further, and an hour or two afterward, on getting back to the same place, was overtaken again by the horseman.  He pulled up his horse and bade me good-afternoon.  Would I lend him my opera-glass, which happened to be in my hand at the moment?  “I should like to see how my house looks from here,” he said; and he pointed across the field to a house on the hill some distance beyond.  “Ah,” said I, glad to set myself right by a piece of frankness that under the circumstances could hardly work to my disadvantage; “then it is your land on which I have been trespassing.”  “How so?” he asked, with a smile; and I explained that I had been across his cotton-field a little while before.  “That is no trespass,” he answered (so the reader will perceive that I had been quite correct in my understanding of the law); and when I went on to explain my object in visiting his cane-swamp (for such it was, he said, but an unexpected freshet had ruined the crop when it was barely out of the ground), he assured me that I was welcome to visit it as often as I wished.  He himself was very fond of natural history, and often regretted that he had not given time to it in his youth.  As it was, he protected the birds on his plantation, and the place was full of them.  I should find his woods interesting, he felt sure.  Florida was extremely rich in birds; he believed there were some that had never been classified.  “We have orioles here,” he added; and so far, at any rate, he was right; I had seen perhaps twenty that day (orchard orioles, that is), and one sat in a tree before us at the moment.  His whole manner was most kindly and hospitable,—­as was that of every Tallahassean with whom I had occasion to speak,—­and I told him with sincere gratitude that I should certainly avail myself of his courtesy and stroll through his woods.

I approached them, two mornings afterward, from the opposite side, where, finding no other place of entrance, I climbed a six-barred, tightly locked gate—­feeling all the while like “a thief and a robber”—­in front of a deserted cabin.  Then I had only to cross a grassy field, in which meadow larks were singing, and I was in the woods.  I wandered through them without finding anything more unusual or interesting than summer tanagers and yellow-throated warblers, which were in song there, as they were in every such place, and after a while came out into a pleasant glade, from which different parts of the plantation could be seen, and through which ran a plantation road.  Here was a wooden fence,—­a most unusual thing,—­and I lost no time in mounting it, to rest and look about me.  It is one of the marks of a true Yankee, I suspect, to like such a perch.  My own weakness in that direction is a frequent subject of mirth with chance fellow travelers.  The attitude is comfortable and conducive to meditation; and now that I was seated and at my ease, I felt that this was one of the New England luxuries which, almost without knowing it, I had missed ever since I left home.