taste, and as such are not to be disputed about.  Thus, a man stopped me in Tallahassee to inquire what time it was.  I told him, and he said, “Ah, a little sooner than I thought.”  And why not “sooner” as well as “earlier”?  But when, on the same road, two white girls in an ox-cart hailed me with the question, “What time ’t is?” I thought the interrogative idiom a little queer; almost as queer, shall we say, as “How do you do?” may have sounded to the first man who heard it,—­if the reader is able to imagine such a person.

Meanwhile, let the morning be “fine” or “pretty,” it was all one to the birds.  The woods were vocal with the cackling of robins, the warble of bluebirds, and the trills of pine warblers.  Flickers were shouting—­or laughing, if one pleased to hear it so—­with true flickerish prolixity, and a single downy woodpecker called sharply again and again.  A mocking-bird near me (there is always a mocking-bird near you, in Florida) added his voice for a time, but soon relapsed into silence.  The fact was characteristic; for, wherever I went, I found it true that the mocker grew less musical as the place grew wilder.  By instinct he is a public performer, he demands an audience; and it is only in cities, like St. Augustine and Tallahassee, that he is heard at his freest and best.  A loggerhead shrike—­now close at my elbow, now farther away—­was practicing his extensive vocabulary with perseverance, if not with enthusiasm.  Like his relative the “great northern,” though perhaps in a less degree, the loggerhead is commonly at an extreme, either loquacious or dumb; as if he could not let his moderation be known unto any man.  Sometimes I fancied him possessed with an insane ambition to match the mocking-bird in song as well as in personal appearance.  If so, it is not surprising that he should be subject to fits of discouragement and silence.  Aiming at the sun, though a good and virtuous exercise, as we have all heard, is apt to prove dispiriting to sensible marksmen.  Crows (fish crows, in all probability, but at the time I did not know it) uttered strange, hoarse, flat-sounding caws.  Everv bird of them must have been born without a palate, it seemed to me.  White-eyed chewinks were at home in the dense palmetto scrub, whence they announced themselves unmistakably by sharp whistles.  Now and then one of them mounted a leaf, and allowed me to see his pale yellow iris.  Except for this mark, recognizable almost as far as the bird could be distinguished at all, he looked exactly like our common New England towhee.  Somewhere behind me was a kingfisher’s rattle, and from a savanna in the same direction came the songs of meadow larks; familiar, but with something unfamiliar about them at the same time, unless my ears deceived me.