*

^7 ffr

/

x6mo, $1.10, net.
i6mo,

NATURE'S INVITATION.
Postage extra.

THE CLERK OF THE WOODS.
$1.10, net. Postpaid, $1.20.

FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA. i6mo, £1.10,
net. Postpaid, £1.19.

EVERYDAY BIRDS. Elementary Studies.

With twelve colored Illustrations repro-

duced from Audubon. Square i2mo, $1.00.
BIRDS IN THE BUSH. i6mo, $1.25.
A RAMBLER'S LEASE. i6mo, $1.25.
THE FOOT-PATH WAY. i6mo, gilt top,

$1.25.

A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. i6mo, $1.25.
SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE.

i6mo, $1.25.
A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS. i6mo, $1.25.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

NATURE'S INVITATION

NATURE'S INVITATION

NOTES OF A BIRD-GAZER
NORTH AND SOUTH

BY

BKADFOKD TOKKEY

"On Nature's invitation do I come."— WOBDSWOBTH.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

re?0, CambritJ0e
1904

COPYRIGHT 1904 BY BRADFORD TORREY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published October 1004

PREFATORY NOTE

OF the chapters here brought together the two
longest, the first and the last, are reprinted from
the " Atlantic Monthly." The others were origi-
nally contributed, by way of weekly letters, to
three newspapers, — the " Evening Transcript "
of Boston, and the " Mail and Express " and the
" Evening Post " of New York.

CONTENTS

NEW HAMPSHIRE

PAQB

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 3

A WEEK ON MOUNT WASHINGTON .... 32

ABOVE THE BIRDS 41

MOUNTAIN-TOP AND VALLEY 50

IN THE MOUNT LAFAYETTE FOREST .... 57

ON BALD MOUNTAIN 65

BIRDS AND BKIGHT LEAVES 72

FLORIDA

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MIAMI 83

A FROSTY MORNING 89

BEWILDERMENT 96

WAITING FOR THE Music 104

PERIPATETIC BOTANY Ill

A PEEP AT THE EVERGLADES 120

THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING 128

FAIR ORMOND 136

A DAY IN THE WOODS 142

PICTURE AND SONG 151

TEXAS AND ARIZONA

IN OLD SAN ANTONIO ...... 161

A BIRD-GAZER'S PUZZLES 171

LUCK ON THE PRAIRIE . . . . . . 179

viii CONTENTS

OVER THE BOBBER 188

FIRST DAYS IN TUCSON 196

MOBBED IN ARIZONA 205

AN IDLE AFTERNOON 215

SHY LIFE IN THE DESERT 224

A NEW ACQUAINTANCE 233

THE DESERT REJOICES 242

NESTS AND OTHER MATTERS . . . , . 251

A FLYCATCHER AND A SPARROW . ; . . 259

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS , . «',-.. . 266

INDEX . 295

NEW HAMPSHIRE

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE

WHEN a man sets forth on an out-of-door pleasure
jaunt, his prayer is for weather. If he is going
to the mountains, let him double his urgency.
In the mountains, if nowhere else, weather is
three fifths of life.

My first trip to New Hampshire the present
season1 was made under smooth, high clouds,
which left the distance clear, so that the moun-
tains stood up grandly beyond the lake as we
ran along its western border. Not a drop of
rain fell till I stepped off the car at Warren.
At that moment the world grew suddenly dark,
and before I could get into the open carriage the
clouds burst, and with a rattling of thunder bolts
a deluge of rain and hail descended upon us.
There was no contending with such an adversary,
though a good woman across the way, commiser-
ating our plight, came to the door with proffers of
an umbrella. I retreated to the station, while the
driver hastened down the street to put his team
under shelter. So a half hour passed. Then we
tried again, and half frozen, in spite of a winter

4 : NEW HAMPSHIRE

overcoat and everything that goes with it (the
date was May 17), I reached my destination, five
miles away, at the foot of Moosilauke.

All this would hardly deserve narration, per-
haps (the story of travelers' discomforts being
mostly matter for skipping), only that it marked
the setting in of a cold, rainy " spell " that hung
upon us for four days. Four sunless days out of
seven was a proportion fairly to be complained
of. The more I consider it, the truer seems the
equation just now stated, that mountain weather
is three fifths of life. For those four days I did
not even see Moosilauke, though we were living,
so to speak, upon its shoulder, and I knew by
hearsay that the summit house was visible from
the back doorstep.

My first brief walk before supper should rea-
sonably have been in the clearer valley country ;
but if reason spoke inclination did not hear it,
and my feet — which seem to feel that they are
old enough by this time to know their master's
business for him — took of their own motion an
opposite course. The mountain woods, as I en-
tered them, had the appearance of early March :
only the merest sprinkling of new life, — clin-
tonia leaves especially, with here and there a
round-leaved violet, both leaves and flowers, —
upon a ground still all defaced by the hand of

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 5

Winter. Dead leaves make an agreeable carpet,
as they rustle cheerfully-sadly under one's feet in
autumn ; but there was no rustle here ; the snow
had pressed every leaf flat and left it sodden.
One thing consoled me : I had not arrived too
late. The " bud-crowned spring," for all my
fears, was yet to " go forth."

The next morning it was not enough to say that
it was cloudy. That impersonal expression would
have been quite below the mark. We were
cloudy. In short, the cloud was literally around
us and upon us. As I stepped out of doors, a
rose-breasted grosbeak was singing in one direc-
tion, and a white-throated sparrow in another,
both far away in the mist. It was strange they
should be so happy, I was ready to say. But I
bethought myself that their case was no different
from my own. It was comparatively clear just
about me, while the fog shut down like a curtain
a rod or two away, leaving the rest of the world
dark. So every bird stood in a ring of light, an
illuminated chantry all his own,

And sang for joy, good Christian bird,
To be thus marked and favored.

Strange had he not been happy. To be blest
above one's fellows is to be blest twice over.
This time I took the downward road, turning

6 NEW HAMPSHIRE

to the left, and found myself at once in pleasant
woods, with hospitable openings and bypaths ; a
birdy spot, or I was no prophet, though just now
but few voices were to be heard, and those of the
commonest. Here stood new-blown anemones,
bellworts, and white violets, an early flock, with
one painted trillium lording it over them ; a small
specimen of its kind, but big enough to be king
(or shepherd) in such company. A brook, or
perhaps two, with the few birds, sang about me,
invisible. I knew not whither I was going, and
the all-embracing cloud deepened the mystery.
Soon the road took a sudden dip, and a louder
noise filled my ears. I was coming to a river ?
Yes, for presently I was on the bridge, with a
raging mountain torrent, eighty feet, perhaps,
underneath, foaming against the boulders; a
bare, perpendicular cliff on one side, and perpen-
dicular spruces and hemlocks draping a similar
cliff on the other side. It was Baker's River, I
was told afterward, — the same that I had looked
at here and there, the day before, from the car
window. It was good to see it so young and ex-
uberant ; but even a young river need not be so
much in haste, I thought. It would get to the
sawmills soon enough, and by and by would
learn, too late, that it is only a little way to the

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 7

Once over the bridge, the road climbed quickly
out of the narrow gorge, and at the first turn
brought me in sight of a small painted house,
with a small orchard of thrifty-looking small
trees behind it. Here a venerable collie came
running forth to bark at the stranger, but yielded
readily to the usual blandishments, and after
sniffing again and again at my heels, just to
make sure of knowing me the next time, went
back, contented, to lie down in his old place be-
fore the window. He was the only person that
spoke to me — the only one I met — during
the forenoon, though I spent it all on the high-
way.

Another patch of woods, where a distant
Canadian nuthatch is calling (strange how I
love that nasal, penetrating, far-reaching voice,
whose quality my reasoning taste condemns),
and I see before me another house, standing in
broad acres of cleared land. This one is not
painted, and, as I presently make out, is unin-
habited, its old tenant gone, dead or discouraged,
and no new one looked for ; an " abandoned
farm," such as one grows used to seeing in our
northern country. It is beautiful for situation,
one of those sightly places which the city-worn
passer-by in a mountain wagon pitches upon at
once as just the place he should like to buy and

8 NEW HAMPSHIRE

retire to — some day ; in that autumn of golden
leisure of which, now and then,

" When all his active powers are still,"

he has a pleasing vision. Oh yes, he means to
do something of that kind — some day ; and even
while he talks of it he knows in his heart that
" some day " is only another name for " next day
after never."

A few happy barn swallows (wise enough, or
simple enough, to be happy now) go skimming
over the grass, and a pair of robins and a pair
of bluebirds seem to be at home in the orchard ;
which they like none the worse, we may be sure,
— the bluebirds, especially, — because, along
with the house and the barn, it is falling into
decay. What are apple trees for, but to grow
old and become usefully hollow ? Otherwise they
would be no better than so many beeches or
butternuts. It is impossible but that every crea-
ture should look at the world through its own
eyes; and no bluebird ever ate an apple. A
purple finch warbles ecstatically, a white-throated
sparrow whistles in the distance, and now and
then, from far down the slope, I catch the up-
liftings of a hermit thrush.

A man grows thoughtful, not to say senti-
mental, in such a place, surrounded by fields on
which so many years of human labor have been

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILATJKE 9

spent, so much ploughing and harrowing, plant-
ing and reaping, now given up again to nature.
Here was the garden patch, its outlines still
traceable. Here was the well. Long lines of
stone wall still separate the mowing land from
the pasturage ; and scattered over the fields are
heaps of boulders, thrown together thus to get
them out of the grass's way. About the edges
of every pile, and sometimes through the midst,
have sprung up a few shrubs, — shad bushes,
cherries, willows, and the like, Here they escape
the scythe, as we are all trying to do. " Give us
room that we may dwell ! " — so these children
of Zion cry. It is the great want of seeds, so
many millions of which go to waste annually in
every acre, — a place in which to take root and
(harder yet) to keep it. And the birds, too, find
the boulder heaps a convenience. I watch a sa-
vanna sparrow as he flits from one to another,
stopping to sing a measure or two from each.
Even this humble, almost voiceless artist needs
a stage or platform. The lowliest sparrow ever
hatched has some rudiments of a histrionic fac-
ulty ; and be we birds or humans, it is hard to
do one's best without a bit of posing.

What further uses these humble stone heaps
may serve I cannot say ; no doubt they shelter
many insects ; but it is encouraging to consider

10 NEW HAMPSHIRE

how few things a farmer can do that will not be
of benefit to others beside himself. Surely the
man who piled these boulders for the advantage
of his hay crop never expected them to serve as
a text for preaching.

The cloud drops again, and is at its old trick
of exaggeration. A bird that I take for a robin
turns out to be a sparrow. Did it look larger
because it seemed to be farther away than it really
was? Or is it seen now as it actually is, my
vision not being deceived, but rather corrected
of an habitual error ? The fog makes for me a
newer and stranger world, at any rate ; I am
farther from home because of it ; another day's
travel might have done less for me. And for all
that, I am not sorry when it rises again, and the
hills come out. How beautiful they are ! They
will hardly be more so, I think, when the June
foliage replaces the square miles of bare boughs
which now give them a blue-purple tint, inter-
rupted here and there by patches of new yellow-
green poplar leaves — a veritable illumination,
sun-bright even in this sunless weather — or a
few sombre evergreens.

As I get away from the farm, the mountain
woods on either side seem to be filled with some-
thing like a chorus of rose-breasted grosbeaks.
Except for a few days at Highlands, North Caro-

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 11

lina, some years ago, I have never seen so many
together. A grand'" migratory wave " must have
broken on the mountains within a night or two.
As far as music is concerned, the grosbeaks have
the field mostly to themselves, though a grouse
beats his drum at short intervals, and now and
then a white-throat whistles. There is no bird's
voice to which a fog is more becoming, I say to
myself, with a pleasing sense of having said
something unintended. To my thinking, the
white-throat should always be a good distance
away (perhaps because in the mountains one
grows accustomed to hearing him thus) ; and
the fog puts him there, with no damage to the
fullness of his tone.

Looking at the flowers along the wayside, —
a few yellow violets, a patch of spring-beauties,
and little else, — my eye falls upon what seems
to be a miniature forest of curious tiny plants
growing in the gutter. At first I see only the
upright, whitish stalks, an inch or two in height,
each bearing at the top a globular brown knob.
Afterward I discover that the stalks, which, ex-
amined more closely, have a crystalline, glassy
appearance, spring from a leaf -like or lichen-like
growth, lying prostrate upon the wet soil. The
plant is a liverwort, or scale-moss, of some kind,
I suppose, and is growing here by the mile. How

12 NEW HAMPSHIRE

few are the things we see ! And of those we see,
how few there are concerning which we have any
real knowledge, — enough, even, to use words
about them ! (When a man can do that concern-
ing any class of natural objects, no matter what
they are or what he says about them, he passes
with the crowd for a scholar, or at the very least
a " close observer.") But to tell the shameful
truth, my mood just now is not inquisitive. I
should like to know ? Yes ; but I can get on
without knowing. There are worse things than
ignorance. Let this plant be what it will. I
should be little the wiser for being able to name
it.1 I have no body of facts to which to attach
this new one ; and unrelated knowledge is almost
the same as none at all. At best it is quickly
forgotten. So my indolence excuses itself.

The road begins to climb rather sharply. Un-
less I am going to the top of the ridge and
beyond, I have gone far enough. So I turn my
back upon the mountain ; and behold, the cloud
having lifted again, there, straight before me
down the road and across the valley, is the
house from which I set out, almost or quite the
only one in sight. After all, I have walked but
a little way, though I have been a good while

1 It may have been some species of Pellia, to judge by the
plate in Gray's Manual.

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 13

about it; for I have hardly begun my return
before I find myself again approaching the
abandoned farm. Downhill miles are short.
Here a light shower comes on, and I raise my
umbrella. Then follows a grand excitement
among a flock of sheep, whose day, perhaps,
needs enlivening as badly as my own. They
gaze at the umbrella, start away upon the gal-
lop, stop again to look (" There are forty look-
ing like one," I say to myself), and are again
struck with panic. This time they scamper
down the field out of sight. Another danger
escaped ! Shepherds, it is evident, cannot be so
effeminate as to carry umbrellas.

Two heifers are of a more confiding disposi-
tion, coming close to look at the stranger as he
sits on the doorsill of the old barn. Their curi-
osity concerning me is perhaps about as lively
as mine was touching the supposed liverworts.
Like me they stand and consider, but betray no
unmannerly eagerness. "Who is he, I won-
der?" they might be saying ; " I never saw him
before." But their jaws still move mechanically,
and their beautiful eyes are full of a peaceful
satisfaction. A cud must be a great alleviation
to the temper. With such a perennial sedative,
how could any one ever be fretted into nervous
prostration? As a matter of fact, I am told,

14 NEW HAMPSHIRE

cows rarely or never suffer from that most dis-
tressing ailment. I have seen chewers of gum
before now who, by all signs, should have enjoyed
a similar immunity.

While the heifers are still making up their
minds about their unexpected visitor, I turn to
examine a couple of white-crowned sparrows,
male and female, — I wonder if they really are
a couple? — feeding before the house. I hope
the species is to prove common here. Three
birds were behind the hotel before breakfast,
and one of them sang. The quaint little medley,
sparrow song and warbler song together, is still
something of an event with me, I have heard it
so seldom and like it so well ; and whether the
birds sing or not, they are musical to look at.

When I approach the painted house, on my
way homeward, the fat old collie comes running
out again, barking. This time, however, he
takes but one sniff. He has made a mistake,
and realizes it at once. "Oh, excuse me," he
says quite plainly. "I didn't recognize you.
You 're the same old codger. I ought to have
known." And he is so confused and ashamed
that he hurries away without waiting to make
up.

It is a great mortification to a gentlemanly
dog to find himself at fault in this manner. I

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 15

remember another collie, much younger than
this one, with whom I once had a minute or two
of friendly intercourse. Then, months afterward,
I went again by the house where he lived, and
he came dashing out with all fierceness, as if he
would rend me in pieces. I let him come (there
was nothing else to do, or nothing else worth
doing), but the instant his nose struck me he
saw his error. Then, in a flash, he dropped flat
on the ground, and literally licked my shoes.
There was no attitude abject enough to express
the depth of his humiliation. And then, like the
dog of this morning, he jumped up, and ran
with all speed back to his doorstep.

Another descent into the gorge of Baker's
River, and another stop on the bridge (how
gloriously the water comes down !), and I am
again in the pretty, broken woods below the
hotel. Here my attention is attracted by an
almost prostrate but still vigorous yellow birch,
like the one that stood for so many years by the
road below the Profile House, in the Franconia
Notch. Somehow the tree got an awkward slant
in its youth, and has always kept it, while the
larger branches have grown straight upward, at
right angles with the trunk, as if each were trying
to be a tree on its own account. The Franconia
Notch specimen became a landmark, and was

16 NEW HAMPSHIRE

really of no inconsiderable service ; a convenience
to the hotel proprietors, and a means of health
to idle boarders, who needed an incentive to ex-
ercise. " Come, let 's walk down as far as the bent
tree," one would say to another. The average
American cannot stroll ; he has never learned ;
if he puts his legs in motion, he must go to
some fixed point, though it be only a milestone
or a huckleberry bush. The infirmity is most
likely congenital, a taint in the blood. The
fathers worked, — all honor to them, — having
to earn their bread under hard conditions ; and
the children, though they may dress like the
descendants of princes, cannot help turning even
their amusements into a stint.

And the sapient critic? Well, instead of
carrying a fishing rod or walking to a bent tree,
he had come out with an opera-glass, and had
made of his morning jaunt a bird-cataloguing
expedition. Considered in that light, the trip
had not been a brilliant success. In my whole
forenoon I had seen and heard but twenty-eight
species. If I had stayed in my low-country vil-
lage, and walked half as far, I should have
counted twice as many. But I should not have
enjoyed myself one quarter as well.

The next day and the next were rainy, with
Moosilauke still invisible. Then came a morn-

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 17

ing of sunshine and clear atmosphere. So far it
was ideal mountain weather ; but the cold wind
was so strong at our level that it was certain
to be nothing less than a hurricane at the top.
I waited, therefore, twenty-four hours longer.
Then, at quarter before seven on the morning
of May 23, I set out. I am as careful of my
dates, it seems, as if I had been starting for the
North Pole. And why not ? The importance of
an expedition depends upon the spirit in which it
is undertaken. Nothing is of serious consequence
in this world except as subjective considerations
make it so. Even the North Pole is only an
imaginary point, the end of an imaginary line,
as old geographies used to inform us, pleonas-
tically, — as if "position without dimensions,"
a something without length, breadth, or thick-
ness, could be other than imaginary. I started,
then, at quarter before seven. Many years ago
I had been taken up the mountain road in a car-
riage ; now I would travel it on foot, spending
at least an hour upon each of its five miles, and
so see something of the mountain itself, as well
as of the prospect from the summit.

The miles, some longer, some shorter, as I
thought (a not unpleasant variety, though the
fourth stage was excessively spun out, it seemed
to me, perhaps to make it end at the spring),

18 NEW HAMPSHIRE

are marked off by guideboards, so that the new-
comer need not fall into the usual disheartening
mistake of supposing himself almost at the top
before he has gone halfway. As for the first
mile, which must measure near a mile and a half,
and which ends just above the " second brook "
(every mountain path has its natural waymarks),
I had been over it twice within the last few days,
so that the edge of my curiosity was dulled ; but,
with one excuse and another, I managed easily
enough to give it its allotted hour. For one
thing, a hairy woodpecker detained me five or ten
minutes, putting such tremendous vigor into his
hammering that I was positively certain (with
a shade of uncertainty, nevertheless, such as all
"observers" will understand; there is nothing
so true as a paradox) that he must be a pileatus,
till at last he showed himself. " Well, well," said
I, " guesswork is a poor dependence." It was
well I had stayed by. The forest was so nearly
deserted, so little animated, that I felt under ob-
ligation to the fellow for every stroke of his mal-
let. Though a man goes to the wood for silence,
his ear craves some natural noises, — enough, at
least, to make the stillness audible.

The second mile is of steeper grade than the
firsthand toward the close brought me suddenly
to a place unlike anything that had gone before.

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 19

I named it at once the Flower Garden. For an
acre, or, more likely, for two or three acres, the
ground — a steep southern exposure, held up to
face the sun — was covered with plants in bloom :
Dutchman's-breeches (Dicentra cucullaria), —
bunches of heart-shaped, cream-white flowers
with yellow facings, looking for all the world
as if they had been planted there ; round-leaved
violets, in profusion ; white violets (blanda) ;
spring-beauties ; adder 's-tongue (dog's-tooth vio-
let); and painted trillium. A pretty show; pretty
in itself, and a thousand times prettier for being
happened upon thus unexpectedly, after two hours
of woods that were almost as dead as winter.

Only a little way above this point were the
first beds of snow ; and henceforward, till I came
out upon the ridge, two miles above, the woods
were mostly filled with it, though there was little
in the road. About this time, also, I began to
notice a deer's track. He had descended the
road within a few hours, as I judged, or since the
last rainfall, and might have been a two-legged,
or even a one-legged animal, — biped or uniped,
— so far as his footsteps showed. I should
rather have seen him, but the hoofprints were
a deal better than nothing; and undoubtedly
I saw them much longer than I could possibly
have seen the maker of them, and so, perhaps,

20 NEW HAMPSHIRE

got out of them more of companionship. They
were with me for two hours, — clean up to the
ridge, and part way across it.

Somewhere between the third and fourth mile-
boards I stopped short with an exclamation.
There, straight before me, over the long eastern
shoulder of Moosilauke, beyond the big Jobil-
dunk Ravine, loomed or floated a shining snow-
white mountain-top. Nothing could have been
more beautiful. It was the crest of Mount
Washington, I assumed, though even with the
aid of a glass I could make out no sign of build-
ings, which must have been matted with new-
fallen snow. I took its identity for granted, I
say. The truth is, I became badly confused
about it afterward, such portions of the range
as came into view having an unfamiliar aspect ;
but later still, on arriving at the summit, found
that my first idea had been correct.

That sudden, heavenly apparition gave me,
one of those minutes that are good as years.
Once, indeed, in early October, I had seen
Mount Washington when it was more resplen-
dent : freshly snow-covered throughout, and then,
as the sun went down, lighted up before my eyes
with a rosy glow, brighter and brighter and
brighter, till it seemed all on fire within. But
even that unforgettable spectacle had less of

A JMAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 21

unearthly beauty, was less a work of pure en-
chantment, I thought, than this detached, fleecy-
looking piece of aerial whiteness, cloud stuff or
dream stuff, yet whiter than any cloud, lying at
rest yonder, almost at my own level, against the
deep blue of the forenoon sky.

All this while, the birds, which had been few
from the start, — black-throated greens and
blues, Blackburnians, oven-birds, a bay-breast,
blue yellow-backs, siskins, Swainson thrushes,
a blue-headed vireo, winter wrens, rose-breasted
grosbeaks, chickadees, grouse, and snowbirds, —
had grown fewer and fewer, till at last, among
these stunted, low-branched spruces, with the
snow under them, there was little else but an
occasional myrtle warbler (" The brave myrtle,"
I kept saying to myself), with its musical, soft
trill, so out of place, — the voice of peaceful
green valleys rather than of stormy mountain-
tops, — yet so welcome. Once a gray-cheeked
thrush called just aboye me. These impenetra-
ble upper woods are the gray-cheeks' summer
home, — a worthy one ; but I heard nothing of
their wild music, and doubted whether they had
yet arrived in full summer force.

It was past eleven o'clock when I came out at
the clearing by the woodpile, with half the world
before me. From this point it was but a little

22 NEW HAMPSHIRE

way to the bare ridge connecting the South Peak
— up which I had been trudging all the fore-
noon — and the main summit. This, with its
little hotel, that looked as if it were in danger of
sliding off the mountain northward, was straight
before me across the ravine, a long but easy mile
away.

On the ridge I found myself all at once in
something like a gale of ice-cold wind. Who
could have believed it? It was well I had
brought a sweater ; and squatting behind a lucky
clump of low evergreens, I wormed my way into
what is certainly the most comfortable of all gar-
ments for such a place,, — as good, at least, as
two overcoats. Now let the wind whistle, espe-
cially as it was at my back, and was bearing
me triumphantly up the slope. So I thought,
bravely enough, till the trail took a sudden
shift, and the gale caught me on another tack.
Then I sang out of the other corner of my
mouth, as I used to hear country people say.
I no longer boasted, but saved my breath for
better use.

Wind or no wind, it is an exhilaration to walk
here above the world. Once a bird chirps to me
timidly from the knee-wood close by. I answer
him, and out peeps a white-throat. " You here ! "
he says ; " so early ! " At my feet is plenty of

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 23

Greenland sandwort, — faded, winter-worn, gray-
green tufts, tightly packed among the small
boulders. "Whatever lives here must lie low and
hang on. And with it is the shiny-leaved moun-
tain cranberry, — Vaccinium Vitis-Idcea. Let
me never omit that pretty name. Neither cran-
berry nor sandwort shows any sign of blossom
or bud as yet ; but it is good to know that they
will both be ready when the clock strikes. I can
see them now, pink and white, just as they will
look in July — nay, just as they will look a
thousand years hence.

Again my course alters, and the wind lets me
lean back upon it as it lifts me forward. Who
says we are growing old? The years, as they
pass, may turn and look at us meaningly, as
if to say, " You have lived long eriough ; " yet
even to us the climbing of a mountain road
(though by this time it must be a road, or some-
thing like it) is still only the putting of one foot
before the other.

So I come at last to the top, and make haste
to get into the lee of the house, which is tightly
barred, of course, just as its owners left it seven
or eight months ago. The wind chases me round
the corners, one after another ; but by searching
I discover a nook where it can hit me no more
than half the time. Here I sit and look at the

24 NEW HAMPSHIRE

mountains, — a glorious company : Mount Wash-
ington and its fellows, with all their higher parts
white; the sombre mass of the Twins on this
side of them ; and, nearer still, the long, sharp,
purple crest of dear old Lafayette and its south-
ern neighbors. So many I can name. The rest
are mountains only ; a wilderness of heaped-
up, forest-covered land ; a prospect to dilate the
soul.

My expectation has been to stay here for two
hours or more ; but the wind is merciless, and
after going out over the broad, bare, boulder-
sprinkled summit till I can see down into Fran-
conia (which looks pretty low and pretty far off,
though I distinguish certain of the buildings
clearly enough), I begin to feel that I shall enjoy
the sight of my eyes better from some sheltered
position on the upper part of the road. Even on
the ridge, however, I take advantage of every
tuft of spruces to stand still for a bit, looking
especially at the mountain itself, so big, so bare,
and so solid : East Peak, South Peak, and the
Peak, as they are called, although neither of
them is in the slightest degree peaked, with the
great gulf of Jobildunk — in which Baker's
Eiver rises — wedged among them. If the word
Moosilauke means a " bald place," as it is said
to do, then we have here another proof of the

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 25

North American Indian's genius for fitting words
to things.1

Even to-day, windy and cold as it is, a butter-
fly passes over now and then (mostly red admi-
rals), and smaller insects flit carelessly about.
Insects are capable mountaineers, as I have often
found occasion to notice. The only time I was
ever on the sharp point of Mount Adams, where
my companion and I had barely room to stand
together, the air about our heads was black with
insects of all sorts and sizes, a veritable cloud ;
and when we unscrewed the Appalachian Club's
brass bottle to sign the roll of visitors, we found
that the signers immediately before us, after put-
ting down a date and their names, had added,
" Plenty of bugs." And surely I was never pes-
tered worse by black flies than once, years ago, on
this very summit of Moosilauke. All the hours
of a long, breathless, tropical July day they made
life miserable for me. Better a thousand times
such a frosty, man-compelling wind as I am now
fleeing from.

Once off the ridge, I can loosen my hat and
sit down in comfort. The sun is good. How in-

1 And if New Hampshire people will call the mountain
" Moose Hillock," as, alas, they will, then we have here another
proof of the degeneracy which follows the white man's addic-
tion to the punning habit,.

26 NEW HAMPSHIRE

credible it seems that the air is so furiously in mo-
tion only fifty rods back ! Here it is like Elysium.
And almost I believe that this limited prospect
is better than the grander sweep from the summit
itself, — less distracting and more restful. So
half a loaf may be better than a whole one, if a
man cannot be contented without trying to eat the
whole one. A white-throat and a myrtle warbler
sing to me as I nibble my sandwich. They are
the loftiest spirits, it appears. I take off my hat
to them.

Already I am down far enough to catch the
sound of running water ; and every rod brings a
new mountain into view from behind the long
East Peak. One of the best of them all is cone-
shaped Kearsarge, topped with its house. Now
the white crest of Washington rises upon me, —
snow with the sun on it ; and here, by the fourth
mileboard, are a few pale-bright spring-beauties,
— five or six blossoms only. They have found a
bit of earth from which the snow melted early,
and here they are, true to their name, with the
world on every side nothing but a desolation. If it
is time for myrtle warblers, why not for them ?
Now I see not only Washington, but the moun-
tains with it, all strangely foreshortened, so as to
give the highest peak a most surprising preemi-
nence. No wonder I was in doubt what to call it.

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 27

In days past I have walked that whole ridge, from
Clinton to Adams ; and glad I am to remember
it. A man should do such things while he can,
teaching his feet to feel the ground, and letting
his heart cheer him.

A turn in the road, and straight below me lies
my deserted farmhouse. Another turn, and I lose
it. In ascending a mountain we face the path ;
in descending we face the world. I speak thus
because at this moment I am looking down a
charming vista, — forest-covered mountains, row
beyond row. But for the gravel under my feet I
might be a thousand miles from any human habi-
tation. Presently a Swainson thrush whistles.
By that token I am getting away from the sum-
mit, though things are still wintry enough, with
no sign of bud or blossom.

And look ! What is that far below me, facing
up the road ? A four-footed beast of some kind.
A bear ? No ; I raise my glass, and see a porcu-
pine. He has his mobile, sensitive nose to the
ground, and continues to smell, and perhaps to
feed, as I draw nearer and nearer. By and by,
being very near, and still unworthy of the crea-
ture's notice, I roll a stone toward him. At this
he shows a gleam of interest. He sits up, folds
his hands, — puts his fore paws together over his
breast, — looks at me, and then waddles a few

28 NEW HAMPSHIRE

steps toward the upper side of the road. " I must
be getting out of this," he seems to think. But
he reconsiders his purpose, comes back, sits on
end again and folds his hands ; and then, the re-
connoissance being satisfactory, falls to smelling
the ground as before. I can see the tips of his
nostrils twitching as in a kind of ecstasy. There
must be something savory under them. Mean-
time, still with my glass lifted, I come closer and
closer, till I am right upon him. If porcupines
can shoot, I must be in danger of a quill. An-
other step or two, and he waddles to the lower
side of the road. He is a vacillating body, how-
ever ; and once more he turns to sit up and fold
his hands. This time I hear him rattling his teeth,
but not very fiercely, — nothing to compare with
the gnashings of an angry woodchuck ; and at
last, when I cluck to him, he hastens his steps a
little, as much, perhaps, as a porcupine can, and
disappears in the brush, dragging his ridiculous,
sloping, straw-thatched hinder parts — a combi-
nation of lean-to and L — after him. He has
never cultivated speed or decision of character,
having a better defense. So far as appearances
go, he is certainly an odd one.

There are no blossoms yet, nor visible promise
of any, but once in a while a bright Atalanta (red
admiral) butterfly flits before me. I wonder

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 29

if I could capture one by the old schoolboy
method ? I am moved to try ; but my best effort
— not very determined, it must be confessed —
ends in failure. Perhaps I should have had some
golden apples.

At last I come to a few adder's-tongues, the
first flowers since the five or six spring-beauties a
mile and a half back. Yes, I am approaching the
Flower Garden ; for here is a most lovely bank
of yellow violets, a hundred or two together, a
real bed of them. Nobody ever saw anything
prettier. Here, also, is the showy purple trillium,
not so unhandsomely overgrown as it sometimes
is, in addition to all the flowers that I noticed on
the ascent. A garden indeed. I pull up a root
of Dutchman's-breeches, and sit down to examine
the cluster of rice-like pink kernels at the base
of the stem. Excellent fodder they must make
for animals of some kind. " Squirrel-corn " is an
apt name, I think, though I believe it is applied,
not to this species, but to its relative, Dicentra
Canadensis.

The whole plant is uncommonly clean-looking
and attractive, with its pale, finely dissected leaves
and its delicate, waxy bloom; but looking at
it, and then at a bank of round-leaved violets op-
posite, I say once more, " Those are my flowers."
Something in the shade of color is most exactly

30 NEW HAMPSHIRE

to my taste. The very sight of them gladdens
me like sunshine. But before I get out of the
garden, as I am in no haste to do (if it was at-
tractive this morning, it is doubly so now, after
those miles of snowbanks), I am near to chang-
ing my mind ; for suddenly, as my eye follows
the border of the road, it falls upon a small blue
violet, the first of that color that I have noticed
since my arrival at Moosilauke. It must be my
long-desired SelMrldi, I say to myself, and down
I go to look at it. Yes, it is not leafy-stemmed,
the petals are not bearded, and the leaves are un-
like any I have ever seen. I take it up, root and
all, and search carefully till I find one more. If
it is Selkirkii, as I feel sure it is,1 then I am
happy. This is the one species of our eastern North
American violets that I have never picked. It
completes my set. And it is especially good to
find it here, where I was not in the least expect-
ing it. With the two specimens in my pocket I
trudge the remaining two miles in high spirits.
The violets are no newer to me than the liver-
wort specimens on Mount Cushman were, but
they have the incomparable advantage of things
long looked for, — things for the lack of which,
so to speak, a pigeonhole in the mind has stood

1 And so it was ; for though I felt sure, I wanted to be sure,
and submitted it to an expert.

A MAY VISIT TO MOOSILAUKE 31

consciously vacant. Blessed are they who want
something, for when they get it they will be
glad.

The weather below had been warm and still,
a touch of real summer. So said the people at
the hotel ; and I knew it already ; for, as I came
through the cattle pasture, I saw below me a
new, strange-looking, brightly illuminated grove
of young birches. " Were those trees there this
morning ? " I thought. A single day had cov-
ered them with sunny, yellow-green leaves, till
the change was like a miracle. Indeed, it was a
miracle. May the spring never come when I shall
fail to feel it so. Then I looked back at the sum-
mit. Was it there, no farther away than that,
that so icy a wind had chased me about? — or
had I been in Greenland?

A WEEK ON MOUNT WASHINGTON

I WENT up Mount Washington in the afternoon
of August 22d, and came down again in the
afternoon of the 29th. Ten years before I had
spent a week there, in early July, and had not
visited the place since. In some respects, of
course, the summit is badly damaged (I have
heard it spoken of as utterly ruined) by the pre-
sence of the hotel and other buildings, not to men-
tion the railway trains, with their daily freight
of bustling lunch-box tourists. Still the railway
and the hotel are indisputable conveniences ;
I should hardly have stayed there so long with-
out them ; and in this imperfect world we must
not expect to find all the good things in one
basket.

As for the tourists, one need walk but a few
steps to be rid of them. As a class they are
not enterprising pedestrians. In fifteen minutes
you may find yourself where human beings are
as far away, practically, as if you were among
the highest Andes or on the famous " peak in
Darien." There you may sit on a boulder, or re-
cline on a mat of prostrate willow, and imagine

A WEEK ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 33

yourself the only man in the world ; gazing at the
prospect, listening to the mountain silence (there
is none like it), or eating alpine blueberries, as
lonely as any hermit's heart could wish. All this
you may do, and then return to the most obliging
of hosts, the best of good dinners, and a comfort-
able bed.

By the time you have been there two days,
moreover, you will have begun to enjoy the hotel,
not only for its physical comforts, but as an in-
teresting miniature world. The manager and the
clerk, the waiters and the bellboys, the editors
and the printers, the night watchman and the
train conductor, will all have become your friends,
almost your blood relations, — such intimate
good feeling does a joint seclusion induce, — and
at any minute of the day in may come a group
of strangers of the most engagingly picturesque
sort; having no more the appearance of sales-
ladies or women of fashion, shopkeepers or
bankers' clerks, than of college students and
professors. They are men and women. They
have put off the fine clothes and the smug ap-
pearance which society exacts of its members;
they look not the least in the world as if they
had just come out of a bandbox ; their negligee
costumes bear no resemblance to the dainty, im-
maculate rig of the tennis court or the golf links.

34 NEW HAMPSHIRE

They are " roughing it " in earnest. For at least
eight or ten hours, possibly for as many days,
they have ceased to be concerned about the cut
of their garments or the smoothness of their hair.
Of some of them the aspect is fairly disreputable.
It is a solemn fact that you may here see gentle-
men with rents in their trousers and a week's
beard on their faces. And ten to one they will
brazen it out without apology.

The dapper clerk and the prosperous merchant
and his wife, who have ridden up in the train
with their good clothes and their company faces
on, may stare if they will. It is nothing to the
campers and walkers. They are not on parade,
and do not mind being smiled at. A pretty col-
lege girl will walk about the office, alpenstock
in hand, with her hair tied in a careless knot,
her skirts well above the tops of her scratched
and dusty boots, her face brown and her sleeves
tucked up, and seem quite as much at ease as if
she were in full evening dress with the drawing-
room lights blazing upon her alabaster shoulders,
her laces, and her diamonds. It is heroism (or
heroinism) of a kind worth seeing.

You are still enjoying the spectacle when two
men enter the door, one with a botanical box
slung over his shoulder. It is as if he had given
you the Masonic grip, and you hardly wait for

A WEEK ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 35

him to cross the sill before you make up to him
with a question. By which route has he come,
and what luck has he met with ? Over the Craw-
ford path, he answers, and though the season is
pretty late, and Alpine plants are mostly out of
bloom, he has found some interesting things.

Two or three of them he cannot name, and he
opens the box. His special puzzle is a tiny, up-
right-growing plant, thickly set with roundish,
crinkled leaves, and bearing a few blossoms so
exceedingly small as almost to defy a common
pocket-lens. Do you know what it is ? Yes, to
your own surprise, you remember, or seem to re-
member, and you run upstairs to bring down a
Gray's Manual. The plant is Euphrasia (eye-
bright), an Alpine variety. It was pointed out
to you ten years ago, near the same Crawford
path, by the man who knew the Mount Wash-
ington flora better than any one else. You recall
the time as if it had been yesterday. Your com-
panion dropped suddenly upon his knees, eyes
to the ground. " What are you looking for ? "
you asked ; and he answered " Euphrasia." It
is good to see it again. You find it for yourself
the next day, it may be, in the Alpine Garden.

And this other plant, stiffly matted and long
past flowering ? Your new acquaintance supposes
it to be Diapensia ; and for that you need no

36 NEW HAMPSHIRE

book. And this third one, with its -rusty leaves,
is the Lapland azalea. You remember the day
you saw it first — in middle June — when all by
yourself you were making your first ascent of the
mountain, walking alternately over snowbanks
and beds of flowers. So far as the lovely blos-
soms are concerned, you have never seen it since.
Next morning your botanist bids you good-by ;
he is going down by the way of Tuckerman's
Eavine ; and at noon, after some indolent, happy
hours on the carriage-road and in the Alpine
Garden, you are again in the hotel office when
half a dozen campers from the northern peaks
make their appearance. Dusty, travel-stained,
disheveled, they bring the freedom of the hills
with them and fill the place with their breezi-
ness. Some of the " transients " clustered about
the stove smile at a sight so unconventional, but
the manager, the clerk, and the bellboys are bet-
ter informed. They have seen the leader of the
party before, and in a minute the word is passed
round. This is Mr. , who came up the moun-
tain with his son a year ago on the day of that
dreadful storm, when two later adventurers upon
the same path perished by the way, and he him-
self, old mountaineer that he was, with another
life hanging upon his own, had more than once
been all but ready to say, " It can't be done."

A WEEK ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 37

Your traveling companion has seen him here
before, though she was not present on that mem-
orable occasion, and presently you are being in-
troduced to him and his friends — a metropolitan
clergyman, a university professor, and a younger
man, with whose excellent work in your own line
you are already acquainted.

Anon the company breaks up, — the pedes-
trians are off for an afternoon excursion, — and
you step out upon the platform to look about
you. Against the railing are two men, one of
them with what seems to be a " collecting gun "
in his hand. "An ornithologist," you say to
yourself, and at the word you begin edging to-
ward him. A remark or two about the weather
and you ask him point-blank if he is collecting
birds. No, he answers, his weapon is a rifle, and
he shows you the cartridge. He has brought it
along to shoot squirrels with. You wonder why
any one should think it worth while to carry a
gun over the nine miles of the Crawford path
for so trifling a use ; but that is none of your
business, and just then the other man speaks up
to say that his companion is a botanist, while he
himself is a "bird man." This is interesting
(the second ornithologist within an hour), and
you set about comparing notes. Did he hear
anything of the Bicknell thrushes and the Hud-

38 NEW HAMPSHIRE

sonian chickadees on his way up ? No, he missed
them both on this trip, though he has met them
elsewhere in the mountains. You drop an inno-
cent remark about the thrushes, and he says,
" Are you Mr. So-and-So ? " There is no deny-
ing it, and when he pronounces his own name it
proves to be familiar ; and a good talk follows.
Then he starts down into the Alpine Garden, —
you charging him to be sure to eat some of the
delicious cespitose blueberries on the descent, —
and ten minutes afterward he turns up again at
your elbow. He has left his friend, and has
hurried back to tell you of a sharp-shinned hawk
that he has just seen. You may put the name
into your Mount Washington bird list, if you
will.

So the days pass — no day without a new
acquaintance. If you and one of the local ed-
itors start down the trail to the Lakes of the
Clouds after a Sunday-morning breakfast, you
find yourselves going along with three Baltimore
gentlemen, who have walked up from the Craw-
ford House the day before (" Well, we arrive ! "
you remember to have heard the leader exclaim,
as his foot struck the hotel platform), and are
now on their return.

They introduce one another to you and your
companion, — Dr. This, Dr. That, and Dr. The

A WEEK ON MOUNT WASHINGTON 39

Other, — and you pick your way downward over
the boulders in Indian file, talking as you1 go.
After a while you and the oldest of the Balti-
moreans find yourselves falling a little behind
the rest, and the conversation grows more and
more friendly. He has come to New Hampshire,
as he does every year, for the best of all tonics,
a dose of mountain climbing. He has been some-
what overworked of late, especially with a long
task of proof-reading. A new edition of his
treatise on chemistry is passing through the
press, and the moment the last sheets were cor-
rected he broke away northward ; and here he
is, walking over high places, where he loves to be.
" I am an old man," he says ; but his strength
is not abated. Far be the day ! At the lakeside
hands are shaken and good-bys said. You will
most likely never see each other again, but one
of you, at least, keeps a bright memory.

It is a strange place, the Summit House.
Twice a day, as on the seashore, the tide rises
and falls. But the evening flood is a small affair.
The crowd comes at noon. It registers its name,
eats its luncheon, writes a postal-card, buys a
souvenir, asks a question or two, more or less
pertinent (" Can you tell me where the Tip-
Over House is?" one good woman said — for
the rarified air plays, queer pranks with its vie-

40 NEW HAMPSHIRE

tims), possibly looks at the prospect, probably
snaps a camera, and then takes the after-dinner
train for the base. Evening passengers make
a longer stay. They cannot do otherwise. For
them the sunset and the sunrise are the great
events. One would think that such phenomena
were never to be witnessed in the low country.
They watch the clouds, or more likely the cloud,
and go to sleep with one ear open for the sunrise
bell.

So much for the larger number of Summit
House guests, the respectable majority. A few,
two in twenty, perhaps, arrive on foot ; and
these are the good ones — the salt of the moun-
tain, so to speak. This time I was not one of
them, but I had no thought of denying the
superiority of their privilege.

ABOVE THE BIKDS

IN the course of my seven days at the summit of
Mount Washington I listed six species of birds.
A few snowbirds — three or four — were to be
found almost always in the neighborhood of the
stables ; a myrtle warbler was seen on the climb
up the cone from the Lakes of the Clouds;
twice I heard a goldfinch passing somewhere
overhead ; a sharp-shinned hawk, as I took it to
be, showed itself one day, none too clearly, flying
through the mist ; and the next afternoon, as I
sat in the rear of the old Tip-Top House waiting
for the glories of the sunset, a sparrow hawk
shot past me so near as to display not only his
rusty tail, but the black bands on the side of his
neck. Here are five species. The sixth was one
that, rightly or wrongly, I should not have ex-
pected to find in so treeless a place. I speak of
the red-breasted (or Canadian) nuthatch. On
two mornings, as all hands were out upon the
platform at sunrise, we heard the characteristic
nasal calls of this northern forester, and saw two
birds scrambling about the roofs of the buildings ;
and more than once at other times I noticed one

42 NEW HAMPSHIRE

or two on the wing. The species is very common
this season in Franconia, — where it was ex-
tremely scarce a year ago, — and I was pleased
at the summit when a lady standing near me
remarked to her husband, " Why, that is the
note we have been hearing so continually at the
Rangeleys." It was so incessant there, she told
me, as to be almost a trouble. Let us hope that
this autumnal abundance in New Hampshire
foreshadows a nuthatch winter in Massachusetts.

The all but total absence of birds at the
summit was a most striking thing. It helped
greatly to intensify the loneliness and the
silence; that wonderful mountain silence — no
leaf to rustle, no brook to murmur, no bird to
sing — which, wherever I walked, I was always
stopping to listen to. I should love to praise it,
but language for such a purpose would need to
be found on the spot, the stillness itself suggest-
ing the words; and I came down from the
summit more than a week ago. It must have
been, I think, something like that apocalyptic
" silence in heaven."

As for the birds, I should have felt their
absence more disagreeably but for the fact that
I had a novel and absorbing occupation with
which to enliven my walks, and even to beguile
effectually what otherwise might have been the

ABOVE THE BIRDS 43

idle odds and ends of the day. For the nonce I
had turned entomological collector. My search
was for rare Alpine insects. Not that I knew
anything about them; it would have been all
one to me if most of what I saw had been created
out of nothing the day before; but I was in
learned company and needed no science of my
own. My part was to carry a " cyanide bottle "
and put into it any beetle, moth, fly, or other
insect — ants and spiders excepted — on which
I could lay my ignorant fingers. The possessor
of the learning — enough and to spare for the
two of us — has made many collecting visits to
the summit ; her list of Mount Washington
species numbers more than sixteen hundred, if
I remember the figures correctly, and no incon-
siderable proportion of them are honored with
her name. A proud lot they would be, if they
knew it. But the end is not yet; there are
many winged mountaineers still to be pinned,
and in the prosecution of such an enterprise, so
she gave me to understand, two bottles are better
than one, no matter who carries the second one.
Her language was rather encouraging than com-
plimentary, it might have seemed, but I did not
mind ; and for seven days I was never without a
bottle about my person except when I lay in bed.
If I went down to the Lakes of the Clouds,

44 NEW HAMPSHIRE

for example, the poison-bottle went with me ;
and the looker-on, had there been one, — as
luckily there was n't, — might have seen me on
my knees, with hands outstretched over the
water, struggling to snatch from the surface
a poor, unhappy " skater," or a " lucky-bug "
(it really was lucky, for it got away while the
skater perished), as a possible prize for my
lady's cork-lined box. On a]l my jaunts down
the carriage-road (and they were many, longer
or shorter, that route offering the readiest means
of escape from the frequent summit-capping
cloud) the same scientific vial was my compan-
ion. If a grasshopper jumped (not the common
one with banded legs, of which I saw a super-
fluity, but a handsome, rare-looking green fellow,
making me think of Leigh Hunt's " green little
vaulter in the sunny grass"), I stole murder-
ously after him, and with a reckless clutch at
the stunted bush on which he had settled I
gathered him in and put him to sleep. (This
was well done, for he was really of a wingless
Alpine species, and only my employer's third
specimen of his kind.) If a " daddy-long-legs,"
prayerless friend of my childhood, crawled
across the way, he, too, hapless creature, with
legs so superfluously numerous and elongated
that he could not hurry, even to save his life,

ABOVE THE BIRDS 45

fell a victim to my uninstructed zeal. He died
easily, for all his undevout habits, but the sac-
rifice was useless. He proved to be no longer
among the entomologist's desiderata, though he
also is Alpine, and it is not many years since
she herself discovered him here, an insect till
then unregistered by human science.

All caterpillars I was bidden to bring in alive ;
and so, of course, I did, rolling them up in
scraps of soft paper and committing them ten-
derly to a pocket. My chief business, however,
after I had breathed the air, eaten my fill of
mountain blueberries (" Happy," said I, " is the
mouth that feeds on such manna "), and looked
my fill at the northern peaks, — for I was not
employed by the day, but by the piece, and
could steal an hour to myself now and then with
a clear conscience, — my principal occupation, I
say, was to pry under the boulders for beetles.
"Leave no stone unturned," the entomologist
had said, with her fine gift of laconic quotation ;
but she could not have intended the commission
to be taken literally. The stones were too
many, and human existence is too brief. She
meant no more than that I should use a reason-
able diligence ; and so much I surely did, till
the ends of my fingers were in danger of being
skinned alive. Down on all fours I got, lifted a

46 NEW HAMPSHIRE

stone quickly, fastened an eagle eye upon the
exposed hollow, and if a dark object, no matter
how small or how large, was seen to be scurry-
ing to its burrow, I thrust my fingers into the
dirt in frantic efforts to seize it. I knew not
which were common and which rare ; my only
course was to let none escape. But many were
too swift for me, with all my efforts, and of
all that I captured in this manner I am not
sure that one was " worth mounting." I quote
those last two words partly by way of emphasis.
They stood for the lowest round in the ladder of
my entomological ambition. What I most of all
desired was to discover a new species ; next I
coveted a species new to New England; after
that a species new to Mount Washington ; and
last of all a specimen worth saving, or, as my
employer said, " worth mounting " — in short,
worth a pin.

My most productive field, like her own, was
about the front of the hotel itself. In warm
afternoons flies, beetles, moths and what not are
known to drop out of the invisible, from nobody
can tell where, upon the windows or the white
clapboards of the house. Here, not once, but
with something like regularity, insects have been
captured, the Hke of which have never been seen
elsewhere except in the West Indies or Mexico,

ABOVE THE BIRDS 47

in Greenland or among the Kocky Mountains.
How such wanderers come, and why, are among
the things that no man knoweth. Enough that
they are known to come. And who could tell
but one might have come for me ? Here, at all
events, was my golden opportunity. Let me not
miss it. If by chance, therefore, the lady herself
stepped inside for a minute or two, I hastened to
take her place. Tourists by the dozen might be
watching me curiously, or even derisively, my
equanimity was undisturbed. Science is a shield.
Vial in hand (my vade-mecum I called it, Latin
being in the air), I walked along the platform,
with my eyes upon the glass and the paint, and
woe to the unlucky insect that was there taking
the sun. The yawning mouth of a bottle was
clapped over him, the world swam before his
eyes, and long before he knew it he was on his
way to be a specimen. Strange things happen to
insects, though they are not the only ones who
have found perdition in a bottle.

Sometimes I climbed the stairs to the upper
floors of the observatory. No matter how high I
went, the higher the better. In the warm hours
of the day the air at the very top was almost a
cloud of tiny wings. " Excelsior " is the insects'
watchword. Once, in the upper room, I bottled
carelessly a small black-and-white moth. Its

48 NEW HAMPSHIRE

appearance was ordinary enough ; no doubt it
was common ; but it was an insect, and hit or
miss I took it in. And in due course it went
into the entomologist's hands with the rest of
the catch. She emptied the vial, and passed an
unexciting comment or two upon the few flies
and beetles it contained ; perhaps she remarked
that one of them might be worth mounting — I
do not remember precisely; it was a way she
had of egging me on ; but the next morning she
said : " You did n't tell me anything about the
lovely moth you took yesterday." I was obliged
to stop and think. " Oh, that little black-and-
white thing," I said. Yes, that was the one —
" new to the summit." If I was not proud, then
pride does not dwell in earthly minds. This, I
confide, was not my only contribution to the
fauna of our highest New England mountain ;
I seem to remember a short-winged beetle also ;
but the moth, being in the Lepidoptera, is my
especial glory. I wish I could recall its name,
that I might print it here for the reading of
future generations.

With such pursuits did I improve the spare
hours of my Mount Washington week. I have
no thought of boasting. At least I would not
seem to do so. It was little enough that I accom-
plished, or could hope to accomplish, hampered

ABOVE THE BIRDS 49

as I was by my ignorance. Probably I shall
never have a beetle, much less a moth, named
after me ; but with that precious black-and-white
rarity in mind I feel that even in the way of
entomology I have not lived altogether in vain.

Scientific studies apart, the best hours of the
week (after some spent along the carriage-road,
resting here and there upon a boulder to enjoy
the magnificent, ever-shifting prospect, and some
— not hours, alas, but minutes — spent in eat-
ing the ambrosial, banana-savored, soul-satisfying
berries of Vaccinium ccespitosum) — my best
hours, I say, were perhaps those of a certain won-
derful evening. The air was warm, no breath
stirring, the sky clear, and the half world below
us, as we walked the hotel platform, lay covered
with white clouds, on which the full moon was
shining. The stillness, the mildness, the bright-
ness, the sense of elevation, and the bewitching,
unearthly scene, all this was like an evening in
fairyland. For the time being, it is to be feared,
even the rarest of moths would have seemed a
matter of secondary importance. Such is the
power of beauty. So truly was it born to make
other things forgotten.

MOUNTAIN-TOP AND VALLEY

NOTHING heightens appreciation like a contrast.
After a week at the summit of Mount Washing-
ton, where we lived in the clouds and above
them, in a world above the world, we returned
to the lowlands. The afternoon was sultry, and
before the descent was half accomplished — by
the train — we wished ourselves back again on
the heights. How can men live in such an at-
mosphere, we asked each other ; so stifling, so
depressing, so wanting in all the elements of vi-
tality. Our condition seemed like that of fishes
out of water, and we began to think of angling
as a cruel sport. It grieved us to see the trees
growing taller. Even the laughing young Am-
monoosuc was looked upon with indifference. " I
wish I were back," said one ; and the other re-
sponded, " So do I."

At Fabyan's the crowd surged about us like a
sea. Baggage must be found and checked, our
train was waiting, and the baggage-master, true
railway "official" that he was, was not to be
hastened. His steps were all taken by rule, and
every movement of his hands was set to slow

MOUNTAIN-TOP AND VALLEY 51

music. When lie spoke, which was seldom, it was
in a muffled voice and with funereal moderation.
In the midst of all that bustle he was calm —

" Calm as to suit a calmer grief."

You might say what you pleased to him, be
urgently argumentative, or plaintive even to
wheedling, it was all one. Your eloquence was
wasted. It was like nudging a graven image, or
crying haste in the ear of Death. Not a feature
of his countenance altered, not a muscle quick-
ened. Who ever knew the hands of a clock to
accelerate their pace in response to human im-
patience ? Time and tide — and a baggage-mas-
ter — hurry for no man.

"Two trunks for Bethlehem," you say. No
answer. By and by, meekly insistent, and think-
ing that by this time your turn must surely have
come, you repeat the words. No answer. But the
man is taking down checks from their peg, and
in due time, stepping as to the measure of a
dirge, he marches with them down the platform.
" These are mine," you say, keeping an uneasy
pace or two in advance and pointing to the
trunks on the truck. No answer — not so much
as a look. Nor is there need of any. You are
silenced. That implacable manner carries all
before it. You could not speak again, even to

52 NEW HAMPSHIRE

claim your soul. But finally the man himself
speaks. You are relieved to know he can. He
is addressing you. The minute hand is at twelve
and the clock strikes. " These are yours ? " he
asks. You reply in the affirmative, as best you
are able. " For Bethlehem ? " he asks, and you
answer " Yes." And then, after one more set of
machine-like motions, the mighty work is accom-
plished. The checks are yours. Fortunately, the
train has not yet pulled away, though it is past
the time, and at the last moment you see the
trunks on board.

Trifles like these would have been as nothing, of
course, to ordinary travelers ; but to us, innocent
Carthusians, fresh from the unearthly quiet of a
mountain-top, they were little short of tragical.
And how intolerably hot and close the car was !
Things were growing worse and worse with us.
Should we live to reach Bethlehem, with nothing
but this blast out of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace
in our nostrils? Why had we not remained
where existence was not a struggle, but a dream
of pleasure ; where the air had not to be gasped
for, but came of itself to be sweetly inhaled?
Nevertheless, we survived the passage, — the con-
ductor helping to pass the time by stopping in
the aisle to make inquiries touching a little flock
of puzzling birds, crossbills, perhaps, lately seen

MOUNTAIN-TOP AND VALLEY 53

in his apple orchard, — and at Bethlehem the
carriage awaited us. This was a welcome change,
but even so we still found it difficult to draw
breath; and when the horses started, what a
dust they set flying! Truly, between the heat
and the drought, this lower world was in an evil
case. It was a road of sighs all the six miles to
Franconia.

Once there, however, and supper eaten, I
stepped out upon the piazza and looked west-
ward. Venus was bright just above the near
horizon (the near horizon!), and against the
sunset sky stood a line of low woods, with de-
tached pine trees towering over the rest. And in
that sight I discovered anew, all in a moment,
the charm of this valley world. I had seen no-
thing like this from the mountain-top. Yes, good
as the summit prospect was, this was in some
respects better. If that was more magnificent,
more soul-expanding, this was more home-felt
and beautiful. And as I looked and looked, while
the light faded out of the sky, I was conscious
of a new contentment. Mountain-tops for visits,
I said, and may I enjoy them often; but the
valley to live in.

The next morning I was no sooner abroad
than this happy impression was renewed and
deepened. It was a comfort to the feet to be

64 NEW HAMPSHIRE

going neither uphill nor downhill, and it rested
the eyes to be looking not at remote peaks and
dimly discovered sheets of water, but into green
branches so near that the leaves could be seen,
and the blue sky through them. How sweetly
the ripple of the brook came to my ears as it
ran over its stony bed just beyond the velvety,
smooth meadow ! And the cawing of a dozen or
two of crows, who were talking politics among the
pines on the hillside, affected me most agreeably.
There was something of real neighborliness about
it. I would gladly have taken a hand in the dis-
cussion, if they would have let me. When a song
sparrow started out of the hedge at my elbow
it gave me a start of surprise. I had become so
unused to such movements ! A robin's sudden
cackle I thought almost the sweetest of music ;
the careless warble of a bluebird was nothing
less than a voice from heaven; and a squirrel
sputtering defiance from the stone wall set me
laughing with pleasure. None of these sounds,
nor anything akin to them, was to be heard on
the desolate, boulder-covered top of Mount
Washington.

Now the trees interlaced their branches over
my head. Nothing could be prettier ; and the
effect was so novel ! I stopped short to admire
it. And anon, as the road made a little ascent,

MOUNTAIN-TOP AND VALLEY 65

scarcely noticeable to one fresh from the steep-
ness of a mountain cone, I found myself gazing
down upon one of the most engaging scenes in
the world; a sequestered valley farm, thrifty-
looking, snugly kept, nestled among low hills,
with a mountain river winding along the farther
side of it, between the meadow and the woodland,
now lost to sight, now shining in the sun. I had
known the place for years, as I had known the
worthy man who owns it ; and I had looked at
it many times from this very point ; but I had
never seen it till this morning. A pleasant thing
it is when an old picture or an old poem, or both
in one, is thus made new. If our eyes could but
oftener be anointed !

The softness of the meadow, freshly sprung
after the summer mowing, the glistening of the
corn leaves, the narrow road, — a brown ribbon
laid upon the green carpet, — that runs to the
door and stops (for nothing goes by — nothing
but the river, the clouds, and the birds), the shade
trees clustered lovingly about the house, the whole
pastoral scene, I saw it all with the vision of one
who had been looking at a vaguely defined, far-
away world, over which the eye wandered as the
dove wandered over the face of the waters, and
now had come suddenly in sight of home.

Yes, distance is a good painter, but nearness

56 NEW HAMPSHIRE

is a better one. So I felt for the time being, at
all events, falling in with the mood of the hour ;
for it is well that moods alter, as it is well that
the earth goes round the sun and season gives
place to season. Man was not made to see one
kind of beauty, or to believe in one kind of good-
ness. The whole world is hid in his heart. All
things are his. The small and the great, the near
and the far, light and darkness, good and evil,
the intimacies of home and the isolations of in-
finite space, all are parts of the Creator's work,
and equally parts of the creature's inheritance.

For to-day, then, I praise the valley. I am for
having the hills close about me, rather than afar
off and far below. I like to see the trees, and the
leaves on them, rather than leagues on leagues
of barely discernible forest ; and a lonely pool of
still water at my feet, with alders reflected in it,
is more in my eyes than Lake TJmbagog itself,
hardly better than a blur upon the landscape,
fifty miles away. To-morrow I may feel differently,
but for to-day let me listen to the breeze in the
pine branches and the brook pattering over stones,
rather than to the eternal silences of the bare
mountain-top and the brooding sky.

IN THE MOUNT LAFAYETTE FOKEST

IT is one of the cool mornings that descend
rather suddenly upon our White Mountain
country with the coming of autumn ; cool morn-
ings that are liable to be followed by warm days.
I was in doubt how to dress as I set out, and
for the first mile or two almost regretted that I
had not taken an extra garment. Then all at
once the sun broke through the clouds, and even
the one coat became superfluous and was thrown
over my arm. This state of things lasted till I
had crossed the golf links and entered the woods.
At that point the sun withdrew his shining, and
now, between the clouds and the shadow and
dampness of the forest, I have put on my coat
again and buttoned it up ; and what counts for
more, I am driven to walk less slowly than one
would always prefer to do in such a place.

A fresh breeze stirs the tree-tops, so that I am
not without music, let the birds be as silent as
they will. Nearly or quite the only voice I have
so far heard was that of an unseen Maryland
yellow-throat, some distance back, who sprang
into the air and delivered himself of a song with

58 NEW HAMPSHIRE

variations, all in his most rapturous June man-
ner. Why the fellow should have been in any-
thing like an ecstasy at that precise moment is
quite beyond my guessing. Possibly it would be
equally beyond his, if he were to stop to think
about it. Some sudden stirring of memory, per-
haps. Natural beings seldom know just why
they are happy. I recall the fact, unthought of
till now, that I have not heard a yellow-throat
sing before for several weeks, though I have
seen the birds often. They are among the late
stayers, and at this season have a more or less
lonesome look, being commonly found not as
members of a flock or family, after the manner
of autumnal warblers in general, but here and
there one, dodging about in a roadside thicket,
or peeping out curiously at a casual passer-by.

Just as I am remarking upon the unusual
silence my ear catches in the far distance the
song of a white-throated sparrow. So very far
off it is that the sound barely reaches me. In-
deed, I do not so much hear it as become vaguely
conscious that I should hear it if the bird were
ever so little nearer. Yet I am sure he sang —
as sure as if I had seen him. Probably experi-
enced readers will divine what I mean, although
I seem unable to express it.

The road is bordered with the dead tops of

IN THE MOUNT LAFAYETTE FOREST 59

trees, thrown there in heaps by the road-makers.
They form an unsightly hedge, which birds of
various kinds resort to for cover. At this minute
two winter wrens, pert-looking, bob-tailed things,
scold at me out of it. My passing is a trespass,
they consider, and they tell me so with emphasis.
For the sake of stirring them up to protest even
more vigorously (such an eloquent gesticulatory
manner as they have), I stand still and squeak
to them. Few birds can be quiet under such in-
sults ; and the winter wren is not one of them.
There is nothing phlegmatic about his disposi-
tion. He is like some beings of a higher class :
it takes very little to set him in a flutter. So I
squeak and squeak, and the pair vociferate tut,
tut, till I have had enough and go on my way
laughing. Touchy people were made for teasing.

I have hardly started before a hairy wood-
pecker's sharp signal is heard, and within a min-
ute a sapsucker on the opposite side of the way
utters a snarling note, which by a slight effort
of the imagination might be taken for the voice
of an angry cat. To my ear it is not in the
smallest degree woodpeckerish. I see the bird a
moment later as he flies across the road.

In a mountain-side forest like this, near the
mountain's foot, the traveler, if he is not climb-
ing the slope but crossing it transversely, is cer-

60 NEW HAMPSHIRE

tain to come now and then upon a brook. I am
on the edge of one now, and as the sun at this
moment shines out between two clouds I stand
still to enjoy the warmth while it lasts, and at the
same time to hear the singing of the water. Good
music, I call it, and fear no contradiction. It has
the quality of some of the best verse — liquidity.
It is broken unevenly into syllables, yet it is true
to the beat, and it flows. In short, it is smooth,
yet not too smooth — with the smoothness of
water, not of oil. It speaks to every boulder as
it passes. I wish my ear were more at home in
the language.

There is seldom a minute when, if I pause to
listen, I cannot hear from one direction or an-
other the quaint, homely, twangy, countryfied,
yet to me always agreeable voice of Canadian
nuthatches. At frequent intervals one or two
come near enough so that I see them creeping
about over the trees, bodies bent, heads down,
always in search of a mouthful, yet keeping up,
every one, his share of the universal chorus. As
well as I can judge, all the evergreen forests of
this Northern country are now alive with these
pretty creatures ; for they really are pretty. In
fact, there are few forest birds for whom I cher-
ish a kindlier feeling. It is too bad they do not
summer in our Massachusetts woods, though pos-

IN THE MOUNT LAFAYETTE FOREST 61

sibly I should care less for them if they made
themselves neighborly the whole year long, like
their relatives, the white-breasts.

A goldfinch is passing far above, dropping
music as he goes. He is one of the high-fliers.
Wherever you may happen to be, at the summit
of Mount Washington or where not, you will
pretty often hear his sweet voice as he wanders
under the sky, dipping and rising, dipping and
rising, voice and wing keeping step together.

Here and there one or two clouded-sulphur
butterflies (Philodice) take wing as I disturb
them. They have been most extraordinarily
abundant of late. A fortnight ago we drove for
almost a whole forenoon through clouds of them,
bunches of twenty or more constantly rising from
damp spots of earth by the wayside ; and in a
meadow all bespangled with purple asters they
were so thick as almost to conceal the flowers.
Twinkling in the sunlight, they looked a thousand
times more like stars than the asters themselves.
Even the entomologists of the valley, in whose
company I was driving, had never seen the like.
Here in this shaded road such lovers of the sun
are naturally less numerous. In truth, the won-
der is that they should be here at all. And yet
the wonder is not so very great ; they wander at
their own will, and the will of the wind. Only

62 NEW HAMPSHIRE

last week, I am told, in the midst of a driving
snowstorm, one took shelter in the Summit House
on Mount Washington. After all, a butterfly is
not exactly a fool ; it knows enough to go into
the house when it snows.

Now I come upon a few snowbirds, hopping
in silence about the twigs of a brush-heap, snap-
ping their tails nervously, as if proud to show
the white feather ; and shortly beyond are two
or three white-throated sparrows. They also are
silent. Perhaps they perceive that a red squirrel
close by is talking enough for them and him-
self too. He says a good many things, some of
which I feel sure would be highly interesting to
a competent listener. Among forest folk, as
among church folk, the rule is, " He that hath
ears to hear, let him hear." As for me, I can
only lament my deficiency. A solitary vireo is
chattering sweetly (with him music is its own
reward), and all the while, whoever else speaks
or keeps silence, the nuthatch chorus goes on.
Taking New England together, we may safely
say that just at present hundreds of thousands,
yea, millions of anJc-anks go up to heaven every
minute of every day, from sunrise to sunset.

I walk but a few rods farther before I am de-
lighted by the sight of four winter wrens in an
overturned tree -top. In my experience it is some-

IN THE MOUNT LAFAYETTE FOREST 63

thing extremely out of the common course to see
so many together, and — as I did with the two
a quarter of a mile back — I work upon this
quartet's sensibilities till they fairly dance with
curiosity and indignation. I wonder if they are
a family group.

I bethink myself that I am saying nothing
about the forest itself. Its presence is felt rather
than seen, a grateful solemnity ; but the tem-
perature will not suffer me to sit down and
enjoy it as a Christian should. And just here I
emerge into territory over which a fire has swept
within a few years. Under these dead trees I
get the sun again, and can go slowly. Nothing
in the way of physical comfort is more grateful
than warmth after coolness, unless it be coolness
after warmth. A pine siskin calls, the first for
some weeks, and another hairy woodpecker shows
himself. Not a warbler has been seen since I
entered the woods. Of the flycatchers, too, —
olive-sides and wood pewees, — which were al-
ways conspicuous in this burning in August and
early September, there is neither sight nor sound.
Their season is done. Crossbill notes lead me to
look upward, and I see four birds flying past.
Restless, nomadic souls! Like the saints, they
have " no continuing city."

Another half-mile in the leafy forest, and I

64 NEW HAMPSHIRE

reach the foot of Echo Lake, where as I pass a
cluster of balsam firs I am saluted by the busy,
hurried calls of golden-crowned kinglets. A wren
is here also, irritable as ever, and hearing a
chickadee's voice, I whistle and chirp to him.
If I can set him to scolding, all the birds in the
neighborhood will flock this way to ascertain
what the trouble is. The device works to a
charm; in half a minute the excitement is
intense. Nuthatches, white-throats, chickadees,
kinglets, and wren, all take a hand in vituperat-
ing the intruder, and a youthful redstart comes
from the opposite side of the way to satisfy his
more gentle curiosity. One creature, strangely
enough, remains neutral: a red squirrel, who
sits on end at the top of a stump and gazes at
me in silence. He holds one hand upon his heart,
like an opera singer, and looks and looks. " You
sentimental goose ! " I say ; " who taught you
that trick?" and I laugh at him and pass on.
This is near the corner of the old Notch road,
and as I round it and face the cold northerly
wind I button my coat about me and start
homeward at a quicker pace.

ON BALD MOUNTAIN

" FOUR inches of snow at the Profile House : "
such was the word brought to us at the break-
fast table, the driver of the " stage " having
communicated the intelligence as he passed the
hotel an hour or two earlier. We were not
surprised. It rained in Franconia night before
last, and yesterday, when the clouds now and
then lifted a little, the sides of the mountains
were seen to be white. This morning (October
7), although even the lower slopes were veiled,
the day promised well, and at the first minute I
set out for the Notch.

It was evident almost immediately that at
some time within the last forty-eight hours there
had been a great influx of migrating birds.
Song sparrows, white-throated sparrows, snow-
birds, bluebirds, and myrtle warblers were in
extraordinary force. Soon I began to hear the
wrennish calls of ruby-crowned kinglets, —
which have been very scarce hitherto, — and
presently more than one was heard rehearsing
its pretty song. What with bluebird voices,
song sparrows' warblings (no set tune, but

66 NEW HAMPSHIRE

" continuous melody "), the cackle of robins,
and the croaking of rusty blackbirds, the air
was loud. To these travelers, as to me, the
weather seemed to be changing for the better,
though the sun did not yet show itself, and find-
ing themselves in so delectable a valley, they
were in exuberant spirits.

Just above the Profile House farm the road
took me into a flock of birds that proved to be
the better part of half a mile in length. The
wayside hedges were literally in a flutter, snow-
birds being the most abundant, I think, with
white-throats and myrtle warblers not far
behind. Hermit thrushes, winter wrens, chip-
ping sparrows, song sparrows, and ruby-crowns
were continually in sight, and an unseen purple
finch was practicing niggardly, disconnected,
vireo-like phrases, as the manner of his kind is
in the autumnal season.

Then, when the older forest was reached,
there came an interval of silence, broken at last
by the distant, or distant-seeming, voice of a
red-breasted nuthatch and the cheerful notes of
chickadees. Soon two hermits showed them-
selves, facing me on a low perch, and lifting
their tails solemnly in response to my chirping ;
and not far away were a winter wren or two,
and a flock of white-throats and snowbirds. I

ON BALD MOUNTAIN 67

had never seen the dear old road birdier, even
in May, though of course I had often seen the
number of species very much larger.

At the height of land I came upon the first
snow, a ragged fringe left on the shady side of
the way. I made a snowball, for the sake of
doing it (or, as I said to myself, suiting the boy-
ish act with a boyish word, " for greens "), and
decided all at once not to go down into the
Notch, but up to the top of Bald Mountain.
From that point, if the sky cleared, as I felt
hopeful it would, there would be sights worth
remembering.

The mountain is only a little one, but it is
steep enough — the upper half, at all events —
to give the eager pedestrian a puff for his
money. For myself, I had time to spare, and,
fortunately or unfortunately, had been over the
path too often to be subject to the state of
mind (I know it well) which we may charac-
terize as climbers' impatience. Unless something
unforeseen should happen, the summit would
wait for me. Halfway up, also, a flock of blue
jays, five or six at least, who were holding a
long and mysterious confabulation close by the
path, afforded me a comfortable breathing spell.
For a moment I suspected the presence of an
owl, against whom the rascals were plotting mis-

68 NEW HAMPSHIRE

chief ; but their voices were much of the time
too soft, too intimate-sounding, too lacking in
belligerency. Some of the birds might even have
been communing with themselves. Their whole
behavior had an air of preternatural gravity and
cunning, and their remarks, whatever the pur-
port of them, were in the highest degree varied.
One fellow was a masterly performer upon the
bones (jay scholars will understand what I mean,
and I should despair of explaining myself in a
few words to any one else), while another fur-
nished me with a genuine surprise by whistling
again and again in the manner of a red-tailed
hawk.

Well, the conspirators dispersed, the solitary
climber pocketed his curiosity, and in a few
minutes longer his feet were at the top. The
rocky cone of Lafayette was still densely
capped, but under the fringed edges of the
cloud there was plenty of snow in sight. All the
upper slopes of Kinsman, Cannon, and Lafay-
ette were covered with it, except that the de-
ciduous trees (broad patches of yellow) stood
bare. Apparently the snow had stuck only upon
the evergreens, and the effect at this distance
was very striking, the white over the green pro-
ducing a beautiful gray. I could never have
imagined it. The hotel and its cottages, nestled

ON BALD MOUNTAIN 69

between the mountains, all had white roofs, but
the landscape as a whole was anything but win-
try. Everywhere below me the great forest still
showed an abundance of bright hues, — red, yel-
low, and russet, — a piece of glorious pageantry,
though many shades less brilliant than I had
seen it two days before.

So I am saying to myself when suddenly I
look upward, and behold, the cap is lifted from
Lafayette, and the mountain-top is clear white,
shining in the sunlight against the blue sky ; a
vision, it seems ; something not of this world ;
splendor immaculate, unearthly, unspeakable.
I feel like shouting, or tell myself that I do;
but for some reason I keep silence. Clouds
still hang about the mountains, their shapes
altering from glory to glory with every minute.
Now a band lies clean across Lafayette, immedi-
ately below the cone, detaching the white mass
from everything underneath, and leaving it, as
it were, floating in the air.

A sharp-shinned hawk sails past me, nut-
hatches call from the valley woods, a snowbird
perches on a dwarf spruce at my elbow, a red
squirrel breaks into sudden spluttering, and then,
with hands uplifted, sits silent and motionless.
I mention these details, but they are nothing.
What I really see and feel is the world I am liv-

70 NEW HAMPSHIRE

ing in : the sunshine, the stillness, the temper-
ate airs, the bright encircling forest, in which
my little hilltop is cradled, and the white peak
yonder in the sky. The snow lends it lightness,
airiness, buoyancy. As I said just now, it seems
almost to float in the ether.

I remained with this beauty for an hour, di-
vided at the last between the luminous, snowy
peak above me and the soft — ineffably soft —
world of leafy tree-tops below. Then, as I had
done only day before yesterday, I bade the place
good-by. Probably I should not come this way
again till next summer, at the soonest. Good-by,
old mountain. Good-by, old woods. No doubt
you have many worthier lovers, but let me be
counted as one of the faithful.

I was still on the cone, making my way down-
ward, when a grouse drummed and in a minute
or two repeated himself. The sound struck me
as curiously wanting in resonance, as if the log
were water-soaked (though I do not believe he
was striking one), or his breast not fully inflated.
Perhaps he was a young fellow, a new hand with
the drumsticks, and so excusable. Certainly the
difficulty lay not in the matter of distance, for
between two of the performances I turned a sharp
corner, effectively triangulating the bird, and it
was impossible that he should be more than a few

ON BALD MOUNTAIN 71

yards away. On all sides the little nuthatches
were calling to each other in their quaint childish
treble. I love to hear them, and the goldcrests
also ; but here, as on the heights above, the birds
were less than the forest. I was in a susceptible
mood, I suppose. The mere sight of the tall,
straight trunks, with the lights and shadows on
them, gave me a pleasure indescribable. Though
the friend who had been my walking companion
for a week past (and no man could wish a better
one) is sure to read this column, I cannot refrain
from saying that solitariness has its merciful al-
leviations. I was no longer tempted to babble,
and the wise old trees took their turn at talking.
If I could only repeat what they said !

BIRDS AND BEIGHT LEAVES

AFTER the red maple trees and the yellow birches
are mostly bare, and the greater part of the sugar
groves have passed the zenith of their brilliancy,
then the poplars come to the rescue. The hills are
all at once bright again with a second crop of
color, an aftermath of splendid sun-bright yellow.
I knew nothing about this beforehand, and am
delighted over the discovery. From my Franconia
window I am looking at as pretty an autumnal
wood as any man need wish to see, and it is a
wood the seasonable glories of which were ended,
I thought, more than a week ago. As I look at
it I feel sorry for my last week's companion, who
went home too soon. Since his departure the
days have been outdoing one another in the soft-
ness of their airs and the beauty of their lights.
Mother Earth has been in her most amiable
mood. Nothing is too good for her children. I
have never seen fairer weather ; though some,
I dare say, might criticise it as a few degrees too
warm. It is hard, I admit, for a walker to keep
a coat on his back, far along as the season is get-
ting, when the sun wrestles with him for it.

BIRDS AND BRIGHT LEAVES 73

An interesting thing to me has been the tardy
brightening of individual maple trees. It is one
more manifestation, I assume, of Nature's gift
of versatility, her faculty of variation, to which,
all but universal as it is, scientific men attribute
so much potency in the evolving of so-called spe-
cies. What I notice just now is that, as some
bushes and trees mature their fruit later than
others of the same kind, living apparently under
the same conditions, so some maple trees are a
week or two behind their immediate neighbors in
ripening their foliage. I have passed within a
day or two both sugar maples and red maples
that were just donning their gay robes. Well
done, I am moved to say, as my eye lights on
them. They and the poplars, together with cer-
tain extensive maple groves on the higher levels,
still keep the world arrayed in a really barbaric
splendor. Two weeks ago I should have prophe-
sied that before this time the landscape would be
stripped for winter ; and so it would have been,
perhaps, if a cold storm had supervened instead
of this period of summery brightness and calm.
Great is weather. There is nothing like it. It
makes a man — and a tree, too, for aught I know
— glad to be alive.

That it makes the birds happy is beyond dis-
pute. You can see it with half an eye. Many of

74 NEW HAMPSHIRE

them are gone, it is true, but many others are
left ; and wherever you take your walk you may
have joy of them. You will need to be blind and
deaf, or of a hopelessly sour temper, not to catch
a little of their cheeriness. Three days ago (it
was an anniversary with me, and I was early
abroad) I went into the kitchen garden before
breakfast, as I have been doing frequently of
late, to see what birds might be there. For a
month and more, as the coarse grasses and weeds
have ripened their crop (the garden, luckily for
me, having been allowed to go untended), the
place has been a favorite resort of sparrows.
There I saw the Lincoln finches in their time, —
on September 5 and subsequently, — and there
for a fortnight past I have always been able to
begin the day with a few white-crowns.

Well, on the morning in question one of the
first things I heard was a brief, uncharacteristic,
autumnal-sounding ditty which, being too short
for a song sparrow's work, I at once credited to
a white-crown ; and, to be sure> when I looked
that way, there the bird stood on a top stone of
the wall, a young fellow, not yet " crowned,"
practicing his first musical exercises. The morn-
ing was cool, — the ground had stiffened over-
night, — and every time he opened his mouth to
sing, a tiny cloud of vapor could be seen rising

BIRDS AND BRIGHT LEAVES 75

from it. It was visible music. Again and again
I watched him. The dear little chorister ! No-
body's birthday was ever more prettily honored.
He "sang to my eye " indeed — in a daintily
literal sense such as the poet never thought of. I
wonder if any one, anywhere, ever saw and heard
the like.

The white-crowns have been surprisingly musi-
cal (the weather, no doubt, being a provocation),
but I have not once heard their spring song, or
anything which to my ear — none too well accus-
tomed to it — has seemed to bear any relation
thereto. Song sparrows, on the other hand, while
mostly contenting themselves with incoherent,
sotto^voce twitterings, have now and then — al-
most daily, I think — varied the programme
with more or less successful attempts at a fuller-
voiced and more formal melody. As for the ves-
per sparrows, they have mainly kept silence, but
on one or two bright mornings have sung as
sweetly as ever they do in May. Indeed, I might
truthfully say more than that ; for at this season,
when all bright things are taking leave, a strain
of wild music is more grateful to the ear than by
any possibility it can be when every newly green
bush is part of the universal choir gallery.

To us who have been in the habit of coming to
this valley in bright-leaf time nothing is more

76 NEW HAMPSHIRE

characteristic, as nothing is more welcome, than
the continual familiar presence of bluebirds.
This year, because I have stayed later than usual,
it may be, they have seemed uncommonly abun-
dant. Their voices are sure to be among the first
to be heard as I step out of the door in the morn-
ing, and wherever I walk — in the open country
— I find myself surrounded at frequent intervals
by a larger or smaller flock. Two days ago I
counted forty in sight at once ; and a bunch of
forty bluebirds — well, there may be pleasanter
sights for a bird-lover (a flock of sixty, for exam-
ple), but it is a sight to raise low spirits, espe-
cially for a man who remembers the time — after
a cruel winter — when the vision of a single bird
was accepted by all of us as an event to talk about.
Myrtle warblers (yellow-rumps) are still more
numerous, and if a bluebird quits a perch and
takes wing it is almost an even chance that a
yellow-rump, who has been sitting near at hand,
waiting for this to happen, will be seen dashing
in pursuit. You may go down the village street
and watch the trick repeated half a dozen times
within half a mile. To my walking companion
and myself the sight has come to be part of a
Franconia autumn. If you are pretty close to the
birds you may hear a bill snapping (the warbler's,
I think), as if in anger, but on the whole I am

BIRDS AND BRIGHT LEAVES 77

inclined to believe that the thing is no more than
an innocent, though one-sided, game of tag. All
young creatures must have something to play
with, somebody to make game of. So it is with
yellow-rumps, I dare say ; but why should they
so universally pitch upon the inoffensive bluebird,
I should like to know. It is to be added, however,
to make the story truthful, that if there are no
bluebirds handy, the warblers take it out by a
free chasing of each other. To watch them, one
would think that life, by their apprehension of
it, were all a holiday.

And while I am talking of bluebirds I ought to
mention their habit of hanging about bird boxes
in these last days of their Northern season. Only
this forenoon, since the foregoing paragraphs
were written, I passed a box perched upon a
pole beside a house, and at least six bluebirds
were sitting upon its platform, or investigating
its different apartments. Sometimes a pair (so
they looked, one bright colored, the other dull)
sat side by side before a door, like married lovers.
Sometimes one would go inside, sometimes both,
while out of the next door another bird would be
peeping. The box was very unlikely to have
been their home; the countryside is overrun
with bluebirds, too many by half to have sum-
mered hereabout ; but evidently the sight of it

78 NEW HAMPSHIRE

had suggested family pleasures. Perhaps they
were living over the past, perhaps forecasting
the future. Bluebirds have their full share of
sentiment, or both voice and behavior are rank
deceivers. Concerning this aspect of the case,
however, the frivolous yellow-rumps cared not a
farthing. They sat in a small apple tree conven-
iently near, and as often as a bluebird ventured
upon the wing, one or two of them started in-
stantly in pursuit. If he alighted upon a fence
post, down they dropped upon the next rail and
waited for him to make another sally. Once I
heard a bluebird utter a pretty sharp note of
remonstrance, but that, we may guess, only made
the fun the greater. Birds will be birds.

My morning stroll (it is October 13, my last
day in Franconia) showed me, in addition to
the birds already named, one lonesome-mannered
hermit thrush, a few robins, two or three ruby-
crowned kinglets, one of them running over with
his musical twittity, twittity^ twittity, a single
yellow palm warbler (this and the myrtle have
been the only warblers of the month), a red cross-
bill, going somewhere, as usual, and leaving word
behind him as he went, a small flock of pine sis-
kins, a strangely few song sparrows, one vesper
sparrow, one white-crown, a multitude of snow-
birds, a purple finch or two, a goldfinch, and a

BIRDS AND BRIGHT LEAVES 79

grouse, with the inevitable crows, jays, chickadees,
and red-breasted nuthatches. Had my walk been
longer and into a more varied country, I should
have found gold-crested kinglets, winter wrens,
brown creepers, titlarks (perhaps), white-throated
sparrows, field sparrows, chippers, tree sparrows
(probably), and three or four kinds of wood-
peckers.

And speaking of woodpeckers, I must allow
myself to boast that within the last few days I
have had exceptional luck with the big fellow of
them all, known in books as the pileated. On
the 9th I saw one and heard the halloo of an-
other, and on the llth I saw two (together) and
heard a third. One of those seen on the llth
shouted at full length, and at the top of his voice
while flying.

The pileated woodpecker is a splendid bird.
A pity he cannot find himself at home in our
Massachusetts country. To see him here in New
Hampshire one might imagine that he belonged
with the mountains and would be homesick in
other company ; but if you would see him of tener
than anywhere else, you may go to a land where
there is scarcely so much as a hillock — to the
peninsula of Florida. There or here, he is a great
bird. The brightest maple leaf that ever took
color was not so bright as his crest.

FLORIDA

FIKST IMPRESSIONS OF MIAMI

IT is Sunday, the 19th of January. A week ago
I was sitting before a fire, watching the snow
fall outside, in winter-bound Massachusetts.
This forenoon I am reclining in the shade of a
cocoanut palm, looking across the smooth blue
waters of Biscayne Bay to a line of woods, I
know not how many miles distant, broken in the
midst by a narrow cut or inlet (Norris Cut, a
passer-by tells me it is called), through which is
to be seen the open Atlantic. The air is motion-
less, the sky cloudless, the temperature ideal.
" This is the day the Lord hath made," I repeat
to myself. He has seldom done better.

I left Boston Monday morning, spent that
night and the next day in "Washington, slept in
St. Augustine Wednesday night, and on Thurs-
day took the long, all-day ride down the east
coast of Florida, past miles on miles of orange
groves and pineapple plantations, to the termi-
nus of the railroad, the new and flourishing city
of Miami.

My visit, it must be owned, began rather in-
auspiciously. It was nobody's fault, of course,

84 FLORIDA

but the " magic city " did not put its best foot
forward. Friday morning the mercury stood at
forty-five, and although the day was abundantly
warm out of doors, — so warm that a walker nat-
urally took off his coat, — an oil stove proved a
comfort at nightfall. In short, the day was ex-
actly like a White Mountain day in late Septem-
ber, hot in the middle and cool at both ends.
Yesterday, however, was a piece of Massachusetts
June, while this morning is so perfect that every
one, visitor or resident, passes comments upon
it. Perfection of any kind is a rare and precious
thing, — in this world, at least, — and though it
be merely a bit of weather, it should never go
unspoken of. So I say to myself as I lie in the
shade, and look and breathe.

In truth, I can hardly feel it credible that I
was in the midst of snowstorms less than a week
ago. For a long two days winter has seemed
a thing utterly past and forgotten. Only now
and then it comes upon me, with the shock of
unexpected news, that this is not summer, but
January.

The bay, for some reason to me unknown, is
almost without birds. The only one just now in
sight is a cormorant pretty far offshore, diving
and swimming by turns. I imagine him to be a
loon till suddenly he takes wing, with outstretched

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MIAMI 85

neck, and after a long flight comes to rest, not
in the water, but at the top of a stake. Some-
where behind me a flicker is shouting as in
springtime, and on one side a mockingbird is
calling (" smacking " is the word that comes of
itself to my pencil), and a blue-gray gnatcatcher
utters now and then a fine, thread-like ejaculation.
The stillness is really a relief, even to my or-
nithological ears; for though they had been
starved for two or three months in Massachu-
setts, they have been so dinned with bird voices
for the last two days that a brief period of si-
lence is grateful. The centre of the town, where
I have taken up my abode, literally swarms with
fish crows and boat-tailed grackles, every one
trying, as it seems, to outdo its rivals in noisi-
ness. I remember the day, eight or nine years
ago, when in the flatwoods of New Smyrna I
spent an hour of almost painful excitement in
taking observations upon the first boat-tail I had
ever seen. It would have been hard at that
moment for me to imagine that so clever and in-
teresting a bird could ever become a nuisance.
Fortunately, both crow and grackle retire to
roost early and are comparatively late risers;
otherwise the people of Miami might be driven
to violent measures, as against a plague. As
things are, the birds have no fears. They alight

86 FLORIDA

in the shade trees before the windows, or gather
about the kitchen door, crows and blackbirds
alike (and the male blackbirds, with their over-
grown tails, are almost or quite as large as the
crows), as fearless as so many English sparrows.

After them the abundant birds hereabout, so
far as I have yet discovered, are buzzards, car-
rion crows (black vultures), blue jays, catbirds
(which I have never seen half so plentiful), palm
warblers, myrtle warblers, and blue-gray gnat-
catchers. Less numerous, but still decidedly com-
mon, are flickers, red-bellied woodpeckers, mock-
ingbirds, Florida yellow-throats, hummingbirds,
ground doves, and phoebes. Day before yesterday
a long procession of tree swallows straggled past
me as I wandered along the bay shore, and in the
same place a flock of masculine red-winged black-
birds were holding a vociferous mid-winter con-
vention in a thicket of tall reeds. White-eyed
vireos are well distributed, and sing as saucily
as if the month were May instead of January.
Solitary vireos are present likewise, but I have
seen only one, and he was not yet in tune.

Out in the pine lands I came upon a single
group of pine warblers and half a dozen blue-
birds, both singing freely. What a voice the
bluebird has ! It does a Yankee's heart good to
hear it. I have yet to see a robin or a chickadee.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MIAMI 87

All in all, notwithstanding the woods are alive
with wings, there is surprisingly little music.
The season of song is not yet come. Phoebes, for
some reason, form a bright exception to the rule,
and now and then a cardinal grosbeak whistles
with a sweetness that beggars words. Twice, I
think, I have heard a distant mockingbird sing-
ing, and yesterday, in front of the hotel, I stopped
to watch a pair that seemed to be in what I
should call a decidedly lyrical mood, though they
were silent as dead men. They stood on the
pavement a foot or so apart, and took turns in a
very original and pretty kind of dance. One and
then the other suddenly hopped straight upward
for an inch or two, both feet at once. Between
whiles they stood motionless, or sometimes one
(always the same) moved a little away from its
partner. Plainly they were much in earnest, and
without question the ceremony, simple, and al-
most laughable, as it looked, had some deep and
perfectly understood significance. Bitualism is
not confined to churches. Everywhere the heart
speaks by attitude and gesticulation.

A noble concert it will be when all these thou-
sands of song birds recover their voices. May I
be here to enjoy it. For the present I am con-
tented to wait. It is sufficient just now to be in
so strange a land in so lovely a season, with

88 FLORIDA

acres of morning-glories and moon-flowers all
about, roses and marigolds in the gardens, birds
in every bush (not an English sparrow among
them), airs gratefully cool from the sea, and
bright summer weather. For a winter-killed
Yankee, this is what old Omar would have
called "Paradise enow."

A FKOSTY MOENING

THEEE is nothing like weather. It is man's com-
fort and his misery ; more important still, per-
haps, it is his prosperity and his ruin. Indeed,
it has almost divine prerogatives. It wounds and
it heals ; it kills and it makes alive. And this,
which in good degree is true everywhere, is espe-
cially true in a country like southern Florida,
the Mecca at once of pleasure-seeking winter
vacationers, health-seeking tourists, and liveli-
hood-seeking settlers. For all these, Florida is
what it is because of its climate, that is to say,
its weather. Speak with whom you will, weather
is the topic that naturally comes uppermost.

Yesterday (January 22) was one of the most
delightful days imaginable ; for a pedestrian, I
mean to say. I know an insect collector, a gentle
soul, little used to complaining against the order
of the world, who pronounced it " horrid." For
the successful prosecution of her industry there
lacked a few degrees of warmth. Florida insects,
it appears, are much less hardy than their North-
ern cousins, keeping indoors, and so out of the
net, in temperature such as a Yankee butterfly

90 FLORIDA

or beetle, thicker-skinned or thicker-blooded,
would scorn to be afraid of. But if yesterday
was perfect, to-day, by my reckoning, at least,
has been finer still — perfection heaped upon
perfection. Yet every one hereabout is more or
less unhappy, and with more or less reason. In
the night between these two perfect days an air
from the North descended suddenly upon us, and
the temperature took an alarming drop, some say
to 38°, some to 31° — a drop which meant dis-
comfort to all, and disaster to many. When I
put my head out of doors at seven o'clock this
morning, on my way to the post office, I was
startled. My first thought was to run back for
an overcoat. Instead of that I put on steam.

Breakfast over, I betook myself to the pine
lands, my rule being to improve cool days in
that sunny region, leaving the shady hammock
woods for hotter weather. It was cold enough
for overcoat and mittens. In Massachusetts, with
anything like the same temperature, I should
certainly have worn them. Here, however, it was
not so plain a case. I was to be on foot till noon,
and I felt sure that long before that time the
lightest outer garment would become intolerable.
So I buttoned my one coat tightly about me,
stuffed my hands into my pockets, and hastened
my steps. For a mile, perhaps, I kept up the

A FROSTY MORNING 91

pace. By that time the sun had begun to make
itself felt. At the end of the second mile the
temperature was nothing less than summer-like,
and before the third mile was finished my coat
was on my arm ; and as I came down one of the
city streets, on my return at noon, and met two
Seminole Indians walking abroad dressed, after
their airy fashion, in nothing but waistcoat and
shirt, the sight of their comfortable uncivilized
legs was calculated to make a perspiring man
envious.

By nine o'clock, indeed, the weather was
superb ; but presently I came to an opening in
the woods. Here was a field of tomato plants in
front of a new, unpainted house. Some recent
settler had cleared a piece of ground and estab-
lished a home in this land of perpetual summer.
And to support himself and his family he had
" gone into early tomatoes." So much was to be
seen at a glance. And yes, there stood the man
himself in the midst of his plantation. I went
near and accosted him, expressing my hope that
the frost (for by this time it was plain there had
been one) had not damaged his crop. He had
been badly frightened in the night, he confessed,
but thought he had mostly escaped harm. "I
was glad," he said, dwelling upon the verb with
a pleasant foreign accent, " when I saw the ther-

92 FLORIDA

mometer " (pronounced etymologieally, with the
accent on the penult). I fear he was worse hit
than he knew. At all events there were many
acres of wilting tomato plants only a mile away
on the same road. One man, whom I saw look-
ing over his field, was calling the attention of
a solicitous neighbor to the fact that a certain
part of the plantation had fared better than the
rest. A few burning stumps had happened to be
left smouldering on one edge of the field over-
night, and the wind had drifted a light blanket
of smoke across that corner.

But even in unprotected gardens the different
parts had not fared alike. Here the tender plants
were wilting as the sun shone on them, and yon-
der, only five or ten yards away, there was no
symptom of blight. So true is it of tomato vines,
as of nobler creations, that one shall be taken and
the other left. The frost is like the wind, it striketh
where it listeth, and thou seest the effect thereof ;
and the poor man suffereth with the rich.

Such are the cruel uncertainties of truck farm-
ing in this sub-tropical region, far down toward
the very tip of Florida. Like the speculator in
copper or in oil, the farmer goes to bed rich and
gets up poor. But, like the dabbler in " shares,"
the farmer is not easily discouraged. Though he
has moved from one point to another, farther

A FROSTY MORNING 93

and farther down the peninsula, the frost pursu-
ing him, he will still try again. There is one
thing to be depended upon (let us be thankful
to say it) — a sanguine man's hope.

So much for tillers of the soil. For the rest
of us, mere idlers and wayfarers, concerned only
with questions of sight-seeing and momentary
comfort, a day like the present needs no better-
ing. My own course, as I have said, lay through
the pine woods — sunny, spacious, not in the
least like anything that a New Englander would
call a forest. At short intervals the road, white
and hard, ran past a small clearing, generally
with a house upon it. Here would be orange
trees, mango trees (just now in bloom), splendid
hibiscus shrubs, pineapples, perhaps, with other
novelties pleasant for Northern eyes to look
upon, or, quite as likely, a field of tomatoes (the
fruit nearly grown), or a sweet-potato patch.

Near one of the houses the loud cries of some
strange bird troubled my curiosity. The opera-
glass showed me nothing, and I was none the
wiser till beside a second house I heard the same
voice again. This time I put aside my scruples
and made a set attempt to solve the mystery. A
woman before the door was inquisitive about
the stranger, but the stranger was still more in-
quisitive about the bird ; and by and by, on a

94: FLORIDA

lower perch than I had thought, there the fellow
stood at the top of a shrub, directly before my
eyes, a Florida jay. It was nine years since I
had seen a bird of his kind, and the sight was
welcome accordingly. Perhaps he knew it. At
any rate, whether for my pleasure or his own,
he held his ground and kept up his harsh,
shrikely vociferations.

The Florida jay (a crestless bird, not at all
the same as the Florida blue jay, which abounds
everywhere and is everywhere noisy, especially
in the villages) is strictly a bird of the peninsula,
being found nowhere else — a remarkable in-
stance of extreme localization. I ran upon still
another individual before reaching the end of
my jaunt, — on the outskirts of Lemon City, —
and all three were in dooryards. Oak scrub
(where you may look out for rattlesnakes) and
human neighborhood, these, as I read the signs,
are the Florida jay's desiderata.

In general, as compared with the hammock
woods, the pine lands are nearly birdless. An
occasional sparrow hawk (another strangely trust-
ful creature, very common in this country1), an

1 One was living in the greenhouse connected with the big
hotel. The gardener told me that it had come in of itself, and
persisted in staying. He had tried in vain to get rid of it.
Tossed out of doors, it would at once return and make itself
at home.

A FROSTY MORNING 95

occasional mockingbird (more than once in
splendid song), a shrike now and then, a flock
of myrtle-birds, and another of palm warblers,
a good many white-breasted swallows and turkey
buzzards overhead, with a bunch of silent spar-
rows skulking beneath the dwarf palmettoes, —
these are what I now remember.

Birds or no birds, flowers or no flowers, I
should have enjoyed the eight miles. The bright
sunshine, the temperate, genial warmth, the
endless, widely spaced woods, the blue sky, and
on one side the blue expanse of Biscayne Bay, —
summer in winter, — I am not so long from
snowy Massachusetts but that these things are
enough to make for me a kind of perpetual fiesta.
As I said to begin with (and it is as true of
thoughts and feelings as of the tenderest of
garden crops), there is nothing like weather.

BEWILDERMENT

IF any untraveled Northern botanist wishes to
be puzzled, hopelessly confused, clean put out
of his reckoning, let him come to Miami. His
knowledge will drop away from him till not a
rag is left. Let him arrive, as I did, after dark,
and in the morning take the road southward to
Cocoanut Grove. The distance is only five miles,
and the walking excellent. I should like to go
with him, and listen to his exclamations and
comments.

The cocoanut palms before the hotel, as he
leaves the piazza, he has no need to inquire
about ; such things he has at least seen in pic-
tures. And the parti-colored crotons, likewise,
are nothing new ; he has seen the like in hot-
houses, if nowhere else. And the scores of big,
round hibiscus bushes, each with its score or two
of regal scarlet blossoms, — these, or poverty-
stricken imitations of them, he has admired before
now in the Boston Public Garden and elsewhere.
The acalypha shrubs, also, he will perhaps recog-
nize upon a second look, though he has never
before seen them growing as a hedge, carefully

BEWILDERMENT 97

squared, three or four feet high, and as many
feet thick. Yonder euphorbia bush, too (Pom-
settia), with its flaring, flaming rosettes of scar-
let floral leaves at the tips of the stems — this,
like the crotons, he is more or less familiar with
under glass. All these are cultivated plants,
pleasant to look upon out of doors in midwinter,
but of themselves not especially interesting, per-
haps, to a botanist.

But now, at the foot of Thirteenth or Four-
teenth Street, less than a quarter of a mile from
the hotel, we come to some vacant lots. Here
are a few dingy live-oaks (still with last year's
leaves on), and in their shadow, sprawling over
the tangled undergrowth, a wilderness of gadding
morning-glory vines. How lovely the flowers are
— pink and blue ! Unless it be the ubiquitous
fish crow, there is nothing else so common in this
Miami country as the morning-glory ; and the
vines, acres on acres, hold in bloom, one kind
and another, so I am given to understand, almost
or quite the whole year round.

Now we leave the sidewalk and are in the pine
woods. The trees — long-leaved pines — our
botanist knows well enough, the train having
brought him past a thousand miles of such, on
his way hither; though, even so, he might be
puzzled to tell to which of two related species

98 FLORIDA

(Palustris and Elliottii) they belong. From the
rude bridge, as we cross the Miami River, he
admires the myriad-footed, glossy-leaved man-
grove thickets that line the banks, especially as
he looks up the stream. Just beyond are ancient
live-oaks, the huge spreading branches of which
support a profusion of air-plants (poor relations
of the pineapple), with here and there an orchid.
I should like to show him an Epidendrum such
as I secured ten days ago — an open spray of a
dozen blooms, handsome enough to grace the
finest of hothouse collections ; but I have not
been able to find a second specimen, with all my
searching. However, a smaller, one-flowered spe-
cies is common enough, and if he is sufficiently
enterprising he will climb one of the trees for it,
or — as I did — cut a stick by means of which,
with more or less hard work, he can pry the
bulbous root from its foothold.

" What is this yellow flower ? " he asks, as
we go on.

" I don't know," is my answer. " Some mem-
ber of the pulse family."

My companion knew as much as that already.

" And this bush, with its strangely contorted
pods?"

Here I am more at home, and proud to
show it. The plant is Pithecolobium Unguis-

BEWILDERMENT 99

Cati, I tell him. Small wonder the pods are
twisted.

With this we come to more live-oaks, on which
are more air-plants and orchids, and just be-
yond is a confusion of thick-leaved trees and
shrubs.

"What is this? "he asks; "and this? and
this ? "

I have no idea, I am obliged to answer. But
the tall tree a little farther on is Ficus aurea, I
hasten to remark, with a show of extreme erudi-
tion.

" A fig-tree ? " he answers, in a tone of sur-
prise ; for, being a botanist, he knows, of course,
that^cws is fig.

Yes, I assure him, it is a kind of fig (rubber
tree, it is otherwise called), though the leaf is
small and, as botanists say, "entire," not in
the least resembling the modest fig-leaf of con-
vention. I know the tree's name, as I know that
of the shrub before mentioned, because I was
told it yesterday. One's knowledge (of names)
increases rapidly under favorable circumstances,
in a country like this.

Yonder very noticeable shrub, bearing large
globular bunches of small bright-purplish berries
(no eye could miss them), is the French mul-
berry, so called (Callicarpa Americana) ; and

100 FLORIDA

the larger and leafier bush near it, set along
the branches with more loosely disposed orange-
colored berries, is Trema micrantha, a plant
which Chapman's Flora credits to but one place
in the United States, — " Shellmounds in Las-
tero Bay, South Florida," — though hereabout
it is one of the commonest of the common.
Both it and the French mulberry are prime
favorites with various kinds of birds. Mocking-
birds and catbirds are feasting on the berries at
this moment.

And yes, here is a tree that I knew would ex-
cite my companion's curiosity. No stranger ever
drove over this road (and the first drive of every
newcomer to Miami is taken this way) without
asking his driver about it : a large tree, all its
leafy branches far above the ground, with a
strangely conspicuous mahogany-colored bark,
the outermost layers of which peel off in loose
papery flakes, after the manner of the canoe birch.
On my first jaunt into the hammock I heard more
than one driver pronounce its eloquent name —
gumbo-limbo. The two or three men of whom I
made inquiries could tell me nothing more, till
my host, who professed no botany, modestly sug-
gested a reference to the dictionary. There, sure
enough, I found the clue I was seeking. The tree
is Bursera gummifera, or Jamaica birch, one of

BEWILDERMENT J ^ '; \ ipi

two Florida representatives of the tropical torch-
wood family. It is among the chief of my South
Florida admirations, especially for its color. It
and the Seminoles should be of kindred stock.
In the lobby of the hotel, the other evening, I
heard one man rallying another (who had been
fishing and playing golf bareheaded) upon the
magnificent complexion he had put on. " Your
face reminds me of the gumbo-limbo," the joker
said. The comparison was obvious. I had been
thinking the same thing.

Our course takes us through a brief tract of
pine land largely occupied by bayberry bushes,
about which there are always many myrtle war-
blers (which is the same as to say bayberry war-
blers) ; and presently we are in a dense tropical
forest. This is the place I have desired my com-
panion to see ; and here, after a few minutes of
silent wonderment, his curiosity begins to play.
" What is this ? What is this ? What is this ? "
His interrogations come in crowds ; and to every
one my answer is ready — "I don't know." I
am in the case of the poor fellow whose sarcastic
French instructor promised to teach him in one
sentence how to answer correctly every question
he might be asked. Like him I have only to re-
spond, "e/e ne sais pas" Trees, shrubs, and
vines are all far out of my range. During the

**l*-cc el:|^ FLORIDA

fortnight that I have been here, to be sure, I
have begun to distinguish differences among
them, and even to recognize individuality ; but
as to what they are, and what their names are, I
know absolutely nothing.

It is a strange sensation, so delightfully, tan-
talizingly strange that I can hardly keep away
from the pkce. Day after day, in spite of the
dust and (sometimes) the scorching heat, my
steps turn in this direction. " Where have you
been ? " my new acquaintances say to me at the
dinner table; and I answer, almost of course,
" Down in the hammock."

Here and there, wherever there is a favorable
opening, I venture a few steps into the jungle ;
but sometimes I cannot stay. A feeling of some-
thing like superstitious terror comes over me,
the wood is so dense and dark and strange. I
am glad to get back into the dusty road. My
supposititious companion will be braver than I,
I dare say, but he will be with me in confessing
how conf usingly alike all the trees look, and how
utterly unavailable all his previous knowledge
proves to be. On this point I have talked with
two botanists, and they have both assured me
that, although they had lived much in upper Flor-
ida, they found themselves here in a world they
knew nothing about. With me, who am not a

BEWILDERMENT 103

botanist, or only the sheerest dabbler in the sci-
ence, it is literally true that in this sub-tropical
forest I cannot guess at so much as the family
relationship of one plant in twenty.

WAITING FOR THE MUSIC

I AM impatient for the concert to begin. It is
the 7th of February. For three weeks I have
been in Miami ; birds are plentiful ; the country,
one may almost say, is full of them ; the weather,
mostly a few shades too warm for a pedestrian's
comfort, seems to be all that birds could wish ;
but thus far there has been scarcely a sign of the
grand vernal awakening. Warm or cold, for the
birds it is still winter. Phoebes, to be sure, have
sung ever since my arrival, I cannot help won-
dering why ; and the same is true of white-eyed
vireos. It is impossible to walk through the ham-
mock woods without getting somewhat more than
one's fill of their saucily emphatic deliverances.
For aught I can see, they are quite as loqua-
cious now as they will be two or three months
hence. Once in a while, hardly of tener than once
a week, I should say, I have heard a mocking-
bird letting himself loose, and rather more fre-
quently, especially during the last few days,
cardinal grosbeaks have sweetened the air with
their whistle ; but for much the greater part the
birds are dumb. On the morning of February 1,

WAITING FOR THE MUSIC 105

as I stepped out upon the piazza, a house wren
sang from a live-oak by the kitchen door. I re-
membered the date. " Good ! " said I to myself,
" the time of the singing of birds is come." But
I was too much in haste. Since then I have heard
plenty of wren chattering, but not another note
of wren music.

Still the opening of the annual concert cannot
be much longer delayed. When I was in Florida
nine years ago, mockingbirds were in free song
at St. Augustine, before the middle of February ;
and at this point, three hundred miles and more
farther south, the season must be earlier rather
than later.

Some of the more distinctively Southern of the
birds about me I am especially desirous of hear-
ing— the Florida yellow-throats, for example, a
local race of the Maryland yellow-throat, so
called. They are everywhere in sight (the dark
brown of the flanks distinguishing them readily),
and as their music is said to be very unlike that
of their familiar Northern relative, I am natu-
rally desirous of adding it to my (memorized)
collection. It will be nothing great, presumably,
but it will be something new.

Still more interesting will be the song of the
painted bunting, or nonpareil, a beauty of beau-
ties that I had never seen (a wild one, I mean)

106 FLORIDA

until this winter. About Miami it is decidedly
common, though the green females show them-
selves ten times as often as the red, blue, and
yellow-green males. What a superbly dressed
creature the masculine nonpareil is ! And he
carries himself as if he knew it. " Dear me," he
seems always to be saying ; " this Joseph's coat
of mine makes me so conspicuous ! Some day
it will be my undoing." My readers will most
likely have seen the gorgeous little creature in
cages (I found one many years ago in the Bos-
ton Public Garden, I remember), though the
chances are that they have never seen him in
anything like his brightest and liveliest feather.
A bird, like a butterfly, was born to be looked
at out of doors with the sunlight on him. So far
I have heard no note from the nonpareil except
his rather soft chip. The birds frequent weedy
tangles in open grounds, showing special fondness
for patches of the white bur-marigold, and seem
to be well scattered over the country.

Day after day I walk down through the ham-
mock (I have spoken of it before, and most
likely shall do so again) between Miami and
Cocoanut Grove. Indeed, so constant are my
peregrinations thither that I begin to find my
innocent self treated as a kind of mysterious
personage — one of the " features " of the place,

WAITING FOR THE MUSIC 107

so to speak, an "object of interest," like the
gumbo-limbos, the air-plants, and the blossoming
lime trees. Three times, at least, I have over-
heard a driver describing me to his fares as " the
man who comes down through this hammock
every day " — with strong emphasis on the last
two words. One passenger was good enough to
surmise, quite audibly, that I might be a botanist,
while another loudly proclaimed his belief that
I must be " a sort of a bird fiend." So much
for being useful in one's day and generation.
The tourist mind — like the tourist stomach —
abhors a vacuum. It must have something to
browse upon. And the drivers know it. It is a
bad day for the cow when she loses her cud.

In sober truth the hammock is well worth a
daily visit ; and almost as often as I am here it
comes over me what a glorious concert hall it will
be when all these thousands of birds find their
voices, if they ever do ; for it may be, I know,
that the great majority will start on their jour-
ney northward before that happy day arrives.
Here — to name only some of the more common
species — here are mockingbirds, catbirds, cardi-
nals, house wrens, Carolina wrens, ruby-crowned
kinglets, palm warblers, myrtle warblers, parula
warblers, prairie warblers, black-and-white war-
blers, Florida yellow-throats, oven-birds, blue-

108 FLORIDA

gray gnatcatchers (a host), white-eyed vireos
(another host), solitary vireos, che winks, painted
buntings, phosbes, crested flycatchers, and blue
jays. What a chorus there would be if the spring
should get into all their throats at once ! Might
I be here to listen ! Then, indeed, I could make
a list, with the hearing to help the eyesight. Now
I follow the road, and find only such birds as
happen to be near it at the moment when I pass.
Then it would be another story. I should need
a stenographer. The names would crowd upon
the pencil.

It is really an astonishing, unnatural-seeming
thing — this multitude of birds, in this cloudless
summer weather, with mating-time so close at
hand, and no impulse to sing. Yet that expres-
sion is a trifle too strong, or at least too sweeping.
This forenoon I heard a gnatcatcher warbling
softly, as if to himself, tuning his instrument, it
may be, or, more likely, dreaming. The cardi-
nals, too, are certainly growing amorous. I see
the bright males quarreling among themselves
here and there (they are constantly in the road),
and not infrequently, as I have said, they whistle
with all sweetness. At that work there is no
bird to excel them. How any female heart can
resist such appeals is more than any bachelor's
heart can imagine. I rejoice in their numbers.

WAITING FOR THE MUSIC 109

I should love to walk through the hammock and
hear them all whistling together, a chorus a good
mile in length and no rod without a bird.

Loggerhead shrikes are paired or pairing.
The other day I saw one fly up from the ground
and feed another perched on a telegraph wire.
He was doing no more than was meet, her cool-
appearing, unresponsive manner seemed to say.
Mockingbirds, also, though singing little, are be-
ginning to manifest symptoms of jealousy. If all
the mockers and all the cardinals should break
into voice at once, the air itself would hardly
contain the music.

Two pileated woodpeckers that I see every
few days at a particular spot in the hammock
have already come to an understanding, or so I
fancy from certain bits of conduct that I have
been privileged to witness. This morning I stood
watching the female as she hammered to pieces
a decayed branch close by me, when all at once
her mate called in the distance. Instantly she
held up her head, as much as to say, " Hark !
Was that he ? " and the next moment she was
gone. Then I heard low conversational notes,
followed presently by loud drumming on a reso-
nant stub or branch. I thought of what I have
heard preachers say, that Heaven is a state, not
a place.

110 FLORIDA

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 flick-
ers 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 com-
mon 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 say-
ing 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.

PEKIPATETIC 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 plea-
sure 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

112 FLORIDA

Ms 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, bear-
ing 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 favonia.

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

PERIPATETIC BOTANY 113

a more workmanlike fashion, and him also the
key led to the Signoniacece^ 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 fam-
ily 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 Experi-
ment 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 univer-
sity 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

114 FLORIDA

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 ex-
hilaration, 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 re-
serve 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 im-
provements. It is a great place for plants. I
shan't forget how delighted I was to find Ores-
centia 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.1

Winter botanizing by newcomers, in a coun-
try 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,

1 And after all this talk about the plant I must in candor
add that it turned out to be by no means rare along the bay
shore. I think I am not wrong in remembering to have heard
it called the calabash tree.

PERIPATETIC BOTANY 115

" 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 nu-
merous 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, re-
marking especially the highly peculiar, almost
perpendicular carriage of its innumerable thick,
brightly varnished leaves, a device, as the pro-
fessor had suggested, for protecting them against
the vertical rays of the sun. I had never seen
either fruit or blossom, but here, on this particu-
lar plant, my eye fell upon a few scattered pur-

116 FLORIDA

plish 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 over-
took 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 man-
ual 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

PERIPATETIC BOTANY 117

novelty, he kindly offered me one. This, also, I
forthwith carried into the city, stopping passen-
gers by the way — like a natural-historical So-
crates — 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 con-

118 FLORIDA

torted 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 grow-
ing 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 ex-
amination, 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 char-
acter," as the professor rather slightingly called
it. For five weeks my curiosity had been exer-
cised over the puzzle, and in five seconds I had

PERIPATETIC BOTANY 119

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 sud-
denly upon a colored man lying face downward
in the grass, under a blazing sun, fast asleep.
It was no uncommon happening, my friend re-
marked; 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 thou-
sand years.

A PEEP AT THE EVERGLADES 121

But though we Northern visitors may some-
times 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 vaca-
tion hours we have seldom time to sit still.

So it happened that on a sultry, dog-day morn-
ing, with a south wind blowing, the sky partly
clouded, — a comfort to the eyes, — the pro-
fessor and the bird-gazer, after an early break-
fast, set forth upon a reconnoissance of the
Everglades. We took each a boat and an oars-
man, 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 adapta-
tion of plants to their surroundings ; his asso-
ciate 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 man-
grove bushes, every branch sending down " aerial

122 FLORIDA

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.

" Are n'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 ac-
quired 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 swamp-
less 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 pro-
fessor 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, supply-
ing 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

A PEEP AT THE EVERGLADES 123

impressed by the beauty and majesty of the
cypress, and many have no doubt puzzled them-
selves over the meaning of these strange, appar-
ently 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 swift-
ness of the current (it was good, I said to my-
self, 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 Ever-
glades. 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 de-
clared.

124 FLORIDA

All this while, of course, I had kept a lookout
for birds, but, as I had expected, to compara-
tively 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 hawk-
ing 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 man-
ner, 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 show-

A PEEP AT THE EVERGLADES 125

ing, 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 bot-
tom. 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, leav-
ing the professor — who, as it turned out, went
but a few rods beyond us — to pursue his inves-
tigations unhindered.

After all, in spite of our indolent intentions,

126 FLORIDA

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 ! Eight 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," 1 the boat-
man said. " Such a little fellow ! " he called it.
It was a pleasure to find him so enthusiastic.

The best thing of the whole trip, notwithstand-
ing, 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) stand-
ing amid a tuft of handsome upright green leaves.
More than once, also, we passed boatloads of
fishermen (and fisherwomen), white and black.

1 One of the most striking peculiarities of Southern speech
among the illiterate classes (I have observed it in other states
besides Florida) is the almost total absence of the word " saw."

A PEEP AT THE EVERGLADES 127

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 mar-
ket. 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 pos-
sible 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 profu-
sion of avian existence, with the anticipation of
which my glowing periods had filled him.

Fortunately for my reputation, I had fore-
warned him that such would be the case. The

THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING 129

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 ham-
mock 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, monopolis-
tic 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 estab-
lished. On two mornings of the present week,
for example, I found in a few minutes' stroll be-
fore breakfast a highly interesting flock of per-
haps 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, mock-
ingbirds, house wrens, cardinals, palm warblers,
myrtle warblers, parula warblers, prairie war-
blers, black-and-white warblers, yellow-throated
warblers, solitary vireos, yellow-throated vireos,

130 FLORIDA

blue jays, phoebes, ground doves, blue-gray gnat-
catchers, ruby-crowned kinglets, a male nonpareil,
a Baltimore oriole, a crested flycatcher, a hum-
mingbird, 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 re-
member, nothing but white-eyed vireos, phoebes,
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 be-
coming 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

THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING 131

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 some-
what 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.

Pho3bes have sung much less of late than they
did in January. Then they seemed to find exist-
ence a perpetual jubilee. Red-bellied woodpeck-
ers, too, are far less talkative than they were a
month ago. Most likely they are busier. And
by the by, the Kentucky enthusiast above men-
tioned pleased me by calling this woodpecker the

132 FLORIDA

" checkerbaek," a felicitous name, in common
use in Kentucky, it appears, and perhaps else-
where. 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 piece-
meal. In this hospitable Southern country, where
the weather and so many things beside are con-
tinually calling, " Come forth and enjoy us," one
cannot stay indoors very long at once. So it
happened that at the conclusion of the last para-
graph 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

THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING 133

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 hand-
some 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 lib-
erally 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), for-
midable-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,

134 FLORIDA

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 submit-
ting for perhaps ten minutes to my eager inspec-
tion 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 ornitholo-
gists 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

THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING 135

from farther south. My thanks to him for treat-
ing me so handsomely, though he might have
doubled the obligation^ at no cost to himself, by
singing me a tune.

FAIK 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-Hali-
fax. No more bewildering jungles of nameless
West Indian trees and climbers, no more cocoa-
nut 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 win-
dow 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 charac-
teristic 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,

FAIR ORMOND 137

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 Drum-
mond's phlox of our Northern gardens, dear to
me of old, let me not forget that. It is not in-
digenous to the country, I suppose, but, like the
garden verbena, being here it makes itself most
comfortably at home, delighting to overrun for-
saken 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 min-

138 FLORIDA

utes 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 per-
fect 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. Mi-
gratory birds were arriving, and I seemed to be
running away just when there was most to de-
tain me ; those tropical plants, too, were certain
to become more and more interesting as the sea-
son 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,

FAIR ORMOND 139

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 accom-
paniment 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.

140 FLORIDA

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.1 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,

1 We often fed the birds afterward, and one or two, at least,
were never shy about coming into our laps.

FAIR ORMOND 141

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, wait-
ing 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 Flor-
ida 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,

A DAY IN THE WOODS 143

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 car-
riage nor foot-passenger.

We drove as we pleased, stopped as we pleased,
talked or kept silence, listened to the birds, ad-
mired 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 with-

144 FLORIDA

out 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 uncom-
fortable.

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 for-
lornness of the impression, stands a deserted
house ; and not far along is another, that looks
only less unthrifty and disconsolate, with an old

A DAY IN THE WOODS 145

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 be-
hind 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 espe-
cially 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 mag-
nificent 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 stand-
ing. 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 Koad to Buckhead
Bluff on the Tomoka Kiver at the crossing of

146 FLORIDA

the « old King's road ' to St. Augustine." So the
guideboard reads, with commendable particular-
ity. " 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 out-
door 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 heal-
ing 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 an-
swers, " Yes, very nice." Strange that when two
men meet for the only time in their lives they
should find nothing more important to communi-
cate 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

A DAY IN THE WOODS 147

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 reit-
erative, 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 re-
hearsing a strain with a pretty and decidedly origi-
nal quirk at the end. And, by the by, I notice

148 FLORIDA

that many white-eyes hereabout practice a decep-
tive 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 Volubil-
ity, 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 of tener 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 black-
ened 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 wis-
dom of its own. JExperientia docet is true of
them as of us.

And now I suddenly find myself nearing the
railroad, and having consulted my watch con-
clude to go back over the sleepers. It will be my
shortest course, and will have the further advan-
tage of taking me past a swamp, on the edge of

A DAY IN THE WOODS 149

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 checker-back 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 per-
haps 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 galli-
nules ; and when one of them turns, and the sun-
light strikes him, I see the red plate on his fore-

160 FLORIDA

head. 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 vari-
ous 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 day-
light. I blush to confess it, but there are some
enthusiasms with which even that of a strolling
naturalist will hardly endure comparison.

PICTUKE 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-sacrific-
ing creatures are all on parade, like so many
Queens of Sheba), take a hand at cards, or
gossip about something or nothing with a travel-
ing companion or a chance acquaintance. At
the worst they dawdle over a newspaper or a
novel, and consume the hour in smoke. To

152 FLORIDA

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 clear-
ing, in the middle of which stood an abandoned
house. The place had once been an orange

PICTURE AND SONG 153

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 Drum-
mond's phlox, all in fullest bloom, a rosy wilder-
ness.

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 perfec-
tion. 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 Massa-
chusetts 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

154 FLORIDA

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-wilTs-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

PICTURE AND SONG 155

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 imme-
diately 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 es-
pecially have been present in enormous force,

156 FLORIDA

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, affec-
tionateness, 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 sud-
denly heard, coming from a thicket of dwarf pal-
metto on the edge of water, a quite unexpected
strain, a loud, short trill. ."What was that?"
asked my companions, as we looked at one an-
other ; for there were three pairs of field-glasses
in the carriage. " It sounded like a swamp spar-
row," said I, with doubt in my voice. At that
moment the measure was given out again, pre-
faced 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 war-
blers and brown-headed nuthatches were in voice

PICTURE AND SONG 157

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 Eng-
land 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 excel-
lent showing it made, with its many stately and
handsome buildings and its general air of pros-
perity ; but for the most part my eyes traveled
beyond it, or in other directions. The landscape

162 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

was wide, whichever way I turned, and the trans-
parency of the atmosphere, of a kind never en-
joyed in New England except on some half-dozen
days in a year, made it the wider and more al-
luring. 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 en-
tirely by itself. Here and there, also, miles
apart, were fine dwelling-houses, with outbuild-
ings and windmills ; each, like the public insti-
tutions 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

IN OLD SAN ANTONIO 163

name to be,1 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 puz-
zles 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

1 Vachellia Farnesiana, sparingly naturalized in Florida,
where it goes by the name of Opopanax.

164 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 absurd-
ity of his attitude, — and after a moment started
on again. Two or three times he repeated these
manoeuvres ; 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 over-
grown 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 con-
spicuously 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

IN OLD SAN ANTONIO 165

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 be-
cause 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 ap-

166 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

pears at the Summit House, every one knows
what is to happen. So-and-so is going to run
down the mountain. The daily newspaper chroni-
cles his arrival and announces the hour of the
annual event. Then, at the minute agreed upon,
all hands gather before the door, a man ap-
pointed 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 coinci-
dence 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 con-
tradictoriness which seems to belong to weather

IN OLD SAN ANTONIO 167

conditions everywhere and always : roses in all
the gardens, and steam in the radiators ; chil-
dren, 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 my-
self I have compromised the matter, keeping my
boots on and wearing, except when the sun has
been more than commonly persuasive, the light-
est of spring overcoats.

The great drawback to a walking man's com-
fort, 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 better-
ing 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

168 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 com-
fort, 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.1 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 plan-
tation road crosses them, by an excessively high
and close barbed-wire fence. Yet even this hate-
ful obstruction has served me one slight good turn.

A man of something like my own age and build

1 Since this letter was first printed I have been warned more
than once that walking upon railroad tracks, in the South-
western country, at least, is an unsafe proceeding1, for a man
alone and unarmed; and I think it right to pass along the
caution.

IN OLD SAN ANTONIO 169

was trudging along the track in front of me, a
day or two ago (by his gait and general appear-
ance he was used to trudging), when I saw him ap-
proach the fence as if he meant in some way to
force a passage. " You '11 never do it," I thought.
Eeally, 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 be-
tween 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 far-
ther 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."

170 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 con-
fess 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 wander-
ing 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 re-
peated his incomparably prettier word, " mari-
posa" "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 experi-
ence 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 mis-
taken. 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.

172 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

I saw a strange warbler the other day. That
is to say, I thought I saw one. I had been wan-
dering 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

A BIRD-GAZER'S PUZZLES 173

bird having moved on, as birds do, being pro-
vided 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 pecul-
iarly 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 shoul-
der 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 un-
profitable for instruction. It was n'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 collec-
tions. She would be able to help me out of my

174 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 ver-
din 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 South-
western 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

A BIRD-GAZER'S PUZZLES 175

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 re-
ceived (and sometimes smiled at, I fear) in the
past twenty years, letters in which eager search-
ers 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 post-
script 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

176 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 re-
newing one's youth, but it will answer. And con-
ditions 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 impor-
tant. 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 obser-
vation. It is plaguing fun, but it is fun, never-
theless, and good practice, besides ; and withal,
it leaves work for to-morrow.

A BIRD-GAZER'S PUZZLES 177

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 stu-
dent in a new region in these latter days ; espe-
cially 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 over-
lapping each other. It was very well for Emerson
to speak, poetically, of naming all the birds with-
out 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 be-
ginning 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

178 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

half of the work ; but he must not expect to ac-
complish with a glass and patience exactly what
another man accomplishes with powder and shot
and a pair of dividers. In the study of orni-
thology, 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 fooecetes gramineus confinis, or were
probably nothing but plain Pooecetes 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 gold-
finches, 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 PKAIRIE

i

A WELL-GROOMED hobby will carry its rider com-
fortably over many a slough.

I was on my way westward to El Paso, and
knowing that the train was due there before day-
light, 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 stand-
ing 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 pas-
senger after another made his unhandsome, half-
civilized appearance from behind the curtains,
and though we proved to be a pretty philosoph-
ical company, as transcontinental travelers have
need to be, the general run of comment was not
hilarious.

180 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

A turn outside, as it grew lighter, showed that
we were at a station called San Elizario (a pleas-
ing name, surely), some three thousand two hun-
dred 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 favor-
able 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 unoccu-
pied, stood not far off, and near it was a cotton-
wood 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

LUCK ON THE PRAIRIE 181

its charms, and had freshly in mind an enthusi-
astic 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 phoebe was near by, in a pear orchard
(for the piece of prairie land on which we so un-
expectedly 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 char-
acteristics, 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 phoebe 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 sev-
eral 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,

182 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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. Doubt-
less 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 im-
possible, 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 chapar-

LUCK ON THE PRAIRIE 183

ral country not favoring birds of the crow-jay
tribe,1 — 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 ? Is n'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 get-
ting 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 lit-
tle 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

1 I could hardly believe it anything but an accidental omis-
sion when I noticed the total absence of jays, crows, and ra-
vens from Mr. Att water's list of the birds of San Antonio and
vicinity. See The Auk, vol. ix, p. 229.

184 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 sur-
prisingly 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-trav-
elers 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

LUCK ON THE PRAIRIE 185

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 an-
other ; and they were noticeably different from
our Eastern junco, and belonged, as the book's
description made clear, to the variety Junco hye-
malis 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 con-
tinuing, 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 Ari-
zona Pyrrhuloxia ; a bird — related to the cardi-
nal 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

186 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 dis-
tinctively 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 discov-
ered them sitting, the six together, a lovely com-
pany, 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 dis-
covered a new use for ornithological enthusiasm,

LUCK ON THE PRAIRIE 187

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 an-
swered. " But I suppose we don't mind the cold

OVER THE BORDER 189

so much," he continued, emphasizing the pro-
noun, " 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

190 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

travel, even in an electric street-car, is liable to
complications.

As for the river, it was practically dry. Pe-
destrians 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 abso-
lutely 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

OVER THE BORDER 191

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,1 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 in-
different, 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

1 True as a general statement ; but once, at Tucson, I saw
a bird standing on the top of a telegraph pole facing a pretty
stiff breeze, which blew the feathers of the throat apart till
they showed a snow-white spot as large as a silver dollar.

192 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 abun-
dant in Texas at this time of the year — as Lin-
coln 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 novel-
ties 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 Massa-
chusetts 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 neigh-
borly 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 proces-
sion 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

OVER THE BORDER 193

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 him-
self 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."

" AH right."

The souvenir postal-card industry, though
comparatively infantile, is not "protected," it

194 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 morn-
ing, might have numbered a thousand birds. If
disturbed, they rise in a cloud, ancj 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, how-
ever, 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 out-
spread tails showing through — the spectacle is
most animated and pleasing.

OVER THE BORDER 195

As for the city itself, it is squalid, but well
worth a visit ; having so strange and other-world-
ish 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 de-
fiance 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 Mexi-
can, as long as I live, as leaning against the side
of a house) — all these go to make a memor-
able 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 re-
sort, 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 Feb-
ruary was bright and warm ; so that in a long
forenoon jaunt over the desert a very light over-
coat 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 phoebe, — a handsome,
highly presentable fellow with a jet-black waist-
coat,— when all at once the dusty road before
me was seen to be fast becoming inundated. Be-
side the fence, wading in mud and water, the
owner of the fields, having taken up arms — a

FIRST DAYS IN TUCSON 197

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 misfor-
tunes, 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 al-
ways understood irrigation to be a kind of pre-
dictable and controllable rain, but it appeared
that, if this were the rule, the rule had exceptions.

198 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

The sight set me thinking that possibly if the gen-
eral 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 pos-
sible, 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 Scrip-
ture 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, talk-
ing " back and forth," as we say, — his fit of

FIRST DAYS IN TUCSON 199

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 musi-
cian was rather trying his instrument than aim-
ing at a serious performance.

While I stood listening, a bunch of a dozen
Mexican house finches, more than half the num-
ber 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, lean-
ing 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,1 were exceedingly pretty to look at.

All about me stood tall, fluted columns of the
giant cactus, fifteen or twenty feet in height, and

1 Botanically, if I am correctly informed, the plant is Fou-
quiera splendens, otherwise known as candle wood, Jacob's staff,
and coach- whip. Like the giant cactus it seems to be restricted
to the foothills.

200 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 here-
abouts, 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 acquaint-
ance' sake, though the lupine was never one of
my particular favorites, I plucked it for my but-
tonhole. I believe it is the only natural-looking,
familiar-looking wild plant that I have so far
seen in this desert country.

FIRST DAYS IN TUCSON 201

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 Sis-
ters' 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 sum-
mer 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.

202 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

But his generalization was hasty, as generali-
zations are apt to be. They were Brewer's black-
birds — 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 iri-
descence, 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 per-
sons I met each had something to say about the
weather, but nobody stopped for prolonged com-
ment. 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 ram 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

FIRST DAYS IN TUCSON 203

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, was n'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 fore-
noon. 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 hesita-
tion. "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

204 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

trouble," have naturally been put out, — the
more recent arrivals among them greatly aston-
ished ; 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 gen-
eral agreement, to be sure (one heard it on all
hands), that it was " pretty muddy ; " the way-
faring man, though a fool, could not dispute the
statement ; but so far as the prosperity of Ari-
zona is concerned, there is no probability of an
excessive rainfall. The more the better. So
much is evident, even to an itinerant ornitholo-
gist, who may stand, if you will, for the way-
faring 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 inhabit-
ant can remember.

MOBBED IN ARIZONA

I HAVE never known a city more orderly seem-
ing, more evidently peaceful and law-abiding
than Tucson. Nowhere have I felt safer in wan-
dering about by myself in all sorts of places,
whether within the city proper or in the sur-
rounding 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 as-
signable 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 An-
geles, 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

206 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 advan-
tages, 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 day-
light, 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 pre-
sently I came to a place where two or three kinds
of cactus were sprinkled among the creosote

MOBBED IN ARIZONA 207

bushes, and newly sprung bluish-green grass (I
call it grass, provisionally, although, like almost
everything else hereabout, it has an unaccus-
tomed look) carpeted or half-carpeted the
ground. Here were the almost inevitable two
cactus wrens (how overjoyed I was at the unex-
pected 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 phrase over and over and
over. Nothing but the lonesomeness of the de-
sert, surely, could ever make that grating, repe-
titive monotony a pleasure-giving sound. What
the birds will do in the way of song when their
musical season arrives, if it ever does,1 is more
than I know; but, belonging to 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

1 Alas, it never does.

208 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 streak-
ing 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."

MOBBED IN ARIZONA 209

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 de-
sert, however, and usually in the same places that
Oroscoptes affects, places such as I have men-
tioned, where cacti are mingled with the omni-
present creosote. This is Palmer's thrasher,
so called, a grayish-brown bird, with the charac-
teristic 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 East-
ern 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 improvisa-
tion ; but a genuine thrasher, nevertheless, with
a thrasher's song. As the season progresses he

210 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

will probably grow more ecstatic, though to hear
him now, one would not expect him ever to be-
come so mad a rhapsodist as the crazy bird that
we admire, and sometimes smile at, in the East-
ern country.

Whether the thrasher was seen on the day I
am supposed to be describing, I do not now re-
member, 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, Am-
phispiza bilineata deserticola; and possibly,
though this is somewhat less to be taken for

MOBBED IN ARIZONA 211

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 adven-
ture ; 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

212 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

raven," I have caught myself saying l — rose
from the scrub not far in advance, with the invari-
able 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 be-
fore 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

1 There is another raven in Arizona, rarer and larger, — a
real raven, so to speak, — but I saw it only a few times, al-
ways high in air, as if it were passing from one mountain
range to another.

MOBBED IN ARIZONA 213

actually meant violence. They were doing pre-
cisely 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 devil-
ish. 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, wag-
ging 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 persever-
ance 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

214 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 re-
ceiver 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

216 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 north-
easterly side of the telegraph poles. I believe
I never before complained of such obstructions
that they were not big enough ; but every-
thing 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 ex-
cursions 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.

AN IDLE AFTERNOON 217

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 in-
doors, and used to summer temperature in these
parts, she had been thinking of the day as rather
cool, not to say wintry. Would n'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 hav-
ing 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 suf-
fered more from cold than in all my forty years."

218 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

I suspect that he exaggerated. For my own
part, I have n't suffered from cold. It is the oc-
casional heat that makes me fearful of homesick-
ness. 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 yester-
day!— 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, con-
tented 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 be-
lieve that men are fascinated by it (the right
men), and having once been here cannot long
stay away.

AN IDLE AFTERNOON 219

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 gnat-
catcher ; 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 see-
ing him. We are fortunate, both of us, I take
leave to say, to have made each other's acquaint-
ance 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 re-
quisition. 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

220 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

see him do it. Instead, he made off toward the
mountains, and after a long chase and much croak-
ing, 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 talk-
ing 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, es-
pecially when I should be far out on the edge of

AN IDLE AFTERNOON 221

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 ornitho-
logical 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 pre-
sently 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 oc-
currence.

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

222 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

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 pil-
low-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 an optical
illusion ; probably it was ; but if so, it was ab-
solute. Sure I am that more than once I saw a
bird flat on his back in the air (as flat on his
back as ever a swimmer was in water), and to all
appearance, as I say, he did not turn back, but
came up like a flash on the other side. Fact or
illusion, clean over or halfway over, it was a
clever trick, and I could not wonder that the
birds seemed to take pleasure in its repetition.
I imagined they were as proud of it as a young
gymnast ever was of his newly acquired back
handspring. And why not ? A man must be ex-
tremely well contented with himself, or possess a
feeble imagination, not to feel sometimes a twinge
of envy at sight of a bird's superiorities,1

1 The trick was seen to fuller advantage on subsequent occa-
sions, and I came to the settled conclusion that the birds turned

AN IDLE AFTERNOON 223

And while one flock of ravens were playing
" it " in this brilliant fashion, another and larger
flock were sailing in mazy circles after the man-
ner of sea-gulls; a fascinating spectacle, to be
witnessed here every afternoon by any who will
be at the trouble to look up. More than once I
have watched hundreds of the birds thus engaged,
not all at the same elevation, be it understood,
but circle above circle — a kind of Jacob's ladder
— till the top ones were almost at heaven's gate.
It is a good time to be out on the desert when the
ravens are going to roost. And what with their
soarings and tumblings, I have begun to think
that perhaps the big hawk was not such an ab-
solute fool, after all, to decline an aerial combat.
The white-necked raven may be only a little larger
kind of crow, but he is a wonder on the wing.

but halfway over ; that is to say, they lay on their backs for
an instant, and then, as by the recoil of a spring, recovered
themselves. How they acquired the trick, and for what pur-
pose they practice it, are questions beyond my answering.
Since my return home, indeed, I have discovered that Gilbert
White, who noted so many things, noted this same habit on
the part of the European raven. According to him, the birds
"lose the centre of gravity " while "scratching themselves
with one foot." How he knows this he does not inform us, and
I must confess myself unconvinced.

SHY LIFE IN THE DESEKT

AFTER the desert and the mountains, and some
of the longer-desired birds, I have enjoyed few
sights in Arizona more than that of two coyotes.
Old beaters about the wilds of this Western
country will be ready to scoff, I dare say, at so
simple a confession. " Two coyotes, indeed I A
great sight, that ! " So I think I hear them say-
ing. Well, they are welcome to their fun. It is
kindly ordered, the world being mostly a dull
place, that men shall be mutually amusing, and
there is no great harm in being laughed at, pro-
vided it be done behind one's back.

The fact remains, then, as I state it. To me
the coyotes were very interesting and unexpected
beasts. And the pleasure of my encounter with
them was heightened materially (this, too, is a
laughable admission ; I know it as well as any-
body), when I learned that hereabouts, whatever
may be true elsewhere, it was to be esteemed a
piece of rather extraordinary luck, unlikely to
be soon repeated. To all men of science, though
they be nothing but amateurs and dabsters, rar-
ity is one of the cardinal virtues of a specimen.

SHY LIFE IN THE DESERT 225

My good fortune, be it accounted greater or
less, came about in this way.

Six or seven miles across the desert, where
the plain comes to an end at the buried Rillito
River, and the foothills of the Catalinas begin
to rise from the opposite bank, are the adobe
ruins (hospital, barracks, and what not) of Old
Camp Lowell, a relic of the Apache wars. I had
heard of the place (in fact, I had been happy
enough to meet a young man who is camping
there with his brother), and started early one
morning to visit it.

Perhaps it was because of the earliness of the
hour, though the sun was well above the hori-
zon; at any rate, I had gone but a short dis-
tance before my steps were arrested by the sight
of a gray, long-legged, wolfish-looking animal
not far ahead. He had seen me first, I think
(strange if he had not, so alert as every motion
showed him to be), and was already considering
his course of action, starting away, then stopping
to look back. My glass covered him at once (he
was easily within gunshot), and then, following
a turn of his head, I saw that he had a compan-
ion. The second one had already crossed the
trail, and the question between the two seemed
to be whether he should come back or the other
should follow him. The point was quickly de-

226 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

cided ; the second one recrossed the trail, and
the two ran off among the creosote clumps on
the left, and in a few seconds were lost ; but the
hesitation had given me time to note their color,
size, build (especially their long, sharp, collie-
shaped noses), and their general appearance and
action, all very " doggy."

This, as I have said, was but a little way be-
yond the university buildings, and, knowing no
better, I assumed the occurrence to be a common
one, and spoke of it in a matter-of-fact tone to
the campers at the fort. They exclaimed at once
that I had been surprisingly fortunate ; they
themselves, passing their days and nights in the
desert, seldom or never saw one of the animals,
though they often heard them barking after
dark. The circumstantiality of my description,
and it may be their politeness, — for they were
gentlemen, " baching it " here for the older
brother's health, — made it impossible for them
to suggest a doubt as to the identity of the ani-
mals ; but I had no difficulty in perceiving that
if I wished to pass as a man of veracity among
ordinary dwellers hereabouts I must not see coy-
otes too frequently. In point of fact, the very
next man to whom I mentioned the circumstance,
a man who has lived here for several years, on
the rim of the desert, answered promptly:

SHY LIFE IN THE DESERT 227

" They were n't jack rabbits, were they ? " He
had never seen a coyote in Arizona, he said,
though he had seen plenty in Colorado.

As for the big jack rabbits, if I have not seen
" plenty " of them (and I cannot truthfully pro-
fess so much as that), I have seen a good many.
One cannot walk far in the desert, with his eyes
ranging, without discovering, to right or left or
in advance, a pair of long ears, followed by a
black tail, making quick time out of sight.
Generally the creatures seem to run by fits and
starts (" leaps and bounds and sudden stops "
would express it) , but the other morning a fellow
had evidently been frightened almost out of his
five senses by something — not by me — when
a long way from home. There were no stops
in his schedule. Straight across the desert he
bounded, going like an express train — a mile a
minute at the very least.

So lively as these large rabbits are (there is a
smaller kind that I have not yet seen1) they
would be as interesting as the much larger coy-
otes but for their greater commonness. For
grace and lightness, as well as speed, their gait
is next to flying. All the words in the dictionary

1 They are not to be found on the desert, I afterward
learned, but along the watercourses. There I often saw
them.

228 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

could not describe it. I never see one on the
move without admiration and an impulse to give
him three cheers. Surely, man is a slow coach,
and a race-horse is clumsy.

To one who comes this way for the first time
in winter, as I have come (and may Heaven save
me from ever being here in summer, so long
at least as I am in an embodied state !), the
desert seems thinly inhabited. Of the scarcity
of bird-life upon it I have before spoken ; and
the reason is obvious: there is little here for
birds to feed upon. The smaller quadrupeds,
too, are of surprising infrequency. Once in a
long while a striped squirrel, as I should call it,
with its tail over its back, will be seen squatting
beside a hole in the ground, ready to slip into it
long before you can get near ; and somewhat
oftener a gray, rat-tailed, big-eyed squirrel (if it
is a squirrel — I have only half seen it) will
dart across an open space, tail in air, barely vis-
ible before it, too, has ducked into its burrow ;
but two or three such small fry, with as many
jack rabbits, in the course of a half -day tramp,
do not go far toward constituting anything to be
accounted populousness.

One morning I walked out upon the desert
immediately after a snowfall. It would be a fa-
vorable time, I thought, to study zoological hiero-

SHY LIFE IN THE DESERT 229

glyphies ; and I believe I walked a mile before
I saw a single footprint. Think of doing that, or
anything like it, in our poor, frost-bitten, winter-
killed, over-civilized New England ! The tracks
would have been a perfect crisscross.

And, notwithstanding all this, footprints or no
footprints, the desert is not without its own world
of little people. It is a desert only to our dull,
provincial, self-absorbed, self-sufficient, narrow-
minded, egotistical human apprehension of it.
So much ought to be plain as day to the most
undiscerning traveler ; for if he so much as looks
where he steps (lest a snake should bite him), he
cannot help seeing that the ground all about is
almost as full of holes as a colander. Larger
and smaller, the earth is riddled with them. If
the diggers of the holes happen to be just now
within doors instead of gadding abroad like so
many restless tourists, probably their conduct is
not without a reason. Possibly they object to
cold feet. More likely they have an eye to bodily
safety. One thing you may wager upon, home-
keepers though they be — the sharpness of their
wits.

Whatever would live on this bare, open plain
must be as wise as a serpent. The remainder of
the text may be omitted as locally inapplicable.
The desert-dweller — Deserticola, as we name

230 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

him in zoological Latin — must know the times
and the seasons, and catch the scent of danger
afar off. You will find no trustful innocence in
these diggings. If there ever was any, it long
ago perished. Everything is shy, and has need
to be. " Nature red in tooth and claw " has here
its ancestral seat. He that cannot fight must
run ; and however it may be elsewhere, in the
desert the race is to the swift and the battle to
the strong. In one way or another everything
goes armed. It may be set with thorns like the
mesquite and the cactus, or it may have an offen-
sive oil like the creosote ; it may run like the
rabbit, or strike like the rattlesnake. If it can
do nothing else, it must hide. And even the
strong and the speedy must hide when that which
is stronger and speedier heaves in sight. The
desert is open to the sky, but its life is not open.
Like the currents of the rivers, the current of
animal existence runs mostly underground.

A Tucson business man was telling me about
the great antiquity of the town : the oldest set-
tlement in the country, I think he called it, with
the exception of St. Augustine, Florida.

" But how in the world came a city to grow
up here ? " I inquired. " I can see no sufficient
reason."

" Well," said he, as if he could think of no-

SHY LIFE IN THE DESERT 231

tiling else, " the river comes to the surface here,
you know."

He spoke of the Santa Cruz. And it is true.
The river comes to the surface ; the stretch of
watered farms and the brimming irrigation
ditches bear witness to the fact ; but it does not
stay there. I have frequent occasion to go over
the four roads that cross it from the city. On the
southernmost of these, where Mexican women
are always to be seen washing clothes, spreading
the garment over a stone and beating it clean
with a stick (" mangling," I should suppose the
word ought to be), carriages drive through the
stream, while foot-passengers cross by means of
stepping-stones ; six or eight boulders of the size
of a man's head, perhaps, picked up at random
and laid in a row. The next road is furnished
with a bridge, though it is hard to see why. The
other two (they are all within the distance .of a
mile) have neither bridge nor stepping-stones,
nor need of any. The river bottom, so called,
though it is rather roof than bottom, is as dry as
the Sahara.

So it is with the Rillito, and, I suppose, with
all the rivers of the desert. They are shy crea-
tures. They love not the garish day. Like the
saints of old and the capitalists of our own
time, they abhor publicity. Water, they think,

232 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

should n't be too much in sight. With the squir-
rel and the rabbit, they live mostly in burrows.

Of certain more highly specialized inhabit-
ants of the desert — rattlesnakes, Gila monsters,
tarantulas, and the like — a winter stroller can
have little or nothing to relate. They are all
here, no doubt, and will disport themselves in
their season. No midsummer sun will be too hot
for them. For myself, in three weeks' wandering
I have seen one lizard, nothing else. And it, too,
was shy, legging it for shelter ; running, literally,
" like a streak." That was really all that I saw
— a streak of brown over the gray sand. I was
neither a road-runner nor a hawk, and for that
time the lizard was more scared than hurt.

If this shy life of the desert is happy, as I
believe it is, after its manner and according to
its measure, we can only admire once more the
beneficent effect of use and custom. The safest of
us are always in danger. Whether we tread the
sands of the desert or the shaded paths of some
Garden of Eden, our steps all tend to one end,
the one event that happeneth alike to all ; and
if we, who look before and after, go on our way
smiling, why not the humbler and presumably
less sensitive people whose homes are under the
roots of the creosote bushes ?

A NEW ACQUAINTANCE

A STUDENT of nature, differing from some less
fortunate folk that one meets at wintering places,
is never at a loss what to do with his day. In a
strange land, at least (the stranger the better),
he possesses one of the prime requisites of a con-
tented life : he knows every night what is on his
docket for the morrow. His days, so to express
it, are all dovetailed together. Tuesday's work
is to finish Monday's ; Wednesday's is to finish
Tuesday's ; and so the weeks run by. What could
be simpler, or more conducive to cheerfulness?
A day should have a motive, as well as a piece
of music or a poem.

I am still at Tucson. Two mornings ago there
was but one thing for me to do. I knew it before
I rose. I must take the half -past seven horse-car,
ride down town as far as Simpson Street, walk
thence across the Santa Cruz Valley to the base
of Tucson Mountain, and from there follow the
narrow road that winds between the foot of the
cliffs and the old canal, till I came to a certain
bush. The name of this bush I cannot give, not
knowing it, but it bears millions of small, fleshy

234 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

leaves, and, what is more to the present purpose,
is covered with thousands, if not millions, of
small purple flowers.

I had noticed it for the first time the forenoon
before ; and I noticed it then because, as I passed,
I heard to my great surprise and intense grati-
fication the buzz of a hummingbird's wings. I
was not in the least expecting to see any bird of
that sort during my brief winter's stay in Ari-
zona ; and which is better, ornithologically speak-
ing, to find the long expected or the unexpected,
is a point that wiser heads than mine may settle.
For myself, either happening will do, so it be not
too infrequent.

My eyes turned of themselves in the right
direction, and there at my elbow was the tiny,
emerald-backed, familiar-looking beauty, hover-
ing before the blossoms of this spreading bush.
It was only for a second or two. Then for an-
other such period he perched on the slender tip
of the nearest mesquite, and then was away on
the wings of the wind. I waited for his return,
but not long enough, and came back to the city,
wondering.

His upper parts, as I say, were green, and he
looked at a first glance much like our common
ruby-throat of the East. But in the few seconds
that my eye followed him — a time too short for

A NEW ACQUAINTANCE 235

catching myself up and making sure even of the
little I had seen — I received an impression (it
was nothing more) of a black head as well as of
a black throat. If the impression was correct,
the bird could not be a ruby-throat, and besides,
unless my memory was at fault, the ruby-throat
was not to be looked for in this longitude. I
must see the handbook.

A reference to that authority showed that eight
species of hummingbirds had been reported from
the Catalina Mountains, but not the ruby-throat.
Of the two or three common ones among the
eight, the most likely candidate seemed to be the
black-chinned, Trochilus alexandri, though that
bird's crown is not black. Probably my impres-
sion upon that point had been erroneous ; so sur-
prised and hurried as I had been, a measure of
inexactness was rather to be looked for. At all
events, it was impossible to make out how the
bird could be any one of the other seven. By
the rule of exclusion — a pretty safe rule, I told
myself — he ought to be a black-chin.

So the matter rested, not much to my satisfac-
tion, till the next morning. Then, as I have al-
ready said, I went immediately after breakfast
to stand beside that blossoming bush until the
bird should again show himself. If my confidence
that he would be there, in that precise spot, no

236 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

different from thousands of others in all those
miles and miles of country, all so exactly alike,
beside that particular bush, itself like thousands
of others, — if my confidence seems presumptu-
ous, as to many readers I dare say it will, I can
only profess that it was based upon no small ac-
quaintance with the ruby-throat's habit of fre-
quenting day after day the same tree, and even
the same twig, as a resting-place, or post . of ob-
servation. It was not at all unlikely, I reasoned,
that the black-chin's habit would prove to be
similar. At any rate, there was no harm in pro-
ceeding upon that hypothesis.

I went at once to the place, therefore, took
a favorable position with the sun at my back,
focused my eight-power glass to a nicety upon
the topmost twig of the mesquite bush (quarter
seconds might be precious), and waited. As the
capable reader has already divined, the bird did
not fail me, nor keep me long in suspense. There
was a sound of wings, and in another instant the
hummer stood on the top spray of the mesquite.
And his crown was black, like his throat. He
could not be alexandri. But before I had time
to take in the full awkwardness of my dilemma
— since I had already ruled the other seven
species out of the account — the bird turned his
head to one side, the sun struck him at the right

A NEW ACQUAINTANCE 237

angle, and behold, his gorget had long, flaring
wings, like the loose ends of a broad necktie, or,
to use the homely comparison which occurred to
me at the moment, like a pair of big mutton-chop
whiskers, and was no longer black, but of a most
exquisite and brilliant shade of violet. The radi-
ant vision shone upon me for an instant ; then,
at another movement of the head, all was black
again, and in another instant the bird was gone.

Now, then, I began to see daylight. The bird,
having a ruff, was not of the genus Trochilus,
and the question was so far simplified, though it
would be necessary to consult the book again
before it could be settled. Meanwhile, I must
by all means have another look at the beauty.
Such splendor of color was worth waiting for,
though it came only in flashes. And I waited.
But though the creature finally returned to the
mesquite he persisted in sitting with his back to
the sun, and I came away without seeing him
again transfigured.

Another reference to the handbook, and I knew
him for Calypte costce, the Costa hummingbird.
But now mark how one day's work is linked
with another's. The book informed me that the
crown, as well as the gorget and the ruff, was
" brilliantly burnished amethyst violet." I had
not seen that, doubtless because the light had not

238 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

fallen upon the crown at the necessary angle.
The detail must nevertheless be verified. Here,
then, was my business for to-morrow.

I was late in arriving, — a full hour, at least,
behind my appointment, — having walked the
whole distance this time, and by a roundabout
course; and the hummer was waiting for me.
" You are late," I fancied him saying ; but of
course that was my "pathetic fallacy." In the
course of my stay he " gave me three sittings,"
as my penciled memorandum puts it, and I saw
that his forehead and a spot behind the ear were
of the same dazzling, indescribably beautiful color
as the gorget and ruff. The whole crown I did
not see illuminated, but the forehead sufficed.

At one time a ruby-crowned kinglet came and
played about in the same bush, and in that com-
parison he seemed almost a giant. " The hum-
mer is smaller and smaller," my pencil remarked,
" every time I see him." I might have addressed
him as Charles Lamb addressed the shade of
Elliston, when he saw that worthy, all his stage
trappings removed, seated in Charon's boat, —
" Bless me, how little you look."

The identification was now complete. I had
doubled my list of hummingbirds, having seen
but one species in all my previous years, and the
next morning I might reasonably have turned

A NEW ACQUAINTANCE 239

my steps elsewhere. But when the hour came
round I could think of nothing else I wanted so
much to do as to see that hummer again. And I
followed my inclination. It was well I did.

We were both prompt. As I drew near I saw
the tiny creature perched as usual at the tip of
the mesquite. How many times he came and
went during the hour that I stayed by him I fail
to remember ; but on the second or third occa-
sion a verdin happened into the neighborhood.
The hummer descended upon him hotly, drove
him away in no time, and then, as if in celebra-
tion of his triumph, mounted straight into the
air till he was like a dot, and came down again
almost vertically to his perch. It was a brilliant
and lovely display, an ebullition of vital spirits
well worth a forenoon of any man's life to wit-
ness. There are city parades, hours in length,
with martial music and all manner of bright re-
galia, that might better be skipped. And a few
minutes later, the enemy having returned, the
entire performance was repeated, ecstatic flight,
vertical drop and all. The verdin's presence, it
appeared, was extremely annoying to the hum-
mer. This place was %his. Trespassing was for-
bidden, and the verdin ought to know it.

Once, watching for another flash of color, I
had my glass on the hummer as he sat quiet.

240 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

Suddenly the verdin began sputtering to himself,
after his manner, a little way off. Quick as
thought the hummer cocked his head, waited an
instant as if to make sure he had heard correctly
(it seemed impossible, I suppose, after such a
drubbing), and then, like a bullet out of a gun,
flew at the persistent intruder. His spirit was
wonderful, and being roused to his work, he fin-
ished by descending at full speed upon a black
phosbe that just then blundered innocently along.
The big flycatcher, many times bigger than the
hummer, — but so is a man many times bigger
than a rifle ball, — did not stand upon the order
of his going, but went at once. I did not wonder.
The fellow might have driven me away, also, had
he taken it into his head to try. He was irre-
sistible. Talk of a strenuous life !

At another time he darted from his perch in
a quite unwonted direction, and flew on the line
to a palo-verde shrub off on the hillside. The
verdin was there, it turned out, down at the very
bottom of the bush, — though to my senses he
had made no sign, — and must be dislodged forth-
with.

Why the hummer offered no objection to
the kinglet's presence is beyond my knowledge.
Perhaps he took into account the fact that the
kinglet was here only for the whiter ; for it was

A NEW ACQUAINTANCE 241

impossible not to surmise that the hummer had
selected this particular spot for his summer
home, and as such meant to hold it against all
comers, exercising over it all the rights of sov-
ereignty. Let the verdin and the phrebe go
elsewhere.

The phoabe pretty certainly would have gone
elsewhere, hummer or no hummer. As to what
the verdin will conclude to do, things being as
they are, my mind is less clearly made up. He
is not so swift as his bullet of a rival, but I fancy
him to be a pretty dogged fighter, able to be
whipped a good many times without finding it
out. Still, as between the two, if I were com-
pelled to wager, I think I should risk my money
on the hummingbird.

THE DESERT REJOICES

WHAT was foretold in Judea is fulfilled in
Arizona — the desert has blossomed like the
rose.

I could hardly believe it, a month ago, when a
Tucson business man, who in the kindness of
his heart had turned the city upside down, al-
most, seeking to find a home for a man who was
not a consumptive and did not wish to live in a
hospital or a pest-house — I could hardly believe
it, I repeat, when he said : " Oh, you must n't
go back to Texas yet. You must stay and see
the desert in bloom. After these unusual rains
and snowfalls it will soon be all like a flower
garden." " So may it turn out," I thought ;
" but time will tell."

He spoke, according to the privilege of pro-
phets, in the language of hyperbole ; for, al-
though his prediction has come true, its fulfill-
ment is more than a little straitened and stingy.
The desert has blossomed, but it is like a flower
garden only in this respect — that there are
flowers in it. They are numbered by millions,
indeed ; or, rather, they are beyond all thought

THE DESERT REJOICES 243

of numeration ; but, as far as the appearance of
the place is concerned, it is scarcely more like a
flower garden than like a billiard table. A care-
less traveler — and not so very careless, neither
— might tread the blossoms under his feet for
miles without seeing so much as one of them.
They are desert flowers ; vegetable Lilliputians ;
minute, almost microscopic, for the most part,
as if moisture had been doled out to them by
the drop or the thimbleful, as indeed it has
been ; and the few that are larger have in the
main a weedy aspect, such as blinds the eye of
the ordinary non-observer, to whom, rightly or
wrongly, a flower is one thing and a weed an-
other. As for the tiny ones, the overwhelming
majority, a blossom that you can see in its place
only by getting down on your knees to look for
it may be a " flower " to a botanist, but hardly
to a plain, unlettered, matter-of-fact citizen.

And still, after the prophetic manner, the
prediction has come true. The desert has blos-
somed abundantly. As it now is, I can imagine
that it would be a place of unspeakable interest
to a philosophic botanist. He would know, pre-
sumably, what I do not, whether these starveling
races, existers upon nothing, are to be accounted
species by themselves, or only stunted representa-
tives of species that under favoring conditions

244 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

grow to a more considerable size. To his mind
numberless problems would be suggested touch-
ing the methods by which plants, sturdy and
patient beings, adapt themselves to untoward
circumstances and keep themselves alive — so
perpetuating the race — upon the chariest of
encouragement. He would understand the sig-
nificance of the prevailing hairiness of desert-
inhabiting species, as well as of the all but uni-
versal light bluish or dusty color of the foliage ;
for, saving the yellow-green creosote, there is
hardly so much as a bright green leaf from one
end of the desert to the other.

The state of my own unphilosophic mind is
peculiar, like the circumstances in which it finds
itself. It is (or perhaps it would be more honest
to say, it ought to be) humiliating, but it has
something of the charm of novelty.

I spoke a month ago of my ornithological pre-
dicament when, newly arrived in Texas, I found
myself surrounded by a quite strange set of
birds. I was back in the primer, I think I said.
Well, botanically, here in Tucson, I have retro-
graded a long step farther even than that. If I
may say so, my state is pre-primeric. I am not
even a primary scholar. I am no scholar at all.
My condition is what it was in childhood, when
I had never heard of botany. In those days, in

THE DESERT REJOICES 245

what for some reason was known as a grammar
school, we studied reading, writing, arithmetic,
geography, and grammar. One older girl, long
since dead (poor child, I can see her now, recit-
ing all by herself), studied " Watts on the
Mind I " At the high school we added algebra,
geometry, Latin, and Greek. As for "nature
study," neither the name nor the thing was ever
mentioned to us. Mr. Burroughs had not yet
written, and if Thoreau had written, his books
were not yet heard of. Botany and Hebrew
were alike absent from our curriculum. For
my own part, at any rate, whatever may have
been true of my cleverer or more home-favored
contemporaries, I neither knew the names of
the flowers I saw, nor did I aspire to know
them. If I ever thought of such knowledge, I
regarded it as permanently beyond my ken.
Who was I, that I should be wiser than all my
betters? I contented myself with liking the
things themselves.

Then, years afterward, I somehow began to
" botanize," as we say, by myself ; and from that
time to the present, whether at home or abroad,
I have always had a " manual " at my elbow or
in my trunk. A strange flower must be looked
up and set in its place.

But now, in Arizona, all this is done. I have

246 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

no manual. This carpet of desert plants I walk
over almost without curiosity, as I might walk
*t over a flowery carpet in a parlor. Their names
are nothing more to me than the jabberings of
the Mexicans who pass me on the desert with
loads of wood. Sometimes, indeed, I guess at a
relationship, as now and then I catch a word of
Spanish. This flower, I say, may be a Mgosotis.
But nine chances to one I do not so much as
guess. It 's a pretty red flower, or a dainty white
blossom, and there 's an end of it. As I said just
now, the state of my mind is pre-primeric. I am
too ignorant even to ask questions.

A sad case, certainly, but, like sad cases in
general, it brings its own partial compensations.
I have the more leisure for the birds, and for
looking at the mountains. Two months ago it
would not have seemed possible, but it has come
true ; I can sit upon the ground with half a
dozen kinds of unknown flowers about me, and
gaze upon the Catalinas or the snow-capped
Santa Ritas as peacefully or rapturously as if I
had never used a manual or a pocket lens since
I was born. Have I been converted, and become
as a little child ? Possibly ; but I anticipate a
speedy backsliding when conditions alter.

Yet I perceive that, like the prophet, I am
waxing tropical, and using language that requires

THE DESERT REJOICES 247

" interpretation." There are at least three kinds
of flowers in the desert that are not microscopic,
and that I call by name. They are not very
numerous ; you may walk long distances without
meeting them ; but they are there. I mean the
evening primrose, the lupine, and the California
poppy. The primrose, which is much the com-
monest of the three, has no stalk, or none that
is apparent; the large, handsome, lemon-colored
flower opens directly from a tuft of leaves lying
flat on the ground. As for the poppies, I should
hardly speak of them as growing in the desert
but for the fact that two or three days ago I
stumbled upon a place (it would be like trying
to find a spot in the ocean to look for it again)
where the ground for the space of an acre or
more was sparsely sprinkled with them. They
were abnormally small, and very short in the
stem ; but they were bright as the sun, and be-
ing lighted upon thus unexpectedly they really
made the spot a garden. As the prophet said,
the place was " glad for them ; " and so was I.

Both poppy and primrose (and the lupine as
well) are much more at home on the foothills.
There, too, are many flowers not to be seen at all
on the desert. I cannot talk about them for lack
of names. The brightest and showiest of them
all is of a vivid, but, in my vocabulary, nameless

248 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

shade of red ; not scarlet, nor crimson, nor
orange, nor pink, but red. The plant stands a
foot or so in height and bears a dozen, more or
less, of rather large cup-shaped blossoms, the
lively color of which would attract notice in any
garden.

A very different favorite of mine (I have been
intimate with it for a week) is a low — inch-
high — composite flower, of the size of a ten-cent
piece, with seven or eight white rays and a yel-
low disk ; a dwarf daisy, it looks to be, with
soft, cottony stem and leaves. It grows in the
driest and most barren places, and as I sit down
here and there on the hillsides to rest (looking
meanwhile at the green barley fields and the ever-
glorious mountains) I am sensibly happier if I
see this dainty bit of nature's loveliness (a child,
not a dwarf — I take back the word) within my
hand's reach. It is the very flower to make a
pet of ; prettier by far than if it were taller and
showier. Cultivation would spoil it. It was made
for the desert.

And this reminds me to say that, if the hills
are to be counted as part of the desert, as in rea-
son they may be, then the prophet's word has
been fulfilled, not partially but in all strictness.
The desert has blossomed like the rose. For the
slopes of the Tucson range are literally on fire

THE DESERT REJOICES 249

with blossoms. Patches of sun-bright yellow,
some of them to all appearance an acre or more
in extent, can be seen clear across the plain. I
saw them yesterday afternoon as I started home-
ward from Camp Lowell. The distance could
hardly be less than eight miles, and probably
they would have been visible had it been twice
as far. That the flowers are poppies, and not
blossoms of a smaller cruciferous plant that is
very abundant and gregarious hereabout, I am
confident, not only because I am assured so by
residents of the city, but because the patches are
much less conspicuous in the early forenoon,
when poppies are not wide open, than later in
the day. Some of the patches (I can see a dozen
from my window as I write, fully five miles off *)
are well toward the tops of the mountains, which,
needless to say, are not of great elevation, per-
haps four thousand feet.

The poppy is the Tucson flower. Children go
out upon the hills and bring back bunches to sell
along the streets and from house to house. Their
splendid color need not be praised. It is known
to all Eastern people, who grow the plants in gar-
dens (I seem to remember when they came in)
under the name of Esclischoltzia. And here, on
the mountain walls of this Arizona desert, are

1 I visited more than one of them afterward.

250 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

hanging-gardens so full of them as to form masses
of color visible ten or fifteen miles away ! " They
shall blossom abundantly," said the prophet;
and who knows but he spoke of the Tucson
Mountains in poppy time ?

NESTS AND OTHER MATTERS

WITH the first of April approaching, the life of
Arizona birds takes on a busier complexion. The
idle season is over ; now there are nests to be
built (no small undertaking, in itself, as a man
may easily find out by setting himself to build
one), and a family to be watched over and de-
fended. Now the human visitor begins to under-
stand what cactuses were made for. As he walks
among the whitish-green chollas, giving them
elbow-room, he has only to glance to right and
left to see what a considerable proportion of them
are inhabited ; this one by a pair of thrashers,
the other by a pair of cactus wrens. In neither
case is there any serious attempt at concealment ;
partly because the attempt would be useless ;
partly, we may guess, because concealment is
unnecessary. If your safe is burglar proof, why
be at the trouble to hide it? Neither squirrel
nor snake is likely to climb a cholla cactus, and
even a man knows enough to approach it with
caution.

Of the two species of thrasher that live in the
desert the larger one, known as Palmer's, seems

252 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

to be the earlier breeder. I found a nest with
eggs on the first day of March ; and on the ninth,
I came upon a brood of young birds already out
of the nest. They were still new to the world,
acting as if they found it a strange, unintelligible
place ; but they were fully fledged, and when put
to it, flew from one cholla to another without dif-
ficulty. Still, they had more faith in cactus
thorns than in wing-power, and allowed me al-
most to lay hands on them before taking flight.

The two desert-inhabiting thrashers, by the by,
Palmer's and Bendire's, are so much alike (the
Palmer being somewhat longer and darker than
its neighbor), that it was some time before I felt
sure of myself in discriminating between them.
As to the question of comparative length (one of
the most uncertain points on which an observer
can base a determination), I fell back upon an
old method, which it seems worth while to men-
tion here, because I have never seen it referred
to in print. It has served one man well, and may
do as much for another.

Two of our Eastern birds that are most trouble-
some to beginners in ornithology are the downy
and the hairy woodpecker, the only difference
between them — the only one that can ordinarily
be seen in the field, I mean to say — being one
of size. Well, I long ago discovered for myself

NESTS AND OTHER MATTERS 253

that it was much easier to carry in my eye the
comparative measurements of the two birds' bills
than the comparative measurements of the birds
themselves. Let me see the head in profile, and
I could name its owner almost beyond mistake.

This method, as I say, I resorted to in the case
of my two desert thrashers, and little by little
(time itself being of great service in such mat-
ters), I settled the question with myself. And
still there remained a certain fact that cast a
shade of doubt over my determination. In Mrs.
Bailey's Handbook, the only authority I had
brought with me, Mr. Herbert Brown, after
twenty years' experience with Tucson birds, is
quoted as saying that the Bendire thrasher al-
most never sings, whereas the birds that I was
calling by that name were m song continually.
What was I to think? It seemed a case for a
gun. Without it, how could I ever be sure of
my reckoning ? I was in a box, as we say. But
there was a way out. There almost always is.
The two species lay eggs of different colors. I
must find them ; and with patience I did ; first,
the blue-green eggs of Palmer, and then (two
sets in one day), the whitish eggs of Bendire ;
and my identification of the owners, made before
the eggs were examined, turned out to be correct
in all cases.

254 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

In the way of music, neither bird is equal to
the brown thrasher of the East. In fact, if I am
to be judge, one Massachusetts thrasher, in his
cinnamon-colored suit (and in the top of a gray
birch), could outsing any half-dozen of the birds
in this Arizona desert. It is to be said, however,
that there is a third species here (not on the face
of the desert itself, but in the thickets along the
Eillito River), the crissal thrasher so called,
whose song I have yet to make sure of. He is
larger even than the Palmer, and to look at him
should have a fuller voice.

And this reminds me that I had been in Tuc-
son more than a month before I saw a mocking-
bird ; and even now, when I have been here
almost two months, I have seen but three. The
people generally seem to mistake the thrashers
for mockers. If I speak to them about the
strangeness of the mocker's absence, they declare
that mockers are common here. At least two
persons have turned upon me with the assertion,
" Why, there 's one singing out there at this
minute." And they point to a thrasher, a bird
that wears not one of the mocker's three colors,
— gray, black, and white, — and for music is as
much like him as a child's tin whistle is like a
master's flute. And still it is true, at least the
systematists tell us so, and I have no thought of

NESTS AND OTHER MATTERS 255

questioning it, that the mockingbird is only a
nobler kind of thrasher. And thrashers, the
mocker included, are only larger kinds of wrens.

Arizona is the wrens' country. During my
short stay in Tucson I have seen ten species : the
sage thrasher, the Western mockingbird, the
Bendire thrasher, the Palmer thrasher, the cris-
sal thrasher, the cactus wren, the rock wren, the
canyon wren, the Baird wren, and the interior
tule wren.

The sage thrashers, whose mysterious silence
was commented upon in a previous article, are
only now beginning to find their voices ; for they
are still (March 21) in the desert, though they
will go elsewhere to breed. Two days ago, while
returning from the Killito Valley, I came upon
a group of them, and to my great pleasure two
or three were in song ; not letting themselves
out, to be sure, but running over a medley of
a tune under their breath in a kind of dumb
rehearsal. I could barely hear it, but I saw at
once why the birds, for all their short bills and
unthrasher-like ways, are called sometimes sage
thrashers and sometimes mountain mockingbirds.
I hope their sotto voce preludings will not out-
last my stay among them.

One of my particular favorites here is the Say
phcebe. From the first he took my fancy. All

256 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

his ways please me. As the homely phrase is, I
like the cut of his jib. His plaintive call is never
wearisome, though he is exceedingly free with it.
And I have grown to like him and his mate the
better because they are fond of certain places
where I myself am given to spending now and
then an idle hour. There are four abandoned
shanties in different parts of the desert, in the
shade of which I often rest ; and every one of
them has its pair of Say phoebes. I saw the
birds with building materials in their bills, and
began by expecting to find the nest inside the
open building ; but by and by I discovered that
they liked best of all a site down in a well ! It
seems a safe position to begin with — as long as
the nest contains nothing but eggs ; but I ask
myself about the danger to the little ones when
they become big enough to be uneasy. If they
are anything like young robins, for example, a
pitiful share of them must perish sixty feet
underground. However, the birds may be pre-
sumed to understand their own business better
than any outsider can teach it to them; and
they unquestionably prefer the well. Of the
four pairs just mentioned, three have built in
that position (the wells, it should be understood,
are not stoned), and the fourth would have done
likewise, I dare say, only that the well in their

NESTS AND OTHER MATTERS 257

case happens to be covered. As it is, the nest is
on one of the joists of a shed, and an imperti-
nent stranger has been known to clamber up and
examine the eggs. " Oh, if that well had only
been left open ! " the birds probably thought, as
they saw what he was doing.

One kind of nest that is common here is set
so out in sight that none but a blind man could
miss it, though from its color it might readily be
passed as an old one, not worth investigation. I
do not remember just how many I have seen, —
half a dozen, it may be, — but I have never
looked into one. They cannot be looked into,
unless they are first torn to pieces.

I speak of the verdin's nest. It is a marvel
of workmanship : globular, or roughly so, with
an entrance neatly roofed over well down on one
side ; constructed outwardly — I cannot speak
beyond that, of course — of countless small
thorny sticks, and in size and general color re-
sembling a large paper-wasps' nest. The bird,
as I say, plants it in full sight, in a leafless cat's-
claw bush, by preference, though I have seen
one beauty in a palo-verde tree.

My first one I was directed to by the outcries
of the owner. The f oolish thing — if she was
foolish — actually went inside, and while there
scolded me. She took it for granted, I suppose,

258 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

that I had seen her go in, and was determined
to let me know what she thought of such despic-
able espionage. As a matter of fact, I was busy
just then with a rarer bird, and might have
passed her pretty house unnoticed had she held
her peace. But the verdin is a nervously loqua-
cious body, and perhaps would rather talk than
keep a secret. Such cases have been heard of.
Whatever else we may say of her, she is an archi-
tect of something like genius.

A FLYCATCHER AND A SPARROW

I BELIEVE I have seen two of the oddest birds in
Texas — the road-runner and the scissor-tailed
flycatcher. The first was mentioned some time
ago in these letters ; the second I have but lately
met with. When I was in San Antonio in Jan-
uary, he was absent for the winter. He would
return, I was informed, shortly after the middle
of March, and I have kept it fast in mind that I
must stop here on my way home and make his
acquaintance.

I knew he was odd, but he has turned out to be
odder even than I supposed. Other places, other
birds, as a matter of course, but surely this one,
to use Emerson's word, is the " otherest." When
I saw him first, in San Pedro Park (everything
is saintly in the Southwest), I thought for an
instant that I was looking at a bird which had
seized a long string, or a strip of cloth, and was
flying away with it to his nest. Seen more fully,
he looked, I said to myself, like a Japanese kite,
or some other outlandish plaything. Even now,
when he has been in sight pretty constantly
for five or six days, I can hardly say that he

260 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

looks like a bird to me. His enormously long tail
feathers are so fantastic, so almost grotesque !
They render him a kind of monstrosity. One
feels as if he had been made, not born ; and some
Oriental must have been the maker.

Yet if ever a bird was alive, he is. His spirits
are effervescent and apparently inexhaustible.
Few birds are noisier or more continually on the
move. When six or eight scissor-tails meet for
consultation in one small tree, even though it be
in a cemetery, there are " great doings," as the
country phrase is. What the disturbance is all
about, it is beyond me to tell, but it seems a rea-
sonable assumption that it has to do somehow
with questions of love and marriage. So far as I
have noticed, such sessions do not last long. In
the nature of things they cannot. The hubbub in-
creases, the discussion, whatever its subject, waxes
more and more animated, and then, of a sudden,
the assembly breaks up (I was going to say ex-
plodes), and away fly the birds (and the birds'
tails), every one still contending for the last
word.

But there is no need of six or eight to set the
pot bubbling. Two are a plenty ; and indeed I
suspect that a single bird would have it out with
himself rather than forego for an hour or two
the excitement of a shindy. In temperament the

A FLYCATCHER AND A SPARROW 261

scissor-tail, as well as I can determine, is own
brother to the kingbird. As I said, he is brim-
ming over with spirits. If he gave them no vent
he would burst.

So after a few minutes of quietness, the calm
that precedes the storm, he darts into the air,
with vehement, mad gyrations, opening and shut-
ting his tail feathers spasmodically, and uttering
loud cries of one sort and another. Perhaps he
flies straight upward, or as nearly so as possible
(this is one of the kingbird's tricks), and with
tail outspread comes down headfirst like an arrow.
He is like a creature full of wine, or like one be-
side himself. What he does, he has to do. There
is no holding him in.

Sometimes, when there are two in the air to-
gether, and for anything I know at other times,
— I tell what I have seen, — they utter most
curious, hollow, throbbing, booming noises, such
as one would never attribute to any bird of the
flycatcher family. They utter them, I say, but I
mean only that they make them. How they do it,
whether with the throat, the wings, or the tail, is
something I have yet to discover. The only book
I have at hand makes no mention of such noises,
and I was greatly taken aback when I heard
them.

As the reader perceives, I am dealing in first

262 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

impressions. They are all I have. Most of the
scissor-tail's tricks and manners, indeed, I have
yet to witness. I have not seen him chase a crow,
for instance, or a raven (he would have to travel
a hundred miles, I suspect, to find either the one
or the other), but give him half a chance, and I
am sure he would do it. One thing I have seen
him do : I have seen him fly before an English
sparrow. The action seemed unworthy of him,
but I dare say he did not so regard it. Perhaps
it was all a joke. But apparently no bird con-
siders it a disgrace to be put to rout by a smaller
one. The shameful thing is to be afraid of one
that is larger than yourself. This is not the
human way of looking at such matters; but
perhaps that does not prove it a false way. I
seem to see that much might be said in defense
of it.

It is surprising how common the scissor-tail is,
and more surprising yet that nobody seems to
notice him. I should have thought that all the
passers-by would be stopping to stare at so half-
absurd a prodigy. But when he performs his
craziest evolutions here in the Alamo Plaza, in the
very heart of the city, nobody appears to mind
him. The truth is that to these people — to most
of them, at least — he is an old story, while to
me he is like a bird invented last week. Wher-

A FLYCATCHER AND A SPARROW 263

ever you notice men, you will perceive that it is
not the wonderful that attracts their attention,
but the novel and the out-of-the-way. The moon
and the stars they are used to, and quite properly
look upon with indifference ; but let a neighbor's
hencoop catch fire, and they cannot run fast
enough to behold the spectacle.

Another and better thing I have accomplished
during my present brief stay in San Antonio :
I have heard and seen the Cassin sparrow. A
Washington ornithologist, familiar with this
Southwestern country, learning that I was on my
way thither, wrote to me in January : " On no
account return without hearing the Cassin spar-
row." To confess the truth, I had almost for-
gotten the injunction, emphatic as it was ; but a
few mornings ago, on my way back to the termi-
nus of the street-car line after a jaunt into some
old pecan woods, five or six miles out of the city,
I stopped short at the sound of a few simple bird
notes. What a gracious tune! And as novel
as it was gracious ! I had never heard the like :
a long trill or shake, pitched at the top of the
scale, and then, after a rest, a phrase of five
notes in the sweetest of sparrow voices, ending
with the truest and most unexpected of musical
intervals. For mnemonic purposes, as my custom
is (useful to me, if to no one else), I at once put

264 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

words to the tune : " She " (this for the long
trill), " pretty, pretty she."

The birds were in some scattered mesquite
bushes (very bright now, in their new yellow-
green leafage), and I hastened to get through the
fence and make up to them. They proved to be
very small, and distressingly deficient in marks
or " characters," but I took such note of them as
I could, in a poor light. The main thing, for the
time being, was the song. That prolonged open-
ing note, with its sound of an indrawn whistle,
ought to be the work of a Puccea, I told myself,
remembering the Florida representative of that
genus, and the singers should therefore be Cas-
sin sparrows.

The next morning, having refreshed my mem-
ory by a reading of the handbook, I took the car
immediately after breakfast for another visit to
the place. This, I should have said, was in the
rear grounds of an asylum for the insane. It was
Sunday morning, and as I crawled through the
fence and took up my position among the mes-
quites, I presently found myself under fire from
the windows and balconies. The distance was too
great for me to understand what was said, but
there was no doubt that the inmates of the insti-
tution regarded me as a queer one. However, I
believed in my own sanity (as things go in this

A FLYCATCHER AND A SPARROW 265

world), and did not propose to be hindered. The
birds were there, and that was enough.

And now, to my intense satisfaction, I found
that they were doing just what the handbook de-
scribed : springing into the air for a few feet,
after the manner of long-billed marsh wrens, and
with fluttering wings dropping slowly back to the
perch, uttering their sweet, " She, pretty, pretty
she," as they descended. I secured somewhat
fuller observations of their plumage, also, and be-
came morally certain — which means something
less than scientifically certain, though really,
taking Mr. Attwater's list of the birds of San
Antonio as a guide, there is nothing else they
can be — that the singers were Cassin sparrows.1

And glad I am to have heard them. I cannot
speak for others ; judgment in such matters must
always be largely a question of personal taste ;
but for myself I have heard few bird songs that
satisfy me so well ; so quaint and original, yet so
true and simple. San Antonio mockingbirds are
numberless, and their performances are wonder-
ful ; I think I should never tire of them ; but
somehow those six quiet notes of the sparrow
seem to go deeper home.

1 And so they were, on the testimony of the Washington
ornithologist above quoted, who knows both bird and song.

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS

ALMOST or quite the most brilliant bird that I
saw in Arizona was the vermilion flycatcher. I
had heard of it as sometimes appearing in the
neighborhood of Tucson, but entertained small
hope of meeting it there myself. A stranger,
straitened for time, and that time in winter,
blundering about by himself, with no pilot to
show him the likely places, could hardly expect
to find many besides the commoner things. So
I reasoned with myself, aiming to be philosophi-
cal. Nevertheless, there is always the chance of
green hand's luck ; I knew it by more than one
happy experience ; and who could tell what
might happen ? Possibly it was not for nothing
that my eye, as by a kind of magnetic attraction,
fell so often upon Mrs. Bailey's opening sentence
about this particular bird as day after day, on
one hunt and another, I turned the leaves of her
Handbook. " Of all the rare Mexican birds seen
in southern Arizona and Texas," so I read, " the
vermilion flycatcher is the gem."

One thing was certain : this famous Mexican
rarity was not confusingly like anything else,

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 267

as so many of its Northern relatives have the
unhandsome trick of being. If I saw it, ever so
hurriedly, I should recognize it.

Well, I did see it, and almost of course at a
moment when I was least looking for it. This
was on the 5th of February, my fifth day in
Tucson. I had crossed the Santa Cruz Valley,
west of the city, by one road, and after a stroll
among the foothills opposite, was returning by
another, when a bit of flashing red started up
from the wire fence directly before me. I knew
what it was, almost before I saw it, as it seemed,
so eager was I, and so well prepared ; and as the
solitary's companionable habit is, I spoke aloud.
" There 's the vermilion flycatcher ! " I heard
myself saying.

The fellow was every whit as splendid as my
fancy had painted him, and to my joy he seemed
to be not in the least put out by my approach nor
chary of displaying himself. He was too innocent
and too busy ; darting into the air to snatch a
passing insect, and anon returning to his perch,
which was now a fence-post, now the wire, and
now, best of all, the topmost, tilting spray of a
dwarf mesquite. Thus engaged, every motion a
delight to the eye, he flitted along the road in
advance of me, till finally, having reached the
limit of his hunting-ground, — the roadside

268 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

ditches filled with water from the overflow of irri-
gated barley fields, — he turned back by the way
he had come.

I went home a happy man ; I had added one
of the choicest and most beautiful of American
birds to my mental collection. One thing was
still lacking, however : flycatchers are not song-
birds, but the humblest of them has a voice, and
having things to say is apt to say them; my
new acquaintance had kept his thoughts to him-
self.

This was in the forenoon, and after luncheon
I went back to walk again over that muddy road
between those ditches of muddy water. The bird
might still be there. And he was, — still catch-
ing insects, and still silent. But so handsome !
At first sight most people, I suppose, would com-
pare him, as I did, with the scarlet tanager. The
red parts are of nearly or quite the same shade,
— a little deeper and richer, if anything, —
while the wings, tail, and back are dark brown,
approaching black, — the wings and tail espe-
cially, — dark enough, at any rate, to afford a
brilliant contrast. His scientific name is Pyro-
cephalus, which is admirable as far as it goes,
but falls a long way short of telling the whole
truth about him ; for not only is his head of a
fiery hue, but his whole body as well, with the

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 269

exceptions already noted. In size he ranks be-
tween the least flycatcher and the wood pewee.
In liveliness of action he is equal to the spryest
of his family, with a flirt of the tail which to my
eye is identical with that of the phoebe. His gor-
geous color is the more effective because of his
aerial habits. The taiiager is bright sitting on
the bough, but how much brighter he would look
if every few minutes he were seen hovering in
mid-air with the sunlight playing upon him !

Certainly I was in great luck, and I felt it the
more as day after day I found the dashing beauty
in the same place. I could not spend my whole
winter vacation in visiting him, but I saw him
there at odd times, — nearly as often as I passed,
— until February 17. Then he disappeared ; but
a week later I discovered him, or another like
him, in a different part of the valley, and on the
26th I saw two. The next day, for the first time,
one of the birds was in voice, uttering a few fine,
short notes, little remarkable in themselves, but
thoroughly characteristic ; not suggestive of any
other flycatcher notes known to me ; so that,
from that time to the end of my stay in Tucson,
I was never in doubt as to their authorship, no
matter where I heard them.

All these earlier birds were males in full
plumage. The first female — herself a beauty,

270 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

with a modest tinge of red upon her lower parts,
enough to mark the relationship — was noticed
March 5. Males were now becoming common,
and on the 9th, although my walks covered no
very wide territory, I counted, of males and fe-
males together, seventeen. From first to last not
one was met with on the creosote and cactus-
covered desert, but after the first few days of
March they were well distributed over the Santa
Cruz and Rillito valleys and about the grounds
of the university. I found no nest until March
27, although at least two weeks earlier than that
a female was seen pulling shreds of dry bark from
a cottonwood limb, while her mate flitted about
the neighborhood, now here, now there, as if he
were too happy to contain himself.

The prettiest performance of the male, wit-
nessed almost daily, and sometimes many times a
day, after the arrival of the other sex, was a sur-
prisingly protracted ecstatic flight, half flying,
half hovering, the wings being held unnaturally
high above the back, as if on purpose to display
the red body (a most peculiar action, by which
the bird could be told as far as he could be seen),
accompanied throughout by a rapid repetition of
his simple call ; all thoroughly in the flycatcher
manner ; exactly such a mad, lyrical outburst as
one frequently sees indulged in by the chebec, for

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 271

instance, and the different species of phcebe. In
endurance, as well as in passion, Pyrocephalus is
not behind the best of them, while his exceptional
bravery of color gives him at such moments a
glory altogether his own. Sometimes, indeed, he
seems to be emulous of the skylark himself, he
rises to such a height, beating his way upward,
hovering for breath, and then pushing higher and
still higher. Once I saw him and the large Ari-
zona crested flycatcher in the air side by side,
one as crazy as the other ; but the big magister
was an awkward hand at the business, compared
with the tiny Pyrocephalus.

It was good to find so showy a bird so little
disposed to shyness. At Old Camp Lowell, where
I often rested for an hour at noon in the shade
of one of the adobe buildings, the bachelor winter
occupants of which were kind enough to give me
food and shelter (together with pleasant com-
pany) whenever my walk took me so far from
home, our siesta was constantly enlivened by his
bright presence and engaging tricks. One day,
as he perched at the top of a low mesquite, on a
level with our eyes, I put my glass into the hand
of the younger of my hosts. He broke out in a
tone of wonder. " Well, now," said he (he spoke
to the bird), "you are a peach." And so he is.
It is exactly what, in my more old-fashioned and

272 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

less collegiate English, I have been vainly en-
deavoring to say.

And to be a " peach " is a fine thing. A viva-
cious living essayist, it is true, who is probably
a handsome man himself, at least in the looking-
glass, declares that " male ugliness is an endear-
ing quality." The remark may be true — in a
sense ; by all means let us hope so, seeing how
lavish Nature has been with the commodity in
question ; but I am confident that the female
vermilion flycatcher would never admit it. As
for her glorious dandy of a husband, there can
be no doubt what opinion he would hold of such
an impudent reflection upon feminine perspica-
city and taste. " A plague upon paradoxes and
aphorisms," I hear him answer. " If fine feathers
don't make fine birds, what in Heaven's name
do they make ? "

It was only two days after my discovery of the
vermilion flycatcher (if I remember correctly I
was at that moment on my way to enjoy a third
or fourth look at him) that I first saw a very
different but scarcely less interesting novelty. I
was on the sidewalk of Main Street, in the busy
part of the day, my thoughts running upon a
batch of delayed letters just received, when sud-
denly I looked up (probably I had heard a voice
without being conscious of it, for the confirmed

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 273

hobby-rider is sometimes in the saddle unwit-
tingly) and caught sight of a few swifts far over-
head. People were passing, but it was now or
never with me, and I whipped out my opera-glass.
There were six of the birds, and their throats were
white. So much I saw, having known what to
look for, and then they were gone, — as if the
heavens had opened and swallowed them up. It
was a niggardly interview, at pretty long range,
but a deal better than nothing ; enough, at all
events, for an identification. They were white-
throated swifts, — Aeronautes melanoleucus.

Three days later a flock of at least seventeen
birds of the same species were hawking over the
Santa Cruz Valley, and now, as they swept this
way and that at their feeding, there was leisure
for the field-glass and something like a real ex-
amination. To my surprise (surprise is the com-
pensation of ignorance) I discovered that they
had not only white throats, as their name implies,
but white breasts, and more noticeable still, white
rumps. Those who are familiar with our common
dingy, soot-colored chimney swift of the East will
be able to form some idea of the distinguished
appearance of this Westerner: a considerably
larger bird, built on the same rakish lines, shoot-
ing about the sky in the same lightning-like zig-
zags, and marked in this striking and original

274 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

manner with white. I saw the birds only four
times afterward, the last time on the 17th of Feb-
ruary. So I say, speaking after the manner of
men ; but in truth I can see them now, their white
rumps lighting up as they wheel and catch the
sun. It pleases me to learn that it is next to
impossible to shoot them, and that they are scarce
in collections. So may they continue. They were
made for better things.

The most beautiful bird that I found in Ari-
zona, though judgments of this kind are of neces-
sity liable to revision as one's mood changes,
was the Arizona Pyrrhuloxia. I should be glad
to give the reader, as well as to have for my own
use, an English name for it, but so far as I am
aware it has none. It has lived beyond the range
of the vernacular. My delight in its beauty was
less keen than naturally it would have been, be-
cause I had spent my first raptures upon its
equally handsome Texas relative of the same
name a few weeks before. This was at San An-
tonio, in the chaparral just outside the city. I
had been listening to a flock of lark sparrows,
I remember, and looking at sundry things, where
almost everything was new, when all at once I
saw before me at the foot of a bush the loveliest
bunch of feathers that I had ever set eyes on.
Without the least thought of what I was doing

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 275

I began repeating to myself under my breath,
" O my soul ! O my soul ! " And in sober truth
the creature was deserving of all the admiration
it excited : a bird of the cardinal's size and build,
dressed not in gaudy red, but in the most exqui-
site shade of gray, with a plentiful spilling of
an equally exquisite rose color over its under
parts. Its bright orange bill was surrounded at
the base by a double ring of black and rose,
and on its head was a most distinguished-looking,
divided crest, tipped with rose color of a deeper
shade. It was loveliness to wonder at. I cannot
profess that I was awe-struck (not being sure
that I know just what that excellent word means),
but it would hardly be too much to say that " as
I passed, I worshiped."

The Arizona bird, unhappily, was not often
seen (the Texas bird treated me better), though
when I did come upon it, it was generally in ac-
cessible places (in wayside hedgerows) not far
from houses. It would be impossible to see either
the Texas or the Arizona bird for the first time
without comparing it with the cardinal, the two
are so much alike, and yet so different. The
cardinal is brighter, but for beauty give me
Pyrrhuloxia. I do not expect the sight of any
other bird ever to fill me with quite so rapturous
a delight in pure color as that first unlooked-for

276 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

Pyrrhuloxia did in the San Antonio chaparral.
It was like the joy that comes from falling sud-
denly upon a stanza of magical verse, or catch-
ing from some unexpected quarter a strain of
heavenly music.

If Pyrocephalus was the brightest and Pyrrhu-
loxia the most beautiful of my Arizona birds,
Phainopepla must be called the most elegant,
the most supremely graceful, if I may be par-
doned such an application of the word, the most
incomparably genteel. I saw it first at Old Camp
Lowell, before mentioned, near the Rillito, at the
base of the low foothills of the Santa Catalina
Mountains. At my first visit to the camp, which
is six or seven miles from the city of Tucson,
straight across the desert, I mistook my way at
the last and approached the place from the far-
ther end by a cross-cut through the creosote
bushes. Just as I reached the adobe ruins, all
that is left of the old camp, I descried a black
bird balancing itself daintily at the tip of a
mesquite. I lifted my glass, caught sight of
the bird's crest, and knew it for a Phainopepla.
How good it is to find something you have greatly
desired and little expected !

The Phainopepla (like the Pyrrhuloxia it has
no vernacular appellation, living only in that
sparsely settled, Spanish-speaking corner of the

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 277

world) is ranked with the waxwings, though ex-
cept for its crest there is little or nothing in its
outward appearance to suggest such a relation-
ship; and the crest itself bears but a moderate re-
semblance to the pointed topknot of our familiar
cedar-bird. What I call the Phainopepla's ele-
gance comes partly from its form, which is the
very perfection of shapeliness, having in the
highest degree that elusive quality which in semi-
slang phrase is designated as " style ; " partly
from its motions, all prettily conscious and in a
pleasing sense affected, like the movements of a
dancing-master ; and partly from its color, which
is black with the most exquisite bluish sheen, set
off in the finest manner by broad wing-patches
of white. These wing-patches are noticeable,
furthermore, for being divided into a kind of
network by black lines. It is for this reason, I
suppose, that they have a peculiar gauzy look (I
speak of their appearance while in action) such
as I have never seen in the case of any other bird,
and which often made me think of the ribbed,
translucent wings of certain dragon flies.

Doubtless this peculiar appearance was height-
ened to my eyes, because of the mincing, waver-
ing, over-buoyant method of flight (the wings
being carried unusually high) to which I have
alluded, and which always . suggested to me the

278 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

studied movements of a dance. I think I never
saw one of the birds so far forget itself as to take
a direct, straightforward course from one point
to another. No matter where they might be
going, though the flight were only a matter of a
hundred yards, they progressed always in pretty
zigzags, making so many little, unexpected, in-
decisive tacks and turns by the way, butterfly
fashion, that you began to wonder where they
would finally come to rest.

The two birds first seen — the female in lovely
gray — were evidently at home about the camp.
The berry-bearing parasitic plants in the mes-
quites seemed to furnish them with food, and
no doubt they were settled there for the season ;
and at least two more were wintering out among
the Chinese kitchen gardens, not far away. And
some weeks afterward I came upon a third pair,
also in a mesquite grove, on the Santa Cruz side
of the desert. But though in the two river val-
leys I passed a good many hours in their society,
I never once heard them sing, nor, so far as I
can now recall, did they ever utter any sound
save a mellow pip, almost exactly like a certain
call of the robin ; so like it, in fact, that to the
very last I never heard it suddenly given, but
my first thought was of that common Eastern
bird, whose voice in those early spring days it

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 279

would have been so natural and so pleasant to
Lear. I could have spared a dozen or two of
thrashers, I thought (not brown thrashers), for
a pair of robins and a pair of bluebirds. But
southern Arizona is a kind of thrasher paradise,
while robins and bluebirds desire a better coun-
try, and seemingly know where to find it.1

In the last week of March, however, there
took place, as well as I could judge, a concerted
movement of Phainopeplas northward. They
showed themselves in the Santa Cruz Valley,
here and there a pair, until they became, not
abundant, indeed, but a counted-upon, every-day
sight. Those that I had heretofore seen, it ap-
peared, were only a few winter " stay-overs." Now
the season had opened ; and now the birds be-
gan singing. For curiosity's sake it pleased me
to hear them, but the brief measure, in a thin,
squeaky voice, was nothing for any bird to be
proud of. They sing best to the eye. " Birds of
the shining robes," their Greek name calls them ;
and worthily do they wear it, under that un-
clouded Arizona sun, perching, as they habitually
do, at the tip of some tree or bush, where the

1 It should be said, nevertheless, that straggling flocks of
Western bluebirds — lovely creatures — were met with on the
desert on rare occasions, and once, at Old Camp Lowell, three
robins — Westerners, no doubt — passed over my head, flying
toward the mountains, in which they are said to winter.

280 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

man with birds in his eye can hardly fail to sight
them and name them, across the widest barley
field.

One of the birds whose acquaintance I chiefly
wished to make on this my first Western jour-
ney was the famous canyon wren, — famous not
for its beauty (beauty is not the wren family's
mark), but for its voice. Whether my wish
would be gratified was of course a question, es-
pecially as my very modest itinerary included
no exploration of canyons ; but I was not with-
out hope.

I had been in Tucson nearly a week, when one
cool morning after a cold night (it was February
7) I went down into the Santa Cruz Valley and
took the road that winds — where there is barely
room for it — between the base of Tucson
Mountain and the river. Steep, broken cliffs,
perhaps a hundred feet high, were on my right
hand, and the deep bed of the shallow river lay
below me on my left. Here I was enjoying the
sun, and keeping my eyes open, when a set of
loud, clear bird notes in a descending scale fell
upon my ears from overhead. I stopped, pulled
myself together, and said, " A canyon wren." I
remembered a description of that descending
scale. The next instant a small hawk took wing
from the spot on the cliff whence the notes had

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 281

seemed to fall. My mind wavered, but only for
a moment. " No, no," I said, " it is not in any
hawk's throat to produce sounds of that quality ; "
and I waited. A rock wren began calling, but
rock wrens did not count with me at that moment.
Then, in a very different voice, a wren, presum-
ably the one I was in search of, began fretting,
unseen, somewhere above my head ; and then,
silence. I waited and waited. Finally I tried an
old trick — I started on. If the bird was watch-
ing me, as likely enough he was, a movement to
leave his neighborhood would perhaps excite him
pleasurably. And so it did ; or so it seemed ; for
almost at once the song was given out and re-
peated : a hurried introductory phrase, and then
the fuller, longer, more liquid notes, tripping in
procession down the scale.

The singer could be no other than the canyon
wren ; but of course I must see him. At last,
my patience outwearing his, he fell to scolding
again, and glancing up in the direction of the
sound, I saw him on the jutting top of the very
highest stone, his white throat and breast flash-
ing in the sun, and the dark, rich brown of his
lower parts setting the whiteness off to marvelous
advantage. There he stood, calling and bobbing,
calling and bobbing, after the familiar wren
manner, though why he should resent an inno-

282 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

cent man's presence so far below was more than
any innocent man could imagine.

It would be an offense against the truth not
to confess that the celebrated song fell at first a
little short of my expectations. Perhaps I had
heard it celebrated somewhat too loudly and too
often. It was very pleasing ; the voice beautifully
clear and full, and the cadence of the sweetest ;
it had the grace of simplicity ; indeed, there was
nothing to be said against it, except that I had
supposed it would be — well, I hardly know
what, but somehow wilder and more telling.

"Within a few days I discovered a second pair
of the birds not far away, about an old, long-
disused adobe mill. They were already building
a nest somewhere inside, entering by a crack over
one of the windows. The female appeared to be
doing the greater part of the work, while her
mate sat upon the edge of the flat roof and sang
for her encouragement, or railed at me for my
too assiduous lounging about the premises. The
more I listened to the song, the better I enjoyed
it ; it is certainly a song by itself ; I have never
heard anything with which to compare it ; and I
was especially pleased to see how many varia-
tions the performer was able to introduce into
his music, and yet leave it always the same.

The first pair, on the precipitous face of the

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 283

mountain, had chosen the more romantic site, and
I often stopped to admire their address in climb-
ing about over the almost perpendicular surface
of the rock ; now disappearing for a few seconds,
now popping into sight again a little further on ;
finding a foothold everywhere, no matter how
smooth and steep the rock might look.

The canyon wren is a darling bird and a mu-
sical genius; and now that I have ceased to
measure his song by my extravagant expectations
concerning it, I do not wish it in any wise altered.
His natural home is by the side of falling water
(I have heard him since, where I should have
heard him first, in a canyon), and his notes fall
with it. I seem to hear them dropping one by
one, every note by itself, as I write about them.
If they are not of a kind to be ecstatic over at a
first hearing (a little too simple for that), they
are all the surer of a long welcome. Indeed, I
am half ashamed to have so much as referred to
my own early lack of appreciation of their excel-
lence. Perhaps this was one of the times when
the truth should not have been spoken.

My mention just now of the wren's cleverness
in traveling over the steep side of Tucson Moun-
tain called to mind a similar performance on the
part of a very different bird — a road-runner —
in the same place ; and though it was not in my

284 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

plan to name that bird in this paper, I cannot
deny myself the digression.

I had taken a friend, newly inoculated with
ornithological fever, down to this mountain-side
road to show him a black-chinned humming-
bird. We had seen it, to his amazement, on the
very mesquite where I had told him it would
be (" Well ! " he said, — and a most eloquent
"well" it was, — when I pointed the bird out,
scarcely more than a speck, as we came in sight
of the bush), and were driving further, when I
laid my hand on the reins and bade him look up.
There, halfway up the precipitous, broken cliff,
was the big, mottled, long-tailed bird, looking
strangely out of place to both of us, who had
never seen him before except in the lowlands,
running along the road, or dodging among clumps
of bushes. Then of a sudden, he began climbing,
and almost in no time was on the very topmost
stone, at the base of a stunted palo-verde. There
he fell to cooing (like a dove, I said, forgetting
at the moment that the road-runner is a kind of
cuckoo), and by the time he had repeated the
phrase three or four times we remarked that
before doing so he invariably lowered his head.
We sat and watched and listened (" There! " one
or the other would say, as the head was ducked)
for I know not how many minutes, commenting

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 285

upon the droll appearance of the bird, perched
thus above the world, and cooing in this (for
him) ridiculous, lovelorn, gesticulatory manner.

Then, as we drove on, I recalled the strangely
rapid and effortless gait with which he had gone
up the mountain. " He did n't use his wings, did
he ? " I asked ; and my companion thought not.
I was reminded of a bird of the same land that
I had seen a few days before cross a deep gully
perhaps twenty feet in width. " He seemed to
slide across," said the man who was with me.
That was exactly the word. He did not lift a
wing, to the best of our noticing, nor rise so much
as an inch into the air, but as it were stepped
from one bank to the other. So this second bird
went up the mountain-side almost without our
seeing how he did it. A few steps, and he was
there, as by the exercise of some special gift of
specific levity. He did not fly ; and yet it might
have " seemed he flew, the way so easy was."
Take him how you will, the road-runner's looks
do not belie him : he is an odd one ; and never
odder, I should guess, than when he stands upon
a mountain-top and with lowered head pours out
his amorous soul in coos as gentle as a sucking
dove's. I count myself happy to have witnessed
the moving spectacle.

I am running into superlatives, but no matter.

286 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

The feeling against their use is largely prejudice.
Let me suit myself with one or two more, there-
fore, and say that the rarest and most exciting
bird seen by me in Arizona was a painted red-
start, Setophaga picta. It was at the base of
Tucson Mountain, close by the canyon wrens' old
mill. The vermilion flycatcher, rare as I con-
sidered it at first, became after a while almost
excessively common. I believe it is no exagger-
ation to say that forty or fifty pairs must have
been living in and about Tucson before the first
of April. Unless you were out upon the desert,
you could hardly turn round without seeing or
hearing them. But there was no danger of the
painted redstart's cheapening itself after this
fashion. I saw it twice, for perhaps ten minutes
in all, and as long as I live I shall be thankful
for the sight.

I was playing the spy upon a pair of what I
took to be Arkansas goldfinches, and the ques-
tion being a nice one, had got over a wire fence
to have the sun at my back. There I had barely
focused my eight-power glass upon a leafless wil-
low beside an irrigation ditch, when all at once
there moved into its field such a piece of absolute
gorgeousness as I have no hope of making my
reader see by means of any description : a small
bird in three colors, — deep, velvety black, the

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 287

snowiest white, and the most brilliant red. Its
glory lay in the depth and purity of the three
colors ; its singularity lay in a point not men-
tioned in book descriptions, being inconspicuous,
I suppose, in cabinet specimens : a line (almost
literally a line) of white below the eye. From its
position and its extreme tenuity I took it for the
lower eyelid, but as to that I cannot speak with
positiveness. It would hardly have showed, even
in life, I dare say, but for its intensely black sur-
roundings. As it was, it fairly stared at me. I
cannot affirm that it added to the bird's beauty.
Apart from it the colors were all what I may call
solid, — laid on in broad masses, that is : a red
belly, a long white band (not a bar) on each
wing, some white tail feathers, white lower tail
coverts, and everything else black. It does not
sound like anything so very extraordinary, I con-
fess. But the reader should have seen it. Unless
he is a very dry stick indeed, he would have let
off an exclamation or two, I can warrant. There
are cases in which the whole is a good deal more
than the sum of all its parts.

The bird was on one of the larger branches,
over which it moved in something of the black-
and-white creeper's manner, turning its head to
one side and the other alternately as it progressed.
Then it sat still a long time (a long time for a

288 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

warbler), so near me that the glass brought it al-
most into my hand, while I devoured its beauty ;
and then, of a sudden, it took flight into the
dense, leafy top of a tall cottonwood, and I saw
it no more. No more for that time, that is to say.
In my mind, indeed, I bade it good-by forever.
It was not to be thought of that such a bit of
splendor (I had read of it as a mountain bird)
should happen in my way more than once. But
eight days afterward (March 28), in nearly the
same place, it appeared again, straight over my
head ; and I was almost as much astonished as
before. It was exploring the bare branches of a
row of roadside ash trees, and I followed it, or
rather preceded it, backing away as it flitted from
one tree to the next, keeping the sun behind me.
It carried itself now much like the common red-
start ; a little more inclined to moments of inac-
tivity, perhaps, but at short intervals darting into
the air after a passing insect with all conceivable
quickness.

And such colors ! Such an unspeakable red,
so intense a black, and so pure a white ! If I said
that the vermilion flycatcher was the brightest
bird I saw in Arizona, I was like the Hebrew
psalmist. I said it in my haste.

This time the redstart was in a singing mood.
On the previous occasion it had kept silence, and

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 289

I had thought I was glad to have it so, feeling
that no voice could be good enough to go with
such feathers. In its way the feeling was justi-
fied ; but, after all, it would have been too bad
to miss the song. Curiosity has its claims, no less
than sentiment. And happily the song proved to
be a very pretty one ; similar to that of the
Eastern bird, to be sure, but less hurried (so it
seemed to me), less over-emphatic, and in a voice
less sharp and thin ; a very pretty song (for a
warbler), though, as is true of the Phainopepla
and most other brilliantly handsome birds (and
all good children), the redstart's proper appeal is
to the eye. So far as human appreciation is con-
cerned, it need make no other.

I have heard a canyon wren in a canyon, I
said. It was a glorious day in a glorious place,
— Sabino Canyon, it is called, in the Santa
Catalina Mountains. And it was there, where
the ground was all a flower garden, and the dash-
ing brook a doubly delightful sight and sound
after so much wandering over the desert and so
many crossings of dry, sandy river-beds, — it was
there, amid a cluster of leafy oaks (strange oak
leaves they were) and leafless hackberry trees,
that I saw my first and only solitaire, — Mya-
destes townsendii. I have praised other birds for
their brightness and song ; this one I must praise

290 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

for a certain nameless dignity and, as the present-
day word is, distinction. He did not deign to
break silence, or to notice in any manner, unless
it were by an added touch of patrician reserve,
the presence of three human intruders. I stared
at him, — exercising a cat's privilege, — for all
his hauteur, admiring his gray colors, his con-
spicuous white eye-ring, and his manner. I say
" manner," not " manners." You would never
liken Mm to a dancing-master.

He was the solitaire, I somehow felt certain
(certain with a lingering of uncertainty), though
I had forgotten all description of that bird's ap-
pearance. It was the place for him, and his looks
went with the name. Moreover, to confess a more
prosaic consideration, there was nothing else he
could be.

" Myadestes," I said to my two companions,
both unacquainted with such matters ; " I think
it is Myadestes, though I can't exactly tell why I
think so."

We must go into the canyon a little way, gaz-
ing up at the walls, picking a few of the more
beautiful flowers, feeling the place itself (the best
thing one can do, whether in a canyon or on a
mountain-top) ; then we came back to the hack-
berry trees, but the solitaire was no longer in
them. I had had my opportunity, and perhaps

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 291

had made too little of it. It is altogether likely
that I shall never see another bird of his kind.
For now those cloudless Arizona days, the
creosote-covered desert, and the mountain ranges
standing round about it, are all for me as things
past and done ; a bright memory, and no more.
One event conspired with another to put a sudden
end to my visit (which was already longer than
I had planned), and on the last day of March I
walked for the last time under that row of " leaf-
less ash trees," — no longer quite leafless, and no
longer with a painted redstart in them, — and
over that piece of winding road between the
craggy hill and the river. Now I courted not the
sun, but the shade ; it was the sun, more than
anything else, that was hurrying me away, when
I would gladly have stayed longer ; but sunny
or shady, I stopped a bit in each of the more
familiar places. Nobody knew or cared that I
was taking leave. All things remained as they
had been. The same rock wrens were practicing
endless vocal variations here and there upon
the stony hillside ; the same fretful verdin was
talking about something, it was beyond me to
tell what, with the old emphatic monotony ; the
hummingbird stood on the tip of his mesquite
bush, still turning his head eagerly from side to
side, as if he expected her, and wondered why on

292 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

earth she was so long in coming; the mocker
across the field (one of no more than half a dozen
that I saw about Tucson ! ) was bringing out of
his treasury things new and old (a great bird
that, always with another shot in his locker) ;
the Lucy warbler, daintiest of the dainty, sang
softly amid the willow catkins, a chorus of bees
accompanying ; the black cap of the pileolated
warbler was not in the blossoming quince-bush
hedge (that was a pity) ; the desert-loving spar-
row hawk sat at the top of a giant cactus, as if
its thorns were nothing but a cushion ; the happy
little Mexican boy, who lived in one corner of the
old mill, came down the road with his usual smile
of welcome (we were almost old friends by this
time) and a glance into the trees, meaning to
say, what he could not express in English, nor I
understand in Spanish, " I know what you are
doing ; " and then, as I rounded the bend, under
the beetling crags, the same canyon wren, my first
one, not dreaming what a favor he was confer-
ring upon the man he had so often chided as a tres-
passer, let fall a few measures of his lovely song.
How sweet and cool the notes were ! Unless it
was the sound of the brook in the Sabino Canyon,
I believe I heard nothing else so good in Arizona.
But at San Antonio, on my way homeward, I
heard notes not to be called musical, in the

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS 293

smaller and more ordinary sense of the word ; as
unlike as possible, certainly, to the classic sweet-
ness of the canyon wren's tune ; but to me even
more exciting and memorable. On a sultry, in-
dolent afternoon (April 9) I had betaken myself
to Cemetery Hill for a lazy stroll, and had barely
alighted from the electric car, when I heard
strange noises somewhere near at hand. In my
confusion I thought for an instant of the scissor-
tailed flycatchers, with whose various outlandish
outcries and antics I had been for several days
amusing myself. Then I discovered that the
sound came from above, and looking up, saw
straight over my head, between the hilltop and
the clouds, a wedge-shaped flock of large birds.
Long slender necks and bills, feet drawn up and
projecting out behind the tails, wing-action mod-
erate (after the manner of geese rather than
ducks), color dark, — so much, and no more, the
glass showed me, while the birds, sixty or more
in number, as I guessed, were fast receding north-
ward. They should be cranes, I said to myself,
since they were surely not herons, and then, like
a flash, it came over me that I knew the voice.
By good luck I had lived the winter before where
I heard continually the lusty shouts of a captive
sandhill crane ; and it was to a chorus of sand-
hill cranes that I was now listening.

294 TEXAS AND ARIZONA

The flock disappeared, the tumult lessened and
ceased, and I passed on. But fifteen minutes
afterward, as I was retracing my steps over the
hill, suddenly I heard the same resounding chorus
again. A second flock of cranes was passing.
This, too, was in a V-shaped line, though for
some reason it fell into disorder almost immedi-
ately. Now I essayed a count, and had just con-
cluded that there were some eighty of the birds,
when a commotion behind me caused me to turn
my head. To my amazement, a third and much
larger flock was following close behind the
second. There was no numbering it with exact-
ness, but I ran my glass down the long, wavering
line, as best I could, and counted one hundred
and fifteen.

An hour before I had never seen a sandhill
crane in its native wildness (a creature nearly
or quite as tall as myself), and behold, here was
the sky full of them. And what a judgment-day
trumpeting they made ! Angels and archangels,
cherubim and seraphim ! Perhaps I did not enjoy
it, — there, with the white gravestones standing
all about me. After all, there is something in
mere volume of sound. If it does not feed the
soul, at least it stirs the blood. And that is a
good thing, also. I wonder if Michelangelo did
not at some time or other see and hear the like.

INDEX

INDEX

ADDER'S-TONGUE, 19, 29.
Anemone, 6.
Azalea, Lapland, 36.

Bayberry, 101.
Bellwort, 6.
Birch, yellow, 15, 72.
Bittern, least, 126.
Blackbird, Brewer's, 202.

crow, 129.

red-winged, 86, 124, 139.

rusty, 66.

Bluebird, 8, 54, 65,76,86, 132,
150, 156.

chestnut-backed, 181, 186.

Western, 279.
Butterfly, clouded-sulphur, 61.

red admiral, 28.
Buzzard, turkey, 86, 95, 124.

Cactus, giant, 199.
Callicarpa, 99.

Catbird, 86,100, 107, 129, 130.
Chewink, Arctic, 178.

red-eyed, 108, 140.

white-eyed, 140, 146.
Chickadee, black-capped, 21,
64, 66, 79, 86, 139.

Hudsonian, 37.
Chuck-wilTs-widow, 154.
Clintonia, 4.
Coccoloba, 118.
Cocoa plum, 115, 122.
Cormorant, Florida, 84, 124.
Coyote, 224.
Cranberry, mountain, 23.

Crane, sandhill, 293.
Creosote bush, 200, 206.
Crescentia, 112.
Crinum, 126.
Crossbill, red, 63, 78.
Crow, American, 79, 157.

carrion, 86, 124.

fish, 85, 97, 129.
Cypress, 122.

Diapensia, 35.

Dove, ground, 86, 130.

Dutchman' s-breechei, 19, 29.

Eagle, bald, 141.
golden, 220.

Evening primrose, 200, 247.
Eyebright, 35.

Ficus aurea, 99.
Finch, Lincoln, 74, 192.

purple, 8, 66, 78. .
Flicker, 85, 86, 129.

red-shafted, 178.
Flycatcher, Arizona crested,
271.

crested, 108, 130.

olive-sided, 63.

scissor-tailed, 259.

vermilion, 266, 286.

Gallinule, Florida, 149.
Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, 85, 86,

108.

plumbeous, 219.
Goldfinch, American, 41, 61,78.

INDEX

Goldfinch Mexican, 178.
Grackle, boat-tailed, 85, 129,

130.
Grosbeak, cardinal, 87, 104,

107, 108, 129, 130, 134,

139, 149, 156.
rose-breasted, 5, 10, 21.
Grouse, 11, 21, 70, 78.
Gumbo-limbo, 100.

Hawk, desert sparrow, 184,
292.

sharp-shinned, 38, 41, 69.

sparrow, 41, 94.

Western red-tailed, 219.
Heron, great blue, 141.

Louisiana, 124.
Hickory, 148.
Hornbeam, 145.
House finch, 180, 188, 199.
Huisache, 162.

Hummingbird, black-chinned.
284, 291.

Costa, 234.

ruby-throated, 86, 130.

Jay, blue, 67, 79, 86, 108, 130.

Florida, 93, 140.
Jessamine, yellow, 137, 149.
Junco, intermediate, 185.

Kingfisher, 124.

Kinglet, golden-crowned, 64,

71.
ruby-crowned, 65, 66, 78,

107, 130, 238.

Lark bunting, 191, 194.
Lupine, 200, 247.

Mangrove, 98, 121.
Martin, purple, 124.
Meadow lark, 156, 183.
Mockingbird, 85, 86, 87, 95,

100, 104, 107, 109, 129,

130, 139, 156.
Western, 254, 292.
Moon-flower, 88.
Morning-glory, 88, 97.

Nonpareil, 105, 108, 129, 130,

131,134.
Nuthatch, brown-headed, 150,

156.

Canadian (red-breasted),
7, 41, 60, 62, 64, 66, 71,
79.

Carolina (white-breasted),
123.

Ocotillo, 199.
Orchids, 98.
Oriole, Baltimore, 130.
Osprey, 124, 141.
Oven-bird, 21, 107.

Pavonia, 111.
Pelican, brown, 140.
Phainopepla, 276, 289.
Phlox, Drummond, 137, 153.
Phoebe, 86, 87, 104, 108, 130,
131.

black, 196, 240.

Say's, 181, 255.
Pithecolobium, 98.
Plover, killdeer, 124.
Poppy, California, 247, 249.
Porcupine, 27.
Pyrrhuloxia, Arizona, 185, 274.

Texas, 274.

Rabbits, 227.
Rail, Carolina, 149.
Raven, 212.

white-necked, 182, 191,

211, 219, 221.
Redstart, 64.

painted, 286.

INDEX

299

Road-runner, 163, 259, 284.
Robin, 8, 54, 66, 78, 86.

Western, 279.
Rose, Cherokee, 136, 154.

Sandwort, Greenland, 23.
Sapsucker, yellow-bellied, 59,

110.

Seven-year apple, 116.
Shrike, loggerhead, 95, 109.
Siskin, 21, 63, 78.
Snowbird, 21, 41, 62, 65, 66,

69, 78.

Solitaire, 289.
Sparrow, Cassin, 263.
chipping, 66.
desert, 210.
pine-wood, 156.
sage, 211.
savanna, 9.
song, 54, 65, 66, 75, 78,

138.

vesper, 75, 78.
white-crowned, 14, 74, 78,

192.

white-throated, 5, 8, 11,
22, 26, 58, 62, 64, 65,
66, 139.
Swallow, barn, 8.

tree, 86, 95, 124.
Sweet-bay, 146.
Sweet-gum, 136, 145.
Swift, white-throated, 273.

Tanager, summer, 155.
Thrasher, Bendire, 252, 255.

brown, 138, 156.

crissal, 254.

Palmer, 209,251,255.

sage, 207, 255.
Thrush, Bicknell's, 21, 37.

hermit, 8, 66, 78, 130.

Swainson's, 21, 27.
Titmouse, tufted, 139.

Trema, 100.

Trillium, painted, 6, 19.
purple, 29.

Vaccinium caespitosum, 49.
Verdin, 172, 239, 257, 291.
Violet, round-leaved, 4, 11,

19, 29.

Selkirk's, 30.
Vireo, blue-headed (solitary),

21, 86, 108, 129.
red-eyed, 147, 155.
yellow-throated, 129, 130.
white-eyed, 86, 104, 108,
130, 140, 147.

Warbler, Bachman's, 134.
bay-breasted, 21.
black-and-white, 107, 129,

156.

Blackburnian, 21.
black-throated blue, 21.
black-throated green, 21.
Lucy, 292.
myrtle, 21, 26, 41, 65, 66,

76, 86, 101, 107, 129,

130, 156.

palm, 86, 107, 129, 130.
parula, 21, 107, 129, 133,

134, 140, 155.
pileolated, 292.
pine, 86, 156.
prairie, 107, 129, 133, 156.
yellow palm, 78.
yellow-throated, 129, 130,

133, 134, 156.

Woodpecker, downy, 110, 129.
hairy, 18, 59, 63, 110.
ivory-billed, 110.
pileated, 79, 109, 150.
red-bellied, 86, 110, 129,

131, 149.

red-cockaded, 110.
red-headed, 110, 129.

300

INDEX

Wood pewee, 63.
Wren, Baird, 255.
cactus, 207, 251, 255.
canyon, 255, 280, 289, 292.
Carolina, 107, 139, 147,
156.
house, 105, 107, 129.

interior tule, 255.
rock, 198, 255, 291.
winter, 21, 59, 62, 64, 66.

Yellow-throat, Florida, 86, 105,
107.
Maryland, 57.

(Stfce

Elf ctrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.

AN

APR 1 6 1356

-H***

«1

397845- '

OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY