The mill, as it stands, is not much to look at:  some fragments of wall built of coquina stone, with two or three arched windows and an arched door, the whole surrounded by a modern plantation of orange-trees, now almost as much a ruin as the mill itself.  But the mill was built more than a hundred years ago, and serves well enough the principal use of abandoned and decaying things,—­to touch the imagination.  For myself, I am bound to say, it was a precious two hours that I passed beside it, seated on a crumbling stone in the shade of a dying orange-tree.

Behind me a redbird was whistling (cardinal grosbeak, I have been accustomed to call him, but I like the Southern name better, in spite of its ambiguity), now in eager, rapid tones, now slowly and with a dying fall.  Now his voice fell almost to a whisper, now it rang out again; but always it was sweet and golden, and always the bird was out of sight in the shrubbery.  The orange-trees were in bloom; the air was full of their fragrance, full also of the murmur of bees.  All at once a deeper note struck in, and I turned to look.  A humming-bird was hovering amid the white blossoms and glossy leaves.  I saw his flaming throat, and the next instant he was gone, like a flash of light,—­the first hummer of the year.  I was far from home, and expectant of new things.  That, I dare say, was the reason why I took the sound at first for the boom of a bumble-bee; some strange Floridian bee, with a deeper and more melodious bass than any Northern insect is master of.

It is good to be here, I say to myself, and we need no tabernacle.  All things are in harmony.  A crow in the distance says caw, caw in a meditative voice, as if he, too, were thinking of days past; and not even the scream of a hen-hawk, off in the pine-woods, breaks the spell that is upon us.  A quail whistles,—­a true Yankee Bob White, to judge him by his voice,—­and the white-eyed chewink (he is not a Yankee) whistles and sings by turns.  The bluebird’s warble and the pine warbler’s trill could never be disturbing to the quietest mood.  Only one voice seems out of tune:  the white-eyed vireo, even to-day, cannot forget his saucy accent.  But he soon falls silent.  Perhaps, after all, he feels himself an intruder.

The morning is cloudless and warm, till suddenly, as if a door had been opened eastward, the sea breeze strikes me.  Henceforth the temperature is perfect as I sit in the shadow.  I think neither of heat nor of cold.  I catch a glimpse of a beautiful leaf-green lizard on the gray trunk of an orange-tree, but it is gone (I wonder where) almost before I can say I saw it.  Presently a brown one, with light-colored stripes and a bluish tail, is seen traveling over the crumbling wall, running into crannies and out again.  Now it stops to look at me with its jewel of an eye.  And there, on the rustic arbor, is a third one, matching the unpainted wood in hue.  Its throat is white, but when it is inflated, as happens every few seconds, it turns to the loveliest rose color.  This inflated membrane should be a vocal sac, I think, but I hear no sound.  Perhaps the chameleon’s voice is too fine for dull human sense.