flowers,” flowers which it seems perfectly natural to pluck for a nosegay, were very little in evidence.  I heard Northern visitors remark the fact again and again.  On this pretty road out of Tallahassee—­itself a city of flower gardens—­I can recall nothing of the kind except half a dozen strawberry blossoms, and the oxalis and specularia before mentioned.  Probably the round-leaved houstonia grew here, as it did everywhere, in small scattered patches.  If there were violets as well, I can only say I have forgotten them.

Be it added, however, that at the time I did not miss them.  In a garden of roses one does not begin by sighing for mignonette and lilies of the valley.  Violets or no violets, there was no lack of beauty.  The Southern highway surveyor, if such a personage exists, is evidently not consumed by that distressing puritanical passion for “slicking up things” which too often makes of his Northern brother something scarcely better than a public nuisance.  At the South you will not find a woman cultivating with pain a few exotics beside the front door, while her husband is mowing and burning the far more attractive wild garden that nature has planted just outside the fence.  The St. Augustine road, at any rate, after climbing the hill and getting beyond the wood, runs between natural hedges,—­trees, vines, and shrubs carelessly intermingled,—­not dense enough to conceal the prospect or shut out the breeze ("straight from the Gulf,” as the Tallahassean is careful to inform you), but sufficient to afford much welcome protection from the sun.  Here it was good to find the sassafras growing side by side with the persimmon, although when, for old acquaintance’ sake, I put a leaf into my mouth I was half glad to fancy it a thought less savory than some I had tasted in Yankeeland.  I took a kind of foolish satisfaction, too, in the obvious fact that certain plants—­the sumach and the Virginia creeper, to mention no others—­were less at home here than a thousand miles farther north.  With the wild-cherry trees, I was obliged to confess, the case was reversed.  I had seen larger ones in Massachusetts, perhaps, but none that looked half so clean and thrifty.  In truth, their appearance was a puzzle, rum-cherry trees as by all tokens they undoubtedly were, till of a sudden it flashed upon me that there were no caterpillars’ nests in them!  Then I ceased to wonder at their odd look.  It spoke well for my botanical acumen that I had recognized them at all.

Before I had been a week in Tallahassee I found that, without forethought or plan, I had dropped into the habit (and how pleasant it is to think that some good habits can be dropped into!) of making the St. Augustine road my after-dinner sauntering-place.  The morning was for a walk:  to Lake Bradford, perhaps, in search of a mythical ivory-billed woodpecker, or westward on the railway for a few miles, with a view to rare migratory warblers.  But in the afternoon I did not walk,—­I loitered; and though