The strain opens with smooth, sweet notes almost exactly like the introductory syllables of the vesper sparrow.  Then the tone changes, and the remainder of the song is in something like the pleasingly hoarse voice of a prairie warbler, or a black-throated green.  It is soft and very pretty; not so perfect a piece of art as the vesper sparrow’s tune,—­few bird-songs are,—­but taking for its very oddity, and at the same time tender and sweet.  More than one writer has described it as resembling the song of the white-throat.  Even Minot, who in general was the most painstaking and accurate of observers, as he is one of the most interesting of our systematic writers, says that the two songs are “almost exactly” alike.  There could be no better example of the fallibility which attaches, and in the nature of the case must attach, to all writing upon such subjects.  The two songs have about as much in common as those of the hermit thrush and the brown thrasher, or those of the song sparrow and the chipper.  In other words, they have nothing in common.  Probably in Minot’s case, as in so many others of a similar nature, the simple explanation is that when he thought he was listening to one bird he was really listening to another.

The Tallahassee road to which I had oftenest resorted, to which, now, from far Massachusetts, I oftenest look back, the St. Augustine road, so called, I have spoken of elsewhere.  Thither, after packing my trunk on the morning of the 18th, I betook myself for a farewell stroll.  My holiday was done.  For the last time, perhaps, I listened to the mocking-bird and the cardinal, as by and by, when the grand holiday is over, I shall listen to my last wood thrush and my last bluebird.  But what then?  Florida fields are still bright, and neither mocking-bird nor cardinal knows aught of my absence.  And so it will be.

    “When you and I behind the Veil are past,
    Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last.”

None the less, it is good to have lived our day and taken our peep at the mighty show.  Ten thousand things we may have fretted ourselves about, uselessly or worse.  But to have lived in the sun, to have loved natural beauty, to have felt the majesty of trees, to have enjoyed the sweetness of flowers and the music of birds,—­so much, at least, is not vanity nor vexation of spirit.

INDEX.

Air-plants,
Alligator,
Azalea,

Baptisia,
Beggar’s-ticks,
Blackberry,
Blackbird, red—­wing,
Bladderwort,
Bluebird,
Blue-eyed Grass,
Butterworts,
Buzzard, turkey,

Calopogon,
Carrion Crow (Black Vulture),
Catbird,
Cedar-bird,
Cedar, red,
Chat, yellow-breasted,
Cherokee Rose,
Cherry, wild,
Chewink (Towhee):—­
  red-eyed,
  white—­eyed,
Chickadee, Carolina,
Chimney Swift,
Chuck-will’s-widow,
Clematis Baldwinii,