As for Tallahassee itself, it was exactly what I had hoped to find it:  a typical Southern town; not a camp in the woods, nor an old city metamorphosed into a fashionable winter resort; a place untainted by “Northern enterprise,” whose inhabitants were unmistakably at home, and whose houses, many of them, at least, had no appearance of being for sale.  It is compactly built on a hill,—­the state capitol crowning the top,—­down the pretty steep sides of which run roads into the open country all about.  The roads, too, are not so sandy but that it is comparatively comfortable to walk in them—­a blessing which the pedestrian sorely misses in the towns of lower Florida:  at St. Augustine, for example, where, as soon as one leaves the streets of the city itself, walking and carriage-riding alike become burdensome and, for any considerable distance, all but impossible.  Here at Tallahassee, it was plain, I should not be kept indoors for want of invitations from without.

I arrived, as I have said, rather late in the afternoon; so late that I did nothing more than ramble a little about the city, noting by the way the advent of the chimney swifts, which I had not found elsewhere, and returning to my lodgings with a handful of “banana-shrub” blossoms,—­smelling wonderfully like their name,—­which a good woman had insisted upon giving me when I stopped beside the fence to ask her the name of the bush.  It was my first, but by no means my last, experience of the floral generosity of Tallahassee people.

The next morning I woke betimes, and to my astonishment found the city enveloped in a dense fog.  The hotel clerk, an old resident, to whom I went in my perplexity, was as much surprised as his questioner.  He did not know what it could mean, he was sure; it was very unusual; but he thought it did not indicate foul weather.  For a man so slightly acquainted with such phenomena, he proved to be a remarkably good prophet; for though, during my fortnight’s stay, there must have been at least eight foggy mornings, every day was sunny, and not a drop of rain fell.

That first bright forenoon is still a bright memory.  For one thing, the mocking-birds outsang themselves till I felt, and wrote, that I had never heard mocking-birds before.  That they really did surpass their brethren of St. Augustine and Sanford would perhaps be too much to assert, but so it seemed; and I was pleased, some months afterward, to come upon a confirmatory judgment by Mr. Maurice Thompson, who, if any one, must be competent to speak.

“If I were going to risk the reputation of our country on the singing of a mocking-bird against a European nightingale,” says Mr. Thompson,[1] “I should choose my champion from the hill-country in the neighborhood of Tallahassee, or from the environs of Mobile....  I have found no birds elsewhere to compare with those in that belt of country about thirty miles wide, stretching from Live Oak in Florida, by way of Tallahassee, to some miles west of Mobile.”