the newspapers so continually tell us, that political campaigns are
educational.




BESIDE THE MARSH.


I am sitting upon the upland bank of a narrow winding creek. Before me
is a sea of grass, brown and green of many shades. To the north the
marsh is bounded by live-oak woods,--a line with numberless
indentations,--beyond which runs the Matanzas River, as I know by the
passing and repassing of sails behind the trees. Eastward are
sand-hills, dazzling white in the sun, with a ragged green fringe along
their tops. Then comes a stretch of the open sea, and then, more to the
south, St. Anastasia Island, with its tall black-and-white lighthouse
and the cluster of lower buildings at its base. Small sailboats, and now
and then a tiny steamer, pass up and down the river to and from St.
Augustine.

A delicious south wind is blowing (it is the 15th of February), and I
sit in the shade of a cedar-tree and enjoy the air and the scene. A
contrast, this, to the frozen world I was living in, less than a week
ago.

As I approached the creek, a single spotted sandpiper was teetering
along the edge of the water, and the next moment a big blue heron rose
just beyond him and went flapping away to the middle of the marsh. Now,
an hour afterward, he is still standing there, towering above the tall