he
branches of roadside trees,--a typical Southern picture. Here, on a
Sunday afternoon, were two young fellows who had brought to town a
mother coon and three young ones, hoping to find a purchaser. The guests
at the hotels manifested no eagerness for such pets, but the colored
bell-boys and waiters gathered about, and after a little good-humored
dickering bought the entire lot, box and all, for a dollar and a half;
first having pulled the little ones out between the slats--not without
some risk to both parties--to look at them and pass them round. The
venders walked off with grins of ill-concealed triumph. The Fates had
been kind to them, and they had three silver half-dollars in their
pockets. I heard one of them say something about giving part of the
money to a third man who had told them where the nest was; but his
companion would listen to no such folly. "He wouldn't come with us," he
said, "and we won't tell him a damned thing." I fear there was nothing
distinctively Southern about _that_.

Here, too, in the heart of the town, was a magnificent cluster of
live-oaks, worth coming to Florida to see; far-spreading, full of ferns
and air plants, and heavy with hanging moss. Day after day I went out to
admire them. Under them was a neglected orange grove, and in one of the
orange-trees, amid the glossy foliage, appeared my first summer tanager.
It was a royal setting, and the splendid vermilion-red bird was worthy
of it. Among the oaks I walked in the evening, listening to the strange
low chant of the chuck-will's-widow,--a name which the owner himself
pronounces with a rest after the first syllable. Once, for two or three
days, the trees were amazingly full of blue yellow-backed warblers.
Numbers of them, a dozen at least, could be heard singing at once
directly over one's head, running up the scale not one after another,
but literally in unison. Here the tufted titmouse, the very soul of
monotony, piped and piped and piped, as if his diapason stop were pulled
out and stuck, and could not be pushed in again. He is an odd genius.
With plenty of notes, he wearies you almost to distraction, harping on
one string for half an hour together. He is the one Southern bird that I
should perhaps be sorry to see common in Massachusetts; but that
"perhaps" is a large word. Many yellow-throated warblers, silent as yet,
were commonly in the live-oaks, and innumerable myrtle birds, also
silent, with prairie warblers, black-and-white