ent found the city
enveloped in a dense fog. The hotel clerk, an old resident, to whom I
went in my perplexity, was as much surprised as his questioner. He did
not know what it could mean, he was sure; it was very unusual; but he
thought it did not indicate foul weather. For a man so slightly
acquainted with such phenomena, he proved to be a remarkably good
prophet; for though, during my fortnight's stay, there must have been at
least eight foggy mornings, every day was sunny, and not a drop of rain
fell.

That first bright forenoon is still a bright memory. For one thing, the
mocking-birds outsang themselves till I felt, and wrote, that I had
never heard mocking-birds before. That they really did surpass their
brethren of St. Augustine and Sanford would perhaps be too much to
assert, but so it seemed; and I was pleased, some months afterward, to
come upon a confirmatory judgment by Mr. Maurice Thompson, who, if any
one, must be competent to speak.

"If I were going to risk the reputation of our country on the singing of
a mocking-bird against a European nightingale," says Mr. Thompson,[1] "I
should choose my champion from the hill-country in the neighborhood of
Tallahassee, or from the environs of Mobile.... I have found no birds
elsewhere to compare with those in that belt of country about thirty
miles wide, stretching from Live Oak in Florida, by way of Tallahassee,
to some miles west of Mobile."

[Footnote 1: _By-Ways and Bird-Notes_, p. 20.]

I had gone down the hill past some negro cabins, into a small,
straggling wood, and through the wood to a gate which let me into a
plantation lane. It was the fairest of summer forenoons (to me, I mean;
by the almanac it was only the 5th of April), and one of the fairest of
quiet landscapes: broad fields rising gently to the horizon, and before
me, winding upward, a grassy lane open on one side, and bordered on the
other by a deep red gulch and a zigzag fence, along which grew vines,
shrubs, and tall trees. The tender and varied tints of the new leaves,
the lively green of the young grain, the dark ploughed fields, the red
earth of the wayside--I can see them yet, with all that Florida sunshine
on them. In the bushes by the fence-row were a pair of cardinal
grosbeaks, the male whistling divinely, quite unabashed by the
volubility of a mocking-bird who balanced himself on the treetop
overhead,

"Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray,"

and seemed determined to show a