With the fascination of the swamp still upon me, I heard somewhere in the distance a musical voice, and soon came in sight of a garden where a middle-aged negro was hoeing,—­hoeing and singing:  a wild, minor, endless kind of tune; a hymn, as seemed likely from a word caught here and there; a true piece of natural melody, as artless as any bird’s.  I walked slowly to get more of it, and the happy-sad singer minded me not, but kept on with his hoe and his song.  Potatoes or corn, whatever his crop may have been,—­I did not notice, or, if I did, I have forgotten,—­it should have prospered under his hand.

Farther along, in the highway,—­a sandy track, with wastes of scrub on either side,—­boy of eight or nine, armed with a double-barreled gun, was lingering about a patch of dwarf oaks and palmettos.  “Haven’t got that rabbit yet, eh?” said I. (I had passed him there on my way out, and he had told me what he was after.)

“No, sir,” he answered.

“I don’t believe there’s any rabbit there.”

“Yes, there is, sir; I saw one a little while ago, but he got away before I could get pretty near.”

“Good!” I thought.  “Here is a grammarian.  Not one boy in ten in this country but would have said ‘I seen.’” A scholar like this was worth talking with.  “Are there many rabbits here?” I asked.

“Yes, sir, there’s a good deal.”

And so, by easy mental stages, I was clear of the swamp and back in the town,—­saved from the horrible, and delivered to the commonplace and the dreary.

My best days in Sanford were two that I spent on the river above the lake.  A youthful boatman, expert alike with the oar and the gun, served me faithfully and well, impossible as it was for him to enter fully into the spirit of a man who wanted to look at birds, but not to kill them.  I think he had never before seen a customer of that breed.  First he rowed me up the “creek,” under promise to show me alligators, moccasins, and no lack of birds, including the especially desired purple gallinule.  The snakes were somehow missing (a loss not irreparable), and so were the purple gallinules; for them, the boy thought, it was still rather early in the season, although he had killed one a few days before, and for proof had brought me a wing.  But as we were skirting along the shore I suddenly called “Hist!” An alligator lay on the bank just before us.  The boy turned his head, and instantly was all excitement.  It was a big fellow, he said,—­one of three big ones that inhabited the creek.  He would get him this time.  “Are you sure?” I asked.  “Oh yes, I’ll blow the top of his head off.”  He was loaded for gallinules, and I, being no sportsman, and never having seen an alligator before, was some shades less confident.  But it was his game, and I left him to his way.  He pulled the boat noiselessly against the bank in the shelter of tall reeds, put down the oars, with which he could almost have touched the alligator, and took up his gun.  At that moment the creature got wind of us, and slipped incontinently into the water, not a little to my relief.  One live alligator is worth a dozen dead ones, to my thinking.  He showed his back above the surface of the stream for a moment shortly afterward, and then disappeared for good.