Two or three mornings afterward, I set out in the direction indicated.  If the route proved to be half as vague as my good lady’s account of it had sounded, I should probably never find the mill; but the walk would be pleasant, and that, after all, was the principal consideration, especially to a man who just then cared more, or thought he did, for a new bird or a new song than for an indefinite number of eighteenth-century relics.

For the first half-mile the road follows one of the old Turnbull canals dug through the coquina stone which underlies the soil hereabout; then, after crossing the railway, it strikes to the left through a piece of truly magnificent wood, known as the cotton-shed hammock, because, during the war, cotton was stored here in readiness for the blockade runners of Mosquito Inlet.  Better than anything I had yet seen, this wood answered to my idea of a semi-tropical forest:  live-oaks, magnolias, palmettos, sweet gums, maples, and hickories, with here and there a long-leaved pine overtopping all the rest.  The palmettos, most distinctively Southern of them all, had been badly used by their hardier neighbors; they looked stunted, and almost without exception had been forced out of their normal perpendicular attitude.  The live-oaks, on the other hand, were noble specimens; lofty and wide-spreading, elm-like in habit, it seemed to me, though not without the sturdiness which belongs as by right to all oaks, and seldom or never to the American elm.

What gave its peculiar tropical character to the wood, however, was not so much the trees as the profusion of plants that covered them and depended from them:  air-plants (Tillandsia), large and small,—­like pineapples, with which they claim a family relationship,—­the exuberant hanging moss, itself another air-plant, ferns, and vines.  The ferns, a species of polypody ("resurrection ferns,” I heard them called), completely covered the upper surface of many of the larger branches, while the huge vines twisted about the trunks, or, quite as often, dropped straight from the treetops to the ground.

In the very heart of this dense, dark forest (a forest primeval, I should have said, but I was assured that the ground had been under cultivation so recently that, to a practiced eye, the cotton-rows were still visible) stood a grove of wild orange-trees, the handsome fruit glowing like lamps amid the deep green foliage.  There was little other brightness.  Here and there in the undergrowth were yellow jessamine vines, but already—­March 11—­they were past flowering.  Almost or quite the only blossom just now in sight was the faithful round-leaved houstonia, growing in small flat patches in the sand on the edge of the road, with budding partridge-berry—­a Yankee in Florida—­to keep it company.  Warblers and titmice twittered in the leafy treetops, and butterflies of several kinds, notably one gorgeous creature in yellow and black, like a larger and more