agent, in turn, advised me to walk up the track to the “Junction,” and be sure to tell the conductor, when the evening train arrived, as it probably would do some hours later, that I had a trunk at the landing.  Otherwise the train would not run down to the river, and my baggage would lie there till Monday.  He would go down presently and put it under cover.  Happily, he fulfilled his promise, for it was already beginning to thunder, and soon it rained in torrents, with a cold wind that made the hot weather all at once a thing of the past.

It was a long wait in the dreary little station; or rather it would have been, had not the tedium of it been relieved by the presence of a newly married couple, whose honeymoon was just then at the full.  Their delight in each other was exuberant, effervescent, beatific,—­what shall I say?—­quite beyond veiling or restraint.  At first I bestowed upon them sidewise and cornerwise glances only, hiding bashfully behind my spectacles, as it were, and pretending to see nothing; but I soon perceived that I was to them of no more consequence than a fly on the wall.  If they saw me, which sometimes seemed doubtful,—­for love is blind,—­they evidently thought me too sensible, or too old, to mind a little billing and cooing.  And they were right in their opinion.  What was I in Florida for, if not for the study of natural history?  And truly, I have seldom seen, even among birds, a pair less sophisticated, less cabined and confined by that disastrous knowledge of good and evil which is commonly understood to have resulted from the eating of forbidden fruit, and which among prudish people goes by the name of modesty.  It was refreshing.  Charles Lamb himself would have enjoyed it, and, I should hope, would have added some qualifying footnotes to a certain unamiable essay of his concerning the behavior of married people.

ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD.

One of my first inquiries at Tallahassee was for the easiest way to the woods.  The city is built on a hill, with other hills about it.  These are mostly under cultivation, and such woods as lay within sight seemed to be pretty far off; and with the mercury at ninety in the shade, long tramps were almost out of the question.  “Take the St. Augustine road,” said the man to whom I had spoken; and he pointed out its beginning nearly opposite the state capitol.  After breakfast I followed his advice, with results so pleasing that I found myself turning that corner again and again as long as I remained in Tallahassee.

The road goes abruptly downhill to the railway track, first between deep red gulches, and then between rows of negro cabins, each with its garden of rosebushes, now (early April) in full bloom.  The deep sides of the gulches were draped with pendent lantana branches full of purple flowers, or, more beautiful still, with a profusion of fragrant white honeysuckle.  On the roadside, between the wheel-track and the gulch,