grew brilliant Mexican poppies, with Venus’s looking-glass, yellow oxalis, and beds of blackberry vines.  The woods of which my informant had spoken lay a little beyond the railway, on the right hand of the road, just as it began another ascent.  I entered them at once, and after a semicircular turn through the pleasant paths, amid live-oaks, water-oaks, red oaks, chestnut oaks, magnolias, beeches, hickories, hornbeams, sweet gums, sweet bays, and long-leaved and short-leaved pines, came out into the road again a quarter of a mile farther up the hill.  They were the fairest of woods to stroll in, it seemed to me, with paths enough, and not too many, and good enough, but not too good; that is to say, they were footpaths, not roads, though afterwards, on a Sunday afternoon, I met two young fellows riding through them on bicycles.  The wood was delightful, also, after my two months in eastern Florida, for lying on a slope, and for having an undergrowth of loose shrubbery instead of a jungle of scrub oak and saw palmetto.  Blue jays and crested flycatchers were doing their best to outscream one another,—­with the odds in favor of the flycatchers,—­and a few smaller birds were singing, especially two or three summer tanagers, as many yellow-throated warblers, and a ruby-crowned kinglet.  In one part of the wood, near what I took to be an old city reservoir, I came upon a single white-throated sparrow and a humming-bird,—­the latter a strangely uncommon sight in Tallahassee, where, of all the places I have ever seen, it ought to find itself in clover.  Here, too, were a pair of Carolina wrens, just now in search of a building-site, and conducting themselves exactly in the manner of bluebirds intent on such business; peeping into every hole that offered itself, and then, after the briefest interchange of opinion,—­unfavorable on the female’s part, if we may guess,—­concluding to look a little farther.

As I struck the road again, a man came along on horseback, and we fell into conversation about the country.  “A lovely country,” he called it, and I agreed with him.  He inquired where I was from, and I mentioned that I had lately been in southern Florida, and found this region a strong contrast.  “Yes,” he returned; and, pointing to the grass, he remarked upon the richness of the soil.  “This yere land would fertilize that,” he said, speaking of southern Florida.  “I shouldn’t wonder,” said I. I meant to be understood as concurring in his opinion, but such a qualified, Yankeefied assent seemed to him no assent at all.  “Oh, it will, it will!” he responded, as if the point were one about which I must on no account be left unconvinced.  He told me that the fine house at which I had looked, a little distance back, through a long vista of trees, was the residence of Captain H., who owned all the land along the road for a good distance.  I inquired how far the road was pretty, like this.  “For forty miles,” he said.  That was farther than I was ready to walk, and coming soon to the top