the bird flits into sight--a gnatcatcher; and
being a gnatcatcher, with such a note, it must be “the other one,”
known as the plumbeous, which I have been looking for ever since my
arrival in Tucson. And so it was--a pretty creature with a jaunty black
cap. I shall know him henceforth, I hope, even without seeing him.
We are fortunate, both of us, I take leave to say, to have made each
other’s acquaintance on so ideal an afternoon.

The gnatcatcher disappeared, and the dreamer was just dozing off again,
when two large birds were seen to be having a hot encounter, high
overhead. This time the field-glass came into requisition. A raven was
teasing a red-tailed hawk, with all a raven’s pertinacity and spite.
Again and again and again he swooped upon him, while the hawk ducked
and turned to avoid the stroke. Why the big fellow, biggest of all our
hawks, larger and stronger in every way than the raven, did not face
his tormentor and lay him out was a mystery. I confess, I should have
been glad to see him do it. Instead, he made off toward the mountains,
and after a long chase and much croaking, the raven turned away.

This also had passed out of mind, and I was on my way homeward, barely
putting one foot before the other, enjoying the air and the sun,--and
the mountains,--when, happening to glance upward, I beheld a grand
sight. “That’s the golden eagle,” I said aloud (in the desert a man
soon falls into the neighborly habit of talking to himself), and one
look through the field-glass proved the words correct. The great bird
was in perfect light, sailing in circles, so that his upper parts came
every minute into full view as he swung about, the old gold of the
head and neck, as well as the contrasted brown and black of the wings,
perfectly displayed, with nothing left for guesswork. I was all eyes,
and watched him and watched him, admiring especially the firm set of
his wings, till he, too, sailed away, not chased, but moving of his own
royal will, and dropped at last out of sight behind the rolling desert.

He was my first golden eagle, in some respects one of the noblest
of all North American birds. I knew him to be not uncommon in the
mountains, and had hoped some day to see him passing, especially when
I should be far out on the edge of the foothills; and behold, here he
was on my idle afternoon, close at home. Who says that the lame and the
lazy are not provided for?

My dreamy saunter was turning out ornithological in spite of myself,
and as if the gnatcatcher and the eagle had not done enough to that
end, the ubiquitous raven now took a hand at the business. My thoughts
were just settling back into vacancy, when the ravens were seen to be
commencing their regular afternoon progress to their roosting grounds,
wherever those may be, on the other side of the city. A detachment of
some scores was already on the move. And presently I observed what was
to me a strange and interesting thing, although, for aught I can affirm
to the contrary, it may be only an every-day occurrence.

A great part of the birds were playing by twos, one chasing the
other, as if engaged in a frolic to which all parties were perfectly
accustomed. I had not expected such a pitch of levity on the part of
these black-suited, and as I should have thought, rather gloomy-natured
scavengers. But they were going to roost, and like children at the
hour of bedtime, they were making a lark of it. Perhaps the day’s
picking had been uncommonly good; they had been over by a certain
cattle-slaughtering establishment; something, at all events, had put
them in high spirits, and so Tom was having it out with Dick, and Bob
with Harry. To look at them, it seemed as much fun as a pillow-fight,
and as I have said, the greater part of the flock were engaged in it.

But the point I started to speak of was not the game itself, but a
certain acrobatic feat by which it was accompanied. Again and again,
in the course of their doublings and duckings, I saw the birds turn
what looked to be a complete sidewise somersault. It may have been