in this way, I foresaw plainly enough that, as time passed, doubt would get the better of assurance, as it always does, and I should never be certain that I had not been the victim of some illusion.  At best, the evidence was worth nothing for others.  If only that excellent Mr. ——­, for whose kindness I was unfeignedly thankful (and whose pardon I most sincerely beg if I seem to have been a bit too free in this rehearsal of the story),—­if only Mr. ——­ could have left me alone for ten minutes longer!

The worry and the imprecations were wasted, after all, as, Heaven be thanked, they so often are; for within two or three days I saw other blue grosbeaks and heard them sing.  But that was not on a cotton plantation, and is part of another story.

A FLORIDA SHRINE.

All pilgrims to Tallahassee visit the Murat place.  It is one of the most conveniently accessible of those “points of interest” with which guide-books so anxiously, and with so much propriety, concern themselves.  What a tourist prays for is something to see.  If I had ever been a tourist in Boston, no doubt I should before now have surveyed the world from the top of the Bunker Hill monument.  In Tallahassee, at all events, I went to the Murat estate.  In fact, I went more than once; but I remember especially my first visit, which had a livelier sentimental interest than the others because I was then under the agreeable delusion that the Prince himself had lived there.  The guide-book told me so, vouchsafing also the information that after building the house he “interested himself actively in local affairs, became a naturalized citizen, and served successively as postmaster, alderman, and mayor”—­a model immigrant, surely, though it is rather the way of immigrants, perhaps, not to refuse political responsibilities.

Naturally, I remembered these things as I stood in front of “the big house”—­a story-and-a-half cottage—­amid the flowering shrubs.  Here lived once the son of the King of Naples; himself a Prince, and—­worthy son of a worthy sire—­alderman and then mayor of the city of Tallahassee.  Thus did an uncompromising democrat pay court to the shades of Royalty, while a mocking-bird sang from a fringe-bush by the gate, and an oriole flew madly from tree to tree in pursuit of a fair creature of the reluctant sex.

The inconsistency, if such it was, was quickly punished.  For, alas! when I spoke of my morning’s pilgrimage to an old resident of the town, he told me that Murat never lived in the house, nor anywhere else in Tallahassee, and of course was never its postmaster, alderman, or mayor.  The Princess, he said, built the house after her husband’s death, and lived there, a widow.  I appealed to the guide-book.  My informant sneered,—­politely,—­and brought me a still older Tallahassean, Judge ——­, whose venerable name I am sorry to have forgotten, and that indisputable citizen confirmed all that his neighbor had said.  For once, the guide-book compiler must have been misinformed.