I had carried my rifle with me, and young Fleming and I used to go hunting for alligators, still abundant in the river.  The thickets of palmetto and the groves of magnolia filling the air with new and cloying fragrance, alternating with other unaccustomed odors which made the grove resemble an orchestra of perfumes, were to me a new and delightful experience.  There was a mythical wild turkey in the woods around, and the hope of a shot at him carried me many a mile, though he proved only a myth; but of rattlesnakes and copperheads there was no lack.  As I was collecting specimens for the natural-history museum of Cambridge, I canned the largest snakes that I came across, and I secured one rattlesnake which measured nine feet; but the fear of his kind never damped my enthusiasm for the luxuriant forest.  Into the great cypress swamps, with their centennial trees, swarming with reptiles of infinite variety, there run devious inlets which they call “creeks,” and up these I used to paddle my skiff, and lie and watch the teeming life, wishing I were a naturalist.  I spent a week at the ancient (for America) town of St. Augustine, on the Atlantic coast,—­then the sleepy watering-place of a few Southern invalids,—­and enjoyed greatly its local color, so different from that of all other American towns, its picturesque fortress of the days of Spanish rule, and its Spanish fishermen, in their undiluted nationality and costume.  I here poisoned myself dreadfully, rubbing with my legs some poison plant as I shinned up the trees for epiphytal orchids, new to me and an irresistible attraction.

To naturalists, this part of Florida must have been a most interesting field before the bird-slaughterers had invaded it to the extermination of its myriad population of feathered winterers from the Northern regions.  The geological formation is a concrete of shells of enormous thickness, which has hardened to the only semblance of rock which the coast affords, and the low dunes have shut off from the Atlantic long lagoons which swarm with life, marine and aquatic creatures occurring in numberless species and orders; alligators lie in wait for their prey, and schools of porpoises come in by the inlets in pursuit of other schools of fat mullet which swarm in the water.  Such teeming life I had never before any conception of.  In the surf the sharks lurked and coasted up and down, watching us as we waded in fishing for bass, if by chance we should give them an opportunity for a bite; the sharp, warning fin showing in the hollow green of the combing breaker ever and anon as we stood thigh-deep in the foam.  It made one shudder to see that silent terror patrolling up and down the margin of the deep water, waiting for an incautious venture of the bather beyond the shallows, into which the shark dared not come.