I could walk down the road for two miles and back again,
and then sit in my room at the hotel for fifteen minutes, and see more
wood birds, and more kinds of them, in one small live-oak before the
window than I had seen in the whole four miles; and that not once and by
accident, but again and again. In affairs of this kind it is useless to
contend. The spot looks favorable, you say, and nobody can deny it;
there must be birds there, plenty of them; your missing them to-day was
a matter of chance; you will try again. And you try again--and
again--and yet again. But in the end you have to acknowledge that, for
some reason unknown to you, the birds have agreed to give that place the
go-by.

One bird, it is true, I found in this hammock, and not elsewhere: a
single oven-bird, which, with one Northern water thrush and one
Louisiana water thrush, completed my set of Florida _Seiuri_. Besides
him I recall one hermit thrush, a few cedar-birds, a house wren,
chattering at a great rate among the "bootjacks" (leaf-stalks) of an
overturned palmetto-tree, with an occasional mocking-bird, cardinal
grosbeak, prairie warbler, yellow redpoll, myrtle bird, ruby-crowned
kinglet, phoebe, and flicker. In short, there were no birds at all,
except now and then an accidental straggler of a kind that could be
found almost anywhere else in indefinite numbers.

And as it was not the presence of birds that made the river road
attractive, so neither was it any unwonted display of blossoms. Beside a
similar road along the bank of the Halifax, in Daytona, grew multitudes
of violets, and goodly patches of purple verbena (garden plants gone
wild, perhaps), and a fine profusion of spiderwort,--a pretty flower,
the bluest of the blue, thrice welcome to me as having been one of the
treasures of the very first garden of which I have any remembrance.
"Indigo plant," we called it then. Here, however, on the way from New
Smyrna to Hawks Park, I recall no violets, nor any verbena or
spiderwort. Yellow wood-sorrel (oxalis) was here, of course, as it was
everywhere. It dotted the grass in Florida very much as five-fingers do
in Massachusetts, I sometimes thought. And the creeping, round-leaved
houstonia was here, with a superfluity of a weedy blue sage (_Salvia
lyrata_). Here, also, as in Daytona, I found a strikingly handsome
tufted plant, a highly varnished evergreen, which I persisted in taking
for a fern--the sterile fronds--in spite of repeated failures to