miliarity or favoritism. All praise to the mocker
and the thrasher! May their tribe increase! But if we are to indulge in
comparisons, give me the wood thrush, the hermit, and the veery; with
tones that the mocking-bird can never imitate, and a simplicity which
the Fates--the wise Fates, who will have variety--have put forever
beyond his appreciation and his reach.

Florida as I saw it (let the qualification be noted) is no more a land
of flowers than New England. In some respects, indeed, it is less so.
Flowering shrubs and climbers there are in abundance. I rode in the cars
through miles on miles of flowering dogwood and pink azalea. Here, on
this Tallahassee road, were miles of Cherokee roses, with plenty of the
climbing scarlet honeysuckle (beloved of humming-birds, although I saw
none here), and nearer the city, as already described, masses of lantana
and white honeysuckle. In more than one place pink double roses
(vagrants from cultivated grounds, no doubt) offered buds and blooms to
all who would have them. The cross-vine (_Bignonia_), less freehanded,
hung its showy bells out of reach in the treetops. Thorn-bushes of
several kinds were in flower (a puzzling lot), and the treelike
blueberry (_Vaccinium arboreum_), loaded with its large, flaring white
corollas, was a real spectacle of beauty. Here, likewise, I found one
tiny crab-apple shrub, with a few blossoms, exquisitely tinted with
rose-color, and most exquisitely fragrant. But the New Englander, when
he talks of wild flowers, has in his eye something different from these.
He is not thinking of any bush, no matter how beautiful, but of trailing
arbutus, hepaticas, bloodroot, anemones, saxifrage, violets, dogtooth
violets, spring beauties, "cowslips," buttercups, corydalis, columbine,
Dutchman's breeches, clintonia, five-finger, and all the rest of that
bright and fragrant host which, ever since he can remember, he has seen
covering his native hills and valleys with the return of May.

It is not meant, of course, that plants like these are wholly wanting in
Florida. I remember an abundance of violets, blue and white, especially
in the flat-woods, where also I often found pretty butterworts of two or
three sorts. The smaller blue ones took very acceptably the place of
hepaticas, and indeed I heard them called by that name. But, as compared
with what one sees in New England, such "ground flowers," flowers which
it seems perfectly natural to pluck for a nosegay,