in free song.  Their plumage is of the neatest and most exquisite; few, even among warblers, surpass them in that regard:  black and white (reminding one of the black-and-white creeper, which they resemble also in their feeding habits), with a splendid yellow gorget.  Myrtle warblers (yellow-rumps) were still here (the peninsula is alive with them in the winter), and a ruby-crowned kinglet mingled its lovely voice with the simple trills of pine warblers, while out of a dense low treetop some invisible singer was pouring a stream of fine-spun melody.  It should have been a house wren, I thought (another was singing close by), only its tune was several times too long.

At least four of my longer excursions into the surrounding country (long, not intrinsically, but by reason of the heat) were made with a view to possible ivory-billed woodpeckers.  Just out of the town northward, beyond what appeared to be the court end of Marion Street, the principal business street of the city, I had accosted a gentleman in a dooryard in front of a long, low, vine-covered, romantic-looking house.  He was evidently at home, and not so busy as to make an interruption probably intrusive.  I inquired the name of a tree, I believe.  At all events, I engaged him in conversation, and found him most agreeable—­an Ohio gentleman, a man of science, who had been in the South long enough to have acquired large measures of Southern insouciance (there are times when a French word has a politer sound than any English equivalent), which takes life as made for something better than worry and pleasanter than hard work.  He had seen ivory-bills, he said, and thought I might be equally fortunate if I would visit a certain swamp, about which he would tell me, or, better still, if I would go out to Lake Bradford.

First, because it was nearer, I went to the swamp, taking an early breakfast and setting forth in a fog that was almost a mist, to make as much of the distance as possible before the sun came out.  My course lay westward, some four miles, along the railway track, which, thanks to somebody, is provided with a comfortable footpath of hard clay covering the sleepers midway between the rails.  If all railroads were thus furnished they might be recommended as among the best of routes for walking naturalists, since they go straight through the wild country.  This one carried me by turns through woodland and cultivated field, upland and swamp, pine land and hammock; and, happily, my expectations of the ivory-bill were not lively enough to quicken my steps or render me heedless of things along the way.

Here I was equally surprised and delighted by the sight of yellow jessamine still in flower more than a month after I had seen the end of its brief season, only a hundred miles further south.  So great, apparently, is the difference between the peninsula and this Tallahassee hill-country, which by its physical geography seems rather to be a part of Georgia than of Florida.  Here, too, the pink azalea was at its prettiest, and the flowering dogwood, also, true queen of the woods in Florida as in Massachusetts.  The fringe-bush, likewise, stood here and there in solitary state, and thorn-bushes flourished in bewildering variety.