resplendent Turnus, went fluttering through the underwoods.  I could have believed myself in the heart of a limitless forest; but Florida hammocks, so far as I have seen, are seldom of great extent, and the road presently crossed another railway track, and then, in a few rods more, came out into the sunny pine-woods, as one might emerge from a cathedral into the open day.  Two men were approaching in a wagon (except on Sunday, I am not certain that I ever met a foot passenger in the flat-woods), and I improved the opportunity to make sure of my course.  “Go about fifty yards,” said one of them, “and turn to the right; then about fifty yards more, and turn to the left. That road will take you to the mill.”  Here was a man who had traveled in the pine lands,—­where, of all places, it is easy to get lost and hard to find yourself,—­and not only appreciated the value of explicit instructions, but, being a Southerner, had leisure enough and politeness enough to give them.  I thanked him, and sauntered on.  The day was before me, and the place was lively with birds.  Pine-wood sparrows, pine warblers, and red-winged blackbirds were in song; two red-shouldered hawks were screaming, a flicker was shouting, a red-bellied woodpecker cried kur-r-r-r, brown-headed nuthatches were gossiping in the distance, and suddenly I heard, what I never thought to hear in a pinery, the croak of a green heron.  I turned quickly and saw him.  It was indeed he.  What a friend is ignorance, mother of all those happy surprises which brighten existence as they pass, like the butterflies of the wood.  The heron was at home, and I was the stranger.  For there was water near, as there is everywhere in Florida; and subsequently, in this very place, I met not only the green heron, but three of his relatives,—­the great blue, the little blue, and the dainty Louisiana, more poetically known (and worthy to wear the name) as the “Lady of the Waters.”

On this first occasion, however, the green heron was speedily forgotten; for just then I heard another note, unlike anything I had ever heard before,—­as if a great Northern shrike had been struck with preternatural hoarseness, and, like so many other victims of the Northern winter, had betaken himself to a sunnier clime.  I looked up.  In the leafy top of a pine sat a boat-tailed grackle, splendidly iridescent, engaged in a musical performance which afterward became almost too familiar to me, but which now, as a novelty, was as interesting as it was grotesque.  This, as well as I can describe it, is what the bird was doing.  He opened his bill,—­set it, as it were, wide apart,—­and holding it thus, emitted four or five rather long and very loud grating, shrikish notes; then instantly shook his wings with an extraordinary flapping noise, and followed that with several highly curious and startling cries, the concluding one of which sometimes suggested the cackle of a robin.  All this he repeated again and again