Happily, I say, this good-humored talker sat within hearing.  Happily, too, it was now—­April 4—­the height of the season for flowering dogwood, pink azalea, fringe-bushes, Cherokee roses, and water lilies.  All these had blossomed abundantly, and mile after mile the wilderness and the solitary place were glad for them.  Here and there, also, I caught flying glimpses of some unknown plant bearing a long upright raceme of creamy-white flowers.  It might be a white lupine, I thought, till at one of our stops between stations it happened to be growing within reach.  Then I guessed it to be a Baptisia, which guess was afterward confirmed—­to my regret; for the flowers lost at once all their attractiveness.  So ineffaceable (oftenest for good, but this time for ill) is an early impression upon the least honorably esteemed of the five senses!  As a boy, it was one of my tasks to keep down with a scythe the weeds and bushes in a rocky, thin-soiled cattle pasture.  In that task,—­which, at the best, was a little too much like work—­my most troublesome enemy was the common wild indigo (Baptisia tinctoria), partly from the wicked pertinacity with which it sprang up again after every mowing, but especially from the fact that the cut or bruised stalk exhaled what in my nostrils was a most abominable odor.  Other people do not find it so offensive, I suspect, but to me it was, and is, ten times worse than the more pungent but comparatively salubrious perfume which a certain handsome little black-and-white quadruped—­handsome, but impolite—­is given to scattering upon the nocturnal breeze in moments of extreme perturbation.

Somewhere beyond the Suwanee River (at which I looked as long as it remained in sight—­and thought of Christine Nilsson) there came a sudden change in the aspect of the country, coincident with a change in the nature of the soil, from white sand to red clay; a change indescribably exhilarating to a New Englander who had been living, if only for two months, in a country without hills.  How good it was to see the land rising, though never so gently, as it stretched away toward the horizon!  My spirits rose with it.  By and by we passed extensive hillside plantations, on which little groups of negroes, men and women, were at work.  I seemed to see the old South of which I had read and dreamed, a South not in the least like anything to be found in the wilds of southern and eastern Florida; a land of cotton, and, better still, a land of Southern people, instead of Northern tourists and settlers.  And when we stopped at a thrifty-looking village, with neat, homelike houses, open grounds, and lordly shade-trees, I found myself saying under my breath, “Now, then, we are getting back into God’s country.”