I had been disappointed in the number of pelicans we had seen.  I knew that Florida was one of the homes of the pelican, and I had not expected to see these birds merely in small detachments.  But our boatman assured me that on our return trip he would give me a chance of seeing and shooting as many pelicans as I could desire.  We would touch at Pelican Island, which was inhabited entirely by these birds, and whence the parties of seven were evidently sent out.

When we had had all the fishing we wanted, we broke up our camp, and started northward.  We had all been very happy and contented during our ten days’ sojourn in this delightful place; but when at last our departure was determined upon, the Paying Teller became possessed with a wild desire to go, go, go.  There was some reason, never explained nor fully expressed, why no day, hour, minute, or second should be lost in speeding to the far Northwest.  The boatman, too, impelled by what impulse I know not, seemed equally anxious to get home.  As for the Paying Teller’s “group,” it always did exactly as he wished.  Therefore, although Euphemia and I would have been glad to linger here and there upon our homeward way, we could not gainsay the desire of the majority of the party, and consequently we sailed northward as fast as wind and sometimes oars would take us.

Only one cause for delay seemed tolerable to the Paying Teller.  This was to stop at every post-office.  We had received but one mail while in camp, which had been brought in a sail-boat from an office twenty miles away.  But the Paying Teller had given and written the most intricate and complex directions for the retention or forwarding of his mail to every postmaster in the country we had passed through, and these directions, as we afterward found, had so puzzled and unsettled the minds of these postmasters that for several weeks his letters had been moving like shuttlecocks up and down the St. John’s and Indian rivers—­never stopping anywhere, never being delivered, but crossing and recrossing each other as if they were imbued with their owner’s desire to go, go, go.  Some of the post-offices where we stopped were lonely little buildings with no other habitation near.  These we usually found shut up, being opened only on mail-days, and in such cases nothing could be done but to slip a protesting postal into the little slit in the wall apparently intended for letters.  Whether these postals were eaten by rats or read by the P.M.’s, we never discovered.  Wherever an office was found open, we left behind us an irate postmaster breathing all sorts of contemplated vengeance upon the disturbers of his peace.  We heard of letters that had been sent north and sent south, but there never were any at the particular place where we happened to be, and I suppose that the accumulated mail of the Paying Teller may for several years drop gradually upon him through the meshes of the Dead-Letter Office.