a man who cannot tell at least one snake story may be set down
as having land to sell.) He thought it a pretty good jaunt to the lake,
and the road wasn't any too plain, though no doubt I should get there;
but I began to perceive that a white man who traveled such distances on
foot in that country was more of a _rara avis_ than any woodpecker.

Our roads diverged after a while, and my own soon ran into a wood with
an undergrowth of saw palmetto. This was the place for the ivory-bill,
and as at the swamp two days before, so now I stopped and listened, and
then stopped and listened again. The Fates were still against me. There
was neither woodpecker nor turkey, and I pushed on, mostly through pine
woods--full of birds, but nothing new--till I came out at the lake.
Here, beside an idle sawmill and heaps of sawdust, I was greeted by a
solitary negro, well along in years, who demanded, in a tone of almost
comical astonishment, where in the world I had come from. I told him
from Tallahassee, and he seemed so taken aback that I began to think I
must look uncommonly like an invalid, a "Northern consumptive," perhaps.
Otherwise, why should a walk of six miles, or something less, be treated
as such a marvel? However, the negro and I were soon on the friendliest
of terms, talking of the old times, the war, the prospects of the
colored people (the younger ones were fast going to the bad, he
thought), while I stood looking out over the lake, a pretty sheet of
water, surrounded mostly by cypress woods, but disfigured for the
present by the doings of lumbermen. What interested me most (such is the
fate of the devotee) was a single barn swallow, the first and only one
that I saw on my Southern trip.

On my way back to the city, after much fatherly advice about the road on
the part of the negro, who seemed to feel that I ran the greatest risk
of getting lost, I made two more additions to my Florida catalogue--the
wood duck and the yellow-billed cuckoo, the latter unexpectedly early
(April 11), since Mr. Chapman had recorded it as arriving at Gainesville
at a date sixteen days later than this.

I did not repeat my visit to Lake Bradford; but, not to give up the
ivory-bill too easily,--and because I must walk somewhere,--I went
again as far as the palmetto scrub. This time, though I still missed the
woodpecker, I was fortunate enough to come upon a turkey. In the
thickest part of the wood, as I turned a corner, there she stood before
me