A Florida Sketch-Book Part 6

No more could I. "It wasn't a blue jay, was it?" he asked. And then we talked of one thing and another, I have no idea what, till he rode away to another part of the plantation where a gang of women were at work. By this time the grosbeak had disappeared utterly. Possibly he had gone to a bit of wood on the opposite side of the cane-swamp. I scaled a barbed-wire fence and made in that direction, but to no purpose. The grosbeak was gone for good. Probably I should never see another. Could the planter have read my thoughts just then he would perhaps have been angry with himself, and pretty certainly he would have been angry with me. That a Yankee should accept his hospitality, and then load him with curses and call him all manner of names! How should he know that I was so insane a hobbyist as to care more for the sight of a new bird than for all the laws and customs of ordinary politeness? As my feelings cooled, I saw that I was stepping over hills or rows of some strange-looking plants just out of the ground. Peanuts, I guessed; but to make sure I called to a colored woman who was hoeing not far off.

"What are these?" "Pinders," she answered. I knew she meant peanuts,--otherwise "ground-peas" and "goobers,"--and now that I once more have a dictionary at my elbow I learn that the word, like "goober,"

is, or is supposed to be, of African origin.

I was preparing to surmount the barbed-wire fence again, when the planter returned and halted for another chat. It was evident that he took a genuine and amiable interest in my researches. There were a great many kinds of sparrows in that country, he said, and also of woodp.e.c.k.e.rs. He knew the ivory-bill, but, like other Tallaha.s.seans, he thought I should have to go into Lafayette County (all Florida people say La_fay_ette) to find it. "That bird calling now is a bee-bird," he said, referring to a kingbird; "and we have a bird that is called the French mocking-bird; he catches other birds." The last remark was of interest for its bearing upon a point about which I had felt some curiosity, and, I may say, some skepticism, as I had seen many loggerhead shrikes, but had observed no indication that other birds feared them or held any grudge against them. As he rode off he called my attention to a great blue heron just then flying over the swamp. "They are very shy," he said. Then, from further away, he shouted once more to ask if I heard the mocking-bird singing yonder, pointing with his whip in the direction of the singer.

For some time longer I hung about the glade, vainly hoping that the grosbeak would again favor my eyes. Then I crossed more planted fields,--climbing more barbed-wire fences, and stopping on the way to enjoy the sweetly quaint music of a little chorus of white-crowned sparrows,--and skirted once more the muddy sh.o.r.e of the cane-swamp, where the yellowlegs and sandpipers were still feeding. That brought me to the road from which I had made my entry to the place some days before; but, being still unable to forego a splendid possibility, I recrossed the plantation, tarried again in the glade, sat again on the wooden fence (if that grosbeak only _would_ show himself!), and thence went on, picking a few heads of handsome buffalo clover, the first I had ever seen, and some sprays of penstemon, till I came again to the six-barred gate and the Quincy road. At that point, as I now remember, the air was full of vultures (carrion crows), a hundred or more, soaring over the fields in some fit of gregariousness. Along the road were white-crowned and white-throated sparrows (it was the 12th of April), orchard orioles, thrashers, summer tanagers, myrtle and paim warblers, cardinal grosbeaks, mocking-birds, kingbirds, logger-heads, yellow--throated vireos, and sundry others, but not the blue grosbeak, which would have been worth them all.

Once back at the hotel, I opened my Coues's Key to refresh my memory as to the exact appearance of that bird. "Feathers around base of bill black," said the book. I had not noticed that. But no matter; the bird was a blue grosbeak, for the sufficient reason that it could not be anything else. A black line between the almost black beak and the dark-blue head would be inconspicuous at the best, and quite naturally would escape a glimpse so hasty as mine had been. And yet, while I reasoned in this way, I foresaw plainly enough that, as time pa.s.sed, doubt would get the better of a.s.surance, as it always does, and I should never be certain that I had not been the victim of some illusion. At best, the evidence was worth nothing for others. If only that excellent Mr. ----, for whose kindness I was unfeignedly thankful (and whose pardon I most sincerely beg if I seem to have been a bit too free in this rehearsal of the story),--if only Mr. ---- could have left me alone for ten minutes longer!

The worry and the imprecations were wasted, after all, as, Heaven be thanked, they so often are; for within two or three days I saw other blue grosbeaks and heard them sing. But that was not on a cotton plantation, and is part of another story.

A FLORIDA SHRINE.

All pilgrims to Tallaha.s.see visit the Murat place. It is one of the most conveniently accessible of those "points of interest" with which guide-books so anxiously, and with so much propriety, concern themselves. What a tourist prays for is something to see. If I had ever been a tourist in Boston, no doubt I should before now have surveyed the world from the top of the Bunker Hill monument. In Tallaha.s.see, at all events, I went to the Murat estate. In fact, I went more than once; but I remember especially my first visit, which had a livelier sentimental interest than the others because I was then under the agreeable delusion that the Prince himself had lived there. The guide-book told me so, vouchsafing also the information that after building the house he "interested himself actively in local affairs, became a naturalized citizen, and served successively as postmaster, alderman, and mayor"--a model immigrant, surely, though it is rather the way of immigrants, perhaps, not to refuse political responsibilities.

Naturally, I remembered these things as I stood in front of "the big house"--a story-and-a-half cottage--amid the flowering shrubs. Here lived once the son of the King of Naples; himself a Prince, and--worthy son of a worthy sire--alderman and then mayor of the city of Tallaha.s.see. Thus did an uncompromising democrat pay court to the shades of Royalty, while a mocking-bird sang from a fringe-bush by the gate, and an oriole flew madly from tree to tree in pursuit of a fair creature of the reluctant s.e.x.

The inconsistency, if such it was, was quickly punished. For, alas! when I spoke of my morning's pilgrimage to an old resident of the town, he told me that Murat never lived in the house, nor anywhere else in Tallaha.s.see, and of course was never its postmaster, alderman, or mayor.

The Princess, he said, built the house after her husband's death, and lived there, a widow. I appealed to the guide-book. My informant sneered,--politely,--and brought me a still older Tallaha.s.sean, Judge ----, whose venerable name I am sorry to have forgotten, and that indisputable citizen confirmed all that his neighbor had said. For once, the guide-book compiler must have been misinformed.

The question, happily, was one of no great consequence. If the Prince had never lived in the house, the Princess had; and she, by all accounts (and I make certain her husband would have said the same), was the worthier person of the two. And even if neither of them had lived there, if my sentiment had been _all_ wasted (but there was no question of tears), the place itself was sightly, the house was old, and the way thither a pleasant one--first down the hill in a zigzag course to the vicinity of the railway station, then by a winding country road through the valley past a few negro cabins, and up the slope on the farther side. Prince Murat, or no Prince Murat, I should love to travel that road to-day, instead of sitting before a Ma.s.sachusetts fire, with the ground deep under snow, and the air full of thirty or forty degrees of frost.

In the front yard of one of the cabins opposite the car-wheel foundry, and near the station, as I now remember, a middle-aged negress was cutting up an oak log. She swung the axe with vigor and precision, and the chips flew; but I could not help saying, "You ought to make the man do that."

She answered on the instant. "I would," she said, "if I had a man to _make_."

"I'm sure you would," I thought. Her tongue was as sharp as her axe.

Ought I to have ventured a word in her behalf, I wonder, when a man of her own color, and a pretty near neighbor, told me with admirable _navete_ the story of his bereavement and his hopes? His wife had died a year before, he said, and so far, though he had not let the gra.s.s grow under his feet, he had found no one to take her place. He still meant to do so, if he could. He was only seventy-four years old, and it was not good for a man to be alone. He seemed a gentle spirit, and I withheld all mention of the stalwart and manless wood-cutter. I hope he went farther, and fared better. So youthful as he was, surely there was no occasion for haste.

When I had skirted a cotton-field--the crop just out of the ground--and a bit of wood on the right, and a swamp with a splendid display of white water-lilies on the left, and had begun to ascend the gentle slope, I met a man of considerably more than seventy-four years.

"Can you tell me just where the Murat place is?" I inquired.

He grinned broadly, and thought he could. He was one of the old Murat servants, as his father had been before him. "I was borned on to him,"

he said, speaking of the Prince. Murat was "a gentleman, sah." That was a statement which it seemed impossible for him to repeat often enough.

He spoke from a slave's point of view. Murat was a good master. The old man had heard him say that he kept servants "for the like of the thing."

He didn't abuse them. He "never was for barbarizing a poor colored person at all." Whipping? Oh, yes. "He didn't miss your fault. No, sah, he didn't miss your fault." But his servants never were "ironed." He "didn't believe in barbarousment."

The old man was thankful to be free; but to his mind emanc.i.p.ation had not made everything heavenly. The younger set of negroes ("my people"

was his word) were on the wrong road. They had "sold their birthright,"

though exactly what he meant by that remark I did not gather. "They ain't got no sense," he declared, "and what sense they has got don't do 'em no good."

I told him finally that I was from the North. "Oh, I knows it," he exclaimed, "I knows it;" and he beamed with delight. How did he know, I inquired. "Oh, I knows it. I can see it _in_ you. Anybody would know it that had any jedgment at all. You's a perfect gentleman, sah." He was too old to be quarreled with, and I swallowed the compliment.

I tore myself away, or he might have run on till night--about his old master and mistress, the division of the estate, an abusive overseer ("he was a perfect dog, sah!"), and sundry other things. He had lived a long time, and had nothing to do now but to recall the past and tell it over. So it will be with us, if we live so long. May we find once in a while a patient listener.

This patriarch's unfavorable opinion as to the prospects of the colored people was shared by my hopeful young widower before mentioned, who expressed himself quite as emphatically. He was brought up among white people ("I's been taughted a heap," he said), and believed that the salvation of the blacks lay in their recognition of white supremacy. But he was less perspicacious than the older man. He was one of the very few persons whom I met at the South who did not recognize me at sight as a Yankee. "Are you a legislator-man?" he asked, at the end of our talk.

The legislature was in session on the hill. But perhaps, after all, he only meant to flatter me.

If I am long on the way, it is because, as I love always to have it, the going and coming were the better part of the pilgrimage. The estate itself is beautifully situated, with far-away horizons; but it has fallen into great neglect, while the house, almost in ruins, and occupied by colored people, is to Northern eyes hardly more than a larger cabin. It put me in mind of the question of a Western gentleman whom I met at St. Augustine. He had come to Florida against his will, the weather and the doctor having combined against him, and was looking at everything through very blue spectacles. "Have you seen any of those fine old country mansions," he asked, "about which we read so often in descriptions of Southern, life?" He had been on the lookout for them, he averred, ever since he left home, and had yet to find the first one; and from his tone it was evident that he thought the Southern idea of a "fine old mansion" must be different from his.

The Murat house, certainly, was never a palace, except as love may have made it so. But it was old; people had lived in it, and died in it; those who once owned it, whose name and memory still clung to it, were now in narrower houses; and it was easy for the visitor--for one visitor, at least--to fall into pensive meditation. I strolled about the grounds; stood between the last year's cotton-rows, while a Carolina wren poured out his soul from an oleander bush near by; admired the confidence of a pair of shrikes, who had made a nest in a honeysuckle vine in the front yard; listened to the sweet music of mocking-birds, cardinals, and orchard orioles; watched the martins circling above the trees; thought of the Princess, and smiled at the black children who thrust their heads out of the windows of her "big house;" and then, with a sprig of honeysuckle for a keepsake, I started slowly homeward.

The sun by this time was straight overhead, but my umbrella saved me from absolute discomfort, while birds furnished here and there an agreeable diversion. I recall in particular some white-crowned sparrows, the first ones I had seen in Florida. At a bend in the road opposite the water-lily swamp, while I was cooling myself in the shade of a friendly pine-tree,--enjoying at the same time a fence overrun with Cherokee roses,--a man and his little boy came along in a wagon. The man seemed really disappointed when I told him that I was going into town, instead of coming from it. It was pretty warm weather for walking, and he had meant to offer me a lift. He was a Scandinavian, who had been for some years in Florida. He owned a good farm not far from the Murat estate, which latter he had been urged to buy; but he thought a man wasn't any better off for owning too much land. He talked of his crops, his children, the climate, and so on, all in a cheerful strain, pleasant to hear. If the pessimists are right,--which may I be kept from believing,--the optimists are certainly more comfortable to live with, though it be only for ten minutes under a roadside shade-tree.

When I reached the street-car track at the foot of the hill, the one car which plies back and forth through the city was in its place, with the driver beside it, but no mules.

"Are you going to start directly?" I asked.

"Yes, sah," he answered; and then, looking toward the stable, he shouted in a peremptory voice, "Do about, there! Do about!"

"What does that mean?" said I. "Hurry up?"

"Yes, sah, that's it. 'Tain't everybody that wants to be hurried up; so we tells 'em, 'Do about!'"

Half a minute afterwards two very neatly dressed little colored boys stepped upon the rear platform.

"Where you goin'?" said the driver. "Uptown?"

They said they were.

"Well, come inside. Stay out there, and you'll git hurt and cost this dried-up company more money than you's wuth."

They dropped into seats by the rear door. He motioned them to the front corner. "Sit down there," he said, "right there." They obeyed, and as he turned away he added, what I found more and more to be true, as I saw more of him, "I ain't de boss, but I's got right smart to say."

Then, he whistled to the mules, flourished his whip, and to a persistent accompaniment of whacks and whistles we went crawling up the hill.

WALKS ABOUT TALLAHa.s.sEE.

I arrived at Tallaha.s.see, from Jacksonville, late in the afternoon, after a hot and dusty ride of more than eight hours. The distance is only a hundred and sixty odd miles, I believe; but with some bright exceptions, Southern railroads, like Southern men, seem to be under the climate, and schedule time is more or less a formality.

For the first two thirds of the way the country is flat and barren.

Happily, I sat within earshot of an amateur political economist, who, like myself, was journeying to the State capital. By birth and education he was a New York State man, I heard him say; an old abolitionist, who had voted for Birney, Fremont, and all their successors down to Hayes--the only vote he was ever ashamed of. Now he was a "greenbacker."

The country was going to the dogs, and all because the government did not furnish money enough. The people would find it out some time, he guessed. He talked as a bird sings--for his own pleasure. But I was pleased, too. His was an amiable enthusiasm, quite exempt, as it seemed, from all that bitterness, which an exclusive possession of the truth so commonly engenders. He was greatly in earnest; he knew he was right; but he could still see the comical side of things; he still had a sense of the ludicrous; and in that lay his salvation. For a sense of the ludicrous is the best of mental antiseptics; it, if anything, will keep our perishable human nature sweet, and save it from the madhouse. His discourse was punctuated throughout with quiet laughter. Thus, when he said, "_I_ call it the _late_ Republican party," it was with a chuckle so good-natured, so free from acidity and self-conceit, that only a pretty stiff partisan could have taken offense. Even his predictions of impending national ruin were delivered with numberless merry quips and twinkles. Many good Republicans and good Democrats (the adjective is used in its political sense) might have envied him his sunny temper, joined, as it was, to a good stock of native shrewdness. For something in his eye made it plain that, with all his other qualities, our merry greenbacker was a reasonably competent hand at a bargain; so that I was not in the least surprised when his seat-mate told me afterward, in a tone of much respect, that the "Colonel" owned a very comfortable property at St. Augustine. But his best possession, I still thought, was his humor and his own generous appreciation of it. To enjoy one's own jokes is to have a pretty safe insurance against inward adversity.

Happily, I say, this good-humored talker sat within hearing. Happily, too, it was now--April 4--the height of the season for flowering dogwood, pink azalea, fringe-bushes, Cherokee roses, and water lilies.

All these had blossomed abundantly, and mile after mile the wilderness and the solitary place were glad for them. Here and there, also, I caught flying glimpses of some unknown plant bearing a long upright raceme of creamy-white flowers. It might be a white lupine, I thought, till at one of our stops between stations it happened to be growing within reach. Then I guessed it to be a _Baptisia_, which guess was afterward confirmed--to my regret; for the flowers lost at once all their attractiveness. So ineffaceable (oftenest for good, but this time for ill) is an early impression upon the least honorably esteemed of the five senses! As a boy, it was one of my tasks to keep down with a scythe the weeds and bushes in a rocky, thin-soiled cattle pasture. In that task,--which, at the best, was a little too much like work--my most troublesome enemy was the common wild indigo (_Baptisia tinctoria_), partly from the wicked pertinacity with which it sprang up again after every mowing, but especially from the fact that the cut or bruised stalk exhaled what in my nostrils was a most abominable odor. Other people do not find it so offensive, I suspect, but to me it was, and is, ten times worse than the more pungent but comparatively salubrious perfume which a certain handsome little black-and-white quadruped--handsome, but impolite--is given to scattering upon the nocturnal breeze in moments of extreme perturbation.

Somewhere beyond the Suwanee River (at which I looked as long as it remained in sight--and thought of Christine Nilsson) there came a sudden change in the aspect of the country, coincident with a change in the nature of the soil, from white sand to red clay; a change indescribably exhilarating to a New Englander who had been living, if only for two months, in a country without hills. How good it was to see the land rising, though never so gently, as it stretched away toward the horizon!

My spirits rose with it. By and by we pa.s.sed extensive hillside plantations, on which little groups of negroes, men and women, were at work. I seemed to see the old South of which I had read and dreamed, a South not in the least like anything to be found in the wilds of southern and eastern Florida; a land of cotton, and, better still, a land of Southern people, instead of Northern tourists and settlers. And when we stopped at a thrifty-looking village, with neat, homelike houses, open grounds, and lordly shade-trees, I found myself saying under my breath, "Now, then, we are getting back into G.o.d's country."