Of my meditations on this particular occasion I remember nothing; but that is no sign they were valueless; as it is no sign that yesterday’s dinner did me no good because I have forgotten what it was.  In the latter case, indeed, and perhaps in the former as well, it would seem more reasonable to draw an exactly opposite inference.  But, quibbles apart, one thing I do remember:  I sat for some time on the fence, in the shade of a tree, with an eye upon the cane-swamp and an ear open for bird-voices.  Yes, and it comes to me at this moment that here I heard the first and only bull-frog that I heard anywhere in Florida.  It was like a voice from home, and belonged with the fence.  Other frogs I had heard in other places.  One chorus brought me out of bed in Daytona—­in the evening—­after a succession of February dog-day showers.  “What is that noise outside?” I inquired of the landlady as I hastened downstairs.  “That?” said she, with a look of amusement; “that’s frogs.”  “It may be,” I thought, but I followed the sounds till they led me in the darkness to the edge of a swamp.  No doubt the creatures were frogs, but of some kind new to me, with voices more lugubrious and homesick than I should have supposed could possibly belong to any batrachian.  A week or two later, in the New Smyrna flat-woods, I heard in the distance a sound which I took for the grunting of pigs.  I made a note of it, mentally, as a cheerful token, indicative of a probable scarcity of rattlesnakes; but by and by, as I drew nearer, the truth of the matter began to break upon me.  A man was approaching, and when we met I asked him what was making that noise yonder.  “Frogs,” he said.  At another time, in the flat-woods of Port Orange (I hope I am not taxing my reader’s credulity too far, or making myself out a man of too imaginative an ear), I heard the bleating of sheep.  Busy with other things, I did not stop to reflect that it was impossible there should be sheep in that quarter, and the occurrence had quite passed out of my mind when, one day, a cracker, talking about frogs, happened to say, “Yes, and we have one kind that makes a noise exactly like the bleating of sheep.”  That, without question, was what I had heard in the flat-woods.  But this frog in the sugar-cane swamp was the same fellow that on summer evenings, ever and ever so many years ago, in sonorous bass that could be heard a quarter of a mile away, used to call from Reuben Loud’s pond, “Pull him in!  Pull him in!” or sometimes (the inconsistent amphibian), “Jug o’ rum!  Jug o’ rum!”

I dismounted from my perch at last, and was sauntering idly along the path (idleness like this is often the best of ornithological industry), when suddenly I had a vision!  Before me, in the leafy top of an oak sapling, sat a blue grosbeak.  I knew him on the instant.  But I could see only his head and neck, the rest of his body being hidden by the leaves.  It was a moment of feverish excitement.  Here was a new bird, a bird about which I had felt