[Footnote 1:  My suggestion, I now discover,—­since this paper was first printed,—­was some years too late.  Mr. Ridgway, in his Manual of North American Birds (1887), had already described a subspecies of Florida redwings under the name of Agelaius phoeniceus bryanti.  Whether my New Smyrna birds should come under that title cannot be told, of course, in the absence of specimens; but on the strength of the song I venture to think it highly probable.]

The tall grass about the borders of the island was alive with clapper rails.  Before I rose in the morning I heard them crying in full chorus; and now and then during the day something would happen, and all at once they would break out with one sharp volley, and then instantly all would be silent again.  Theirs is an apt name,—­Rallus crepitans. Once I watched two of them in the act of crepitating, and ever after that, when the sudden uproar burst forth, I seemed to see the reeds full of birds, each with his bill pointing skyward, bearing his part in the salvo.  So, far as I could perceive, they had nothing to fear from human enemies.  They ran about the mud on the edge of the grass, especially in the morning, looking like half-grown pullets.  Their specialty was crab-fishing, at which they were highly expert, plunging into the water up to the depth of their legs, and handling and swallowing pretty large specimens with surprising dexterity.  I was greatly pleased with them, as well as with their local name, “everybody’s chickens.”

Once I feared we had heard the last of them.  On a day following a sudden fall of the mercury, a gale from the north set in at noon, with thunder and lightning, hail, and torrents of rain.  The river was quickly lashed into foam, and the gale drove the ocean into it through the inlet, till the shrubbery of the rails’ island barely showed above the breakers.  The street was deep under water, and fears were entertained for the new bridge and the road to the beach.  All night the gale continued, and all the next day till late in the afternoon; and when the river should have been at low tide, the island was still flooded.  Gravitation was overmatched for the time being.  And where were the rails, I asked myself.  They could swim, no doubt, when put to it, but it seemed impossible that they could survive so fierce an inundation.  Well, the wind ceased, the tide went out at last; and behold, the rails were in full cry, not a voice missing!  How they had managed it was beyond my ken.

Another island, farther out than that of the rails (but the rails, like the long-billed marsh wrens, appeared to be present in force all up and down the river, in suitable places), was occupied nightly as a crow-roost.  Judged by the morning clamor, which, like that of the rails, I heard from my bed, its population must have been enormous.  One evening I happened to come up the street just in time to see the hinder part of the procession—­some hundreds of