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FAIR
ORMOND AFTER
nearly two months in the extreme south of Florida I have turned my face
northward, and here I am at Ormond, fair Ormond-on-the-Halifax. No more
bewildering jungles of nameless West Indian trees and climbers, no more
cocoanut palms, no more acres of wild morning-glory vines. It gave me a start
of pleasurable surprise when, somewhere on this side of Palm Beach, I do not
remember where, I saw from the car window a stately sweet-gum tree all freshly
green. It had not occurred to me till then that I had found nothing at Miami of
this handsome and characteristic Southerner, always one of my favorites. Indeed, I
have come to a different world. I am no longer in a foreign country. Here are
lordly magnolias, not yet in blossom, to be sure, but proudly beautiful in the
leaf. Here, too, are Cherokee roses, loveliest of all flowers, just coming into
their kingdom. At sight of the first glossy-leaved bush, which happened to
stand near a house, I made up to the door, not stopping twice to consider, and
asked the privilege of picking a flower and a bud. The householder was
generous, and the bush even more so. “Take another, and another,” it seemed to
say, catching me again and again by the sleeve; “I have enough and to spare.”
It was hard work for me to get away. Here, also, is the yellow jessamine, only
less beautiful than the rose, hanging the tall forest trees full of golden,
fragrant bells. And here, sprinkled along the wayside, are stores of blue
violets. None of these things are to be seen on the shores of Biscayne Bay.
Yes, I am glad to be here. And the
phlox, likewise, the pretty Drummond’s phlox of our Northern gardens, dear to
me of old, let me not forget that. It is not indigenous to the country, I
suppose, but, like the garden verbena, being here it makes itself most
comfortably at home, delighting to overrun forsaken orange groves and similar
unoccupied waste places. How sweetly it looks up at us with its innocent
child’s face! Just now one of the guests of the hotel came in with a broad
market-basket loaded with it, a good half-bushel, at the very least. “I have
counted twenty-six varieties,” he said (he was thinking of diversities of
color), and there must be somewhere near that number in the crowded vase that
he has sent down to brighten my writing-table. Here, too,
is the Atlantic beach. In ten minutes I cross the peninsula and am on the
sands; or, if I stroll up or down the river shore, — on the western side of the
peninsula, — I can hear all the while the pounding of the surf. I have
been in Ormond two days, — two perfect days of temperate summer weather, — and
have walked hither and thither, up the river, down the river, across the river,
and on the beach, seeing comparatively little of the country as yet, but enough
to be able to say that I have never found any place in Florida where a walking
man should be better contented. There are paths and roads everywhere, — a
convenience not to be taken for granted in this Southern country, — and be his states of mind never so variable, he
may here suit the jaunt to the mood. A visit to
Ormond was not in my plans for the winter, and I left Miami with regret.
Migratory birds were arriving, and I seemed to be running away just when there
was most to detain me; those tropical plants, too, were certain to become more
and more interesting as the season grew older; but, like the verbena and the
phlox, being here I am thankful. If I have taken leave of some splendid birds
(those painted buntings are in my eye as I write), I have found some old friends
in their place. It is good to see brown thrashers again, with song sparrows,
white-throats, and chickadees. One of a bird-loving man’s strangest sensations
at Miami is the absence of chickadees and tufted titmice. I had never been in
such a place before. (For eight weeks, let me say in passing, I have seen no
English sparrows. Unfortunately I have not yet forgotten how they look.) In my two
days here I have counted but fifty kinds of birds. A goodly number that I know
to be present, and even common, I have so far happened to miss. But in the
middle of March even fifty birds make something like a festival. Mockers,
cardinals, and Carolina wrens — the great Southern trio — are tuneful, of
course. Even as I write, a wren is whistling an accompaniment to my pencil. If
I could only put the music on the paper! If it would only “modulate my
periods!” as Charles Lamb said. When I sit in the shade of a moss-hung
live-oak, letting the sea breeze fan me, and listen to an assembly of
red-winged blackbirds rehearsing their breezy conkaree among the reeds
along the Halifax (though it is not a simple conkaree, either, but conkaree-dah,
the old tune with a new coda), I think of swamps in far Massachusetts where on
this very 12th of March other redwings are opening the musical season in a very
different atmosphere. Chewinks
of both kinds (red-eyes and white-eyes, Northerners and Southerners) are
calling and singing. Blue yellow-backed warblers are musical after their manner
(they hardly need to be singers, being so exquisite in color, form, and
motion), and white-eyed vireos are numerous enough, though nothing like so
plentiful as at Miami. Here, as there, they have no thought of hiding their
light under a bushel. It is like
old times to see Florida jays sitting on the chimney-tops of the summer
cottages along the dunes behind the beach. Thus it was that I saw them first,
at Daytona, nine years ago. As a friend and I stopped this morning to rest in
the shade of a piazza, one came and stood upon the railing and eyed us long and
curiously. “Have you nothing edible about you?” he seemed to say. If we had had
anything to offer the beggar, I am confident he would have hopped upon our
knees.1 As it was, he approached within five or six feet while we
chirped and talked to him. Florida jays are strange creatures for tameness, and
if it were thought worth while could readily be domesticated. It seemed
natural, also, to see pelicans flying in small flocks up the beach, just over
the breakers, so that half the time they were invisible, lost in the trough of
the sea; moving always in Indian file, flapping their wings and scaling by
turns. And still another remembrancer of my previous visit to this part of
Florida was the sight of a bald eagle robbing a fishhawk. The hawk made a stubborn
defense, dodging this way and that, rising and falling, but in the end the
eagle, an old white-headed fellow, was more than a match for his victim; for
though they were far away, the motions of the contestants showed plainly enough
how the struggle terminated. On the beach, halfway to his knees in water, stood a great blue heron, leaning seaward, waiting for a fish. He might have been standing there for nine years. At all events I left him in the same position that length of time ago. “Ay, and you,” he might rejoin, “you haven’t changed, either. You have still nothing better to do than to go wandering up and down the earth, shooting birds with an opera-glass?” True enough. Heron and man, after nine years each is the same old sixpence. “The thing that hath been it is that which shall be, and there is nothing new under the sun.” Well, so be it. Only let me find new pleasure in the old places and the old pursuits. ________________1 We often
fed the birds afterward, and one or two, at least, were never shy about coming
into our laps. |
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