miles, or something less, be treated as such a marvel?  However, the negro and I were soon on the friendliest of terms, talking of the old times, the war, the prospects of the colored people (the younger ones were fast going to the bad, he thought), while I stood looking out over the lake, a pretty sheet of water, surrounded mostly by cypress woods, but disfigured for the present by the doings of lumbermen.  What interested me most (such is the fate of the devotee) was a single barn swallow, the first and only one that I saw on my Southern trip.

On my way back to the city, after much fatherly advice about the road on the part of the negro, who seemed to feel that I ran the greatest risk of getting lost, I made two more additions to my Florida catalogue—­the wood duck and the yellow-billed cuckoo, the latter unexpectedly early (April 11), since Mr. Chapman had recorded it as arriving at Gainesville at a date sixteen days later than this.

I did not repeat my visit to Lake Bradford; but, not to give up the ivory-bill too easily,—­and because I must walk somewhere,—­I went again as far as the palmetto scrub.  This time, though I still missed the woodpecker, I was fortunate enough to come upon a turkey.  In the thickest part of the wood, as I turned a corner, there she stood before me in the middle of the road.  She ran along the horse-track for perhaps a rod, and then disappeared among the palmetto leaves.

Meanwhile, two or three days before, while returning from St. Mark’s, whither I had gone for a day on the river, I had noticed from the car window a swamp, or baygall, which looked so promising that I went the very next morning to see what it would yield.  I had taken it for a cypress swamp, but it proved to be composed mainly of oaks; very tall but rather slender trees, heavily draped with hanging moss and standing in black water.  Among them were the swollen stumps, three or four feet high, of larger trees which had been felled.  I pushed in through the surrounding shrubbery and bay-trees, and waited for some time, leaning against one of the larger trunks and listening to the noises, of which the air of the swamp was full.  Great-crested flycatchers, two Acadian flycatchers, a multitude of blue yellow-backed warblers, and what I supposed to be some loud-voiced frogs were especially conspicuous in the concert; but a Carolina wren, a cardinal, a red-eyed vireo, and a blue-gray gnatcatcher, the last with the merest thread of a voice, contributed their share to the medley, and once a chickadee struck up his sweet and gentle strain in the very depths of the swamp—­like an angel singing in hell.