I should have been gladder for a sight of the big woodpecker, whose reputed dwelling-place lay not far ahead.  But, though I waited and listened, and went through the swamp, and beyond it, I heard no strange shout, nor saw any strange bird; and toward noon, just as the sun brushed away the fog, I left the railway track for a carriage by-way which, I felt sure, must somehow bring me back to the city.  And so it did, past here and there a house, till I came to the main road, and then to the Murat estate, and was again on familiar ground.

Two mornings afterward I made another early and foggy start, this time for Lake Bradford.  My instructions were to follow the railway for a mile or so beyond the station, and then take a road bearing away sharply to the left.  This I did, making sure I was on the right road by inquiring of the first man I saw—­a negro at work before his cabin.  I had gone perhaps half a mile further when a white man, on his way after a load of wood, as I judged, drove up behind me.  “Won’t you ride?” he asked.  “You are going to Lake Bradford, I believe, and I am going a piece in the same direction.”  I jumped up behind (the wagon consisting of two long planks fastened to the two axles), thankful, but not without a little bewilderment.  The good-hearted negro, it appeared, had asked the man to look out for me; and he, on his part, seemed glad to do a kindness as well as to find company.  We jolted along, chatting at arm’s length, as it were, about this and that.  He knew nothing of the ivory-bill; but wild turkeys—­oh, yes, he had seen a flock of eight, as well as he could count, not long before, crossing the road in the very woods through which I was going.  As for snakes, they were plenty enough, he guessed.  One of his horses was bitten while ploughing, and died in half an hour.  (A Florida man who cannot tell at least one snake story may be set down as having land to sell.) He thought it a pretty good jaunt to the lake, and the road wasn’t any too plain, though no doubt I should get there; but I began to perceive that a white man who traveled such distances on foot in that country was more of a rara avis than any woodpecker.

Our roads diverged after a while, and my own soon ran into a wood with an undergrowth of saw palmetto.  This was the place for the ivory-bill, and as at the swamp two days before, so now I stopped and listened, and then stopped and listened again.  The Fates were still against me.  There was neither woodpecker nor turkey, and I pushed on, mostly through pine woods—­full of birds, but nothing new—­till I came out at the lake.  Here, beside an idle sawmill and heaps of sawdust, I was greeted by a solitary negro, well along in years, who demanded, in a tone of almost comical astonishment, where in the world I had come from.  I told him from Tallahassee, and he seemed so taken aback that I began to think I must look uncommonly like an invalid, a “Northern consumptive,” perhaps.  Otherwise, why should a walk of six