splendid fellow, with the scarlet cheek-patches. When I caught sight of
him, he stood on one of the upper branches of a tall pine, looking
wonderfully alert and wide-awake; now stretching out his scrawny neck,
and now drawing it in again, his long crest all the while erect and
flaming. After a little he dropped into the underbrush, out of which
came at intervals a succession of raps. I would have given something to
have had him under my glass just then, for I had long felt curious to
see him in the act of chiseling out those big, oblong, clean-cut,
sharp-angled "peck-holes" which, close to the base of the tree, make so
common and notable a feature of Vermont and New Hampshire forests; but,
though I did my best, I could not find him, till all at once he came up
again and took to a tall pine,--the tallest in the wood,--where he
pranced about for a while, striking sundry picturesque but seemingly
aimless attitudes, and then made off for good. All in all, he was a
wild-looking bird, if ever I saw one.

I was no sooner in St. Augustine, of course, than my eyes were open for
wild flowers. Perhaps I felt a little disappointed. Certainly the land
was not ablaze with color. In the grass about the old fort fhere was
plenty of the yellow oxalis and the creeping white houstonia; and from a
crevice in the wall, out of reach, leaned a stalk of goldenrod in full
bloom. The reader may smile, if he will, but this last flower was a
surprise and a stumbling-block. A vernal goldenrod! Dr. Chapman's Flora
made no mention of such an anomaly. Sow thistles, too, looked strangely
anachronistic. I had never thought of them as harbingers of springtime.
The truth did not break upon me till a week or so afterward. Then, on
the way to the beach at Daytona, where the pleasant peninsula road
traverses a thick forest of short-leaved pines, every tree of which
leans heavily inland at the same angle ("the leaning pines of Daytona,"
I always said to myself, as I passed), I came upon some white