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[Transcriber's Note: The original scan for text page 142 is missing.This is noted where it occurs in the text.]
A MORNING AT THE OLD SUGARMILL.
ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTONPLANTATION.
In approaching Jacksonville by rail, the traveler rides hourafter hour through seemingly endless pine barrens, otherwise knownas low pine-woods and flat-woods, till he wearies of the sight. Itwould be hard, he thinks, to imagine a region more unwholesomelooking and uninteresting, more poverty-stricken and God-forsaken,in its entire aspect. Surely, men who would risk life in behalf ofsuch a country deserved to win their cause.
Monotonous as the flat-woods were, however, and malarious asthey looked,—arid wastes and stretches of stagnant waterflying past the car window in perpetual alternation, I wasimpatient to get into them. They were a world the like of which Ihad never seen; and wherever I went in eastern Florida, I made itone of my earliest concerns to seek them out.
My first impression was one of disappointment, or perhaps Ishould rather say, of bewilderment. In fact, I returned from myfirst visit to the flat-woods under the delusion that I had notbeen into them at all. This was at St. Augustine, whither I hadgone after a night only in Jacksonville. I looked about the quaintlittle city, of course, and went to the South Beach, on St.Anastasia Island; then I wished to see the pine lands. They were tobe found, I was told, on the other side of the San Sebastian. Thesun was hot (or so it seemed to a man fresh from the rigors of aNew England winter), and the sand was deep; but I sauntered throughNew Augustine, and pushed on up the road toward Moultrie (I believeit was), till the last houses were passed and I came to the edge ofthe pine-woods. Here, presently, the roads began to fork in a veryconfusing manner. The first man I met— a kindlycracker—cautioned me against getting lost; but I had nothought of taking the slightest risk of that kind. I was not goingto explore the woods, but only to enter them, sit down, lookabout me, and listen. The difficulty was to get into them. As Iadvanced, they receded. It was still only the beginning of a wood;the trees far ap