I still minded the birds and flowers, I for the most part forgot my botany and ornithology.  In the cool of the day, then (the phrase is an innocent euphemism), I climbed the hill, and after an hour or two on the plateau strolled back again, facing the sunset through a vista of moss-covered live-oaks and sweet gums.  Those quiet, incurious hours are among the pleasantest of all my Florida memories.  A cuckoo would be cooing, perhaps; or a quail, with cheerful ambiguity,—­ such as belongs to weather predictions in general,—­would be prophesying “more wet” and “no more wet” in alternate breaths; or two or three night-hawks would be sweeping back and forth high above the valley; or a marsh hawk would be quartering over the big oatfield.  The martins would be cackling, in any event, and the kingbirds practicing their aerial mock somersaults; and the mocking-bird would be singing, and the redbird whistling.  On the western slope, just below the oatfield, the Northern woman who owned the pretty cottage there (the only one on the road) was sure to be at work among her flowers.  A laughing colored boy who did chores for her (without injury to his health, I could warrant) told me that she was a Northerner.  But I knew it already; I needed no witness but her beds of petunias.  In the valley, as I crossed the railroad track, a loggerhead shrike sat, almost of course, on the telegraph wire in dignified silence; and just beyond, among the cabins, I had my choice of mocking-birds and orchard orioles.  And so, admiring the roses and the pomegranates, the lantanas and the honeysuckles, or chatting with some dusky fellow-pilgrim, I mounted the hill to the city, and likely as not saw before me a red-headed woodpecker sitting on the roof of the State House, calling attention to his patriotic self—­in his tri-colored dress—­by occasional vigorous tattoos on the tinned ridgepole.  I never saw him there without gladness.  The legislature had begun its session in an economical mood,—­as is more or less the habit of legislatures, I believe,—­and was even considering a proposition to reduce the salary and mileage of its members.  Under such circumstances, it ought not to have been a matter of surprise, perhaps, that no flag floated from the cupola of the capitol.  The people’s money should not be wasted.  And possibly I should never have remarked the omission but for a certain curiosity, natural, if not inevitable, on the part of a Northern visitor, as to the real feeling of the South toward the national government.  Day after day I had seen a portly gentleman—­with an air, or with airs, as the spectator might choose to express it—­going in and out of the State House gate, dressed ostentatiously in a suit of Confederate gray.  He had worn nothing else since the war, I was told.  But of course the State of Florida was not to be judged by the freak of one man, and he only a member of the “third house.”  And even when I went into the governor’s office, and saw the original “ordinance of secession”