[Footnote 1:  By-Ways and Bird-Notes, p. 20.]

I had gone down the hill past some negro cabins, into a small, straggling wood, and through the wood to a gate which let me into a plantation lane.  It was the fairest of summer forenoons (to me, I mean; by the almanac it was only the 5th of April), and one of the fairest of quiet landscapes:  broad fields rising gently to the horizon, and before me, winding upward, a grassy lane open on one side, and bordered on the other by a deep red gulch and a zigzag fence, along which grew vines, shrubs, and tall trees.  The tender and varied tints of the new leaves, the lively green of the young grain, the dark ploughed fields, the red earth of the wayside—­I can see them yet, with all that Florida sunshine on them.  In the bushes by the fence-row were a pair of cardinal grosbeaks, the male whistling divinely, quite unabashed by the volubility of a mocking-bird who balanced himself on the treetop overhead,

    “Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray,”

and seemed determined to show a Yankee stranger what mocking-birds could really do when they set out.  He did his work well; the love notes of the flicker could not have been improved by the flicker himself; but, right or wrong, I could not help feeling that the cardinal struck a truer and deeper note; while both together did not hinder me from hearing the faint songs of grasshopper sparrows rising from the ground on either side of the lane.  It was a fine contrast:  the mocker flooding the air from the topmost bough, and the sparrows whispering their few almost inaudible notes out of the grass.  Yes, and at the self-same moment the eye also had its contrast; for a marsh hawk was skimming over the field, while up in the sky soared a pair of hen-hawks.

In the wood, composed of large trees, both hard wood and pine, I had found a group of three summer tanagers, two males and one female,—­the usual proportion with birds generally, one may almost say, in the pairing season.  The female was the first of her sex that I had seen, and I remarked with pleasure the comparative brightness of her dress.  Among tanagers, as among negroes, red and yellow are esteemed a pretty good match.  At this point, too, in a cluster of pines, I caught a new song—­faint and listless, like the indigo-bird’s, I thought; and at the word I started forward eagerly.  Here, doubtless, was the indigo-bird’s southern congener, the nonpareil, or painted bunting, a beauty which I had begun to fear I was to miss.  I had recognized my first tanager from afar, ten days before, his voice and theme were so like his Northern relative’s; but this time I was too hasty.  My listless singer was not the nonpareil, nor even a finch of any kind, but a yellow-throated warbler.  For a month I had seen birds of his species almost daily, but always in hard wood trees, and silent.  Henceforth, as long as I remained in Florida, they were invariably in pines,—­their summer quarters,—­and