well as "earlier"? But when, on the same road, two white girls in an
ox-cart hailed me with the question, "What time 't is?" I thought the
interrogative idiom a little queer; almost as queer, shall we say, as
"How do you do?" may have sounded to the first man who heard it,--if the
reader is able to imagine such a person.

Meanwhile, let the morning be "fine" or "pretty," it was all one to the
birds. The woods were vocal with the cackling of robins, the warble of
bluebirds, and the trills of pine warblers. Flickers were shouting--or
laughing, if one pleased to hear it so--with true flickerish prolixity,
and a single downy woodpecker called sharply again and again. A
mocking-bird near me (there is _always_ a mocking-bird near you, in
Florida) added his voice for a time, but soon relapsed into silence. The
fact was characteristic; for, wherever I went, I found it true that the
mocker grew less musical as the place grew wilder. By instinct he is a
public performer, he demands an audience; and it is only in cities, like
St. Augustine and Tallahassee, that he is heard at his freest and best.
A loggerhead shrike--now close at my elbow, now farther away--was
practicing his extensive vocabulary with perseverance, if not with
enthusiasm. Like his relative the "great northern," though perhaps in a
less degree, the loggerhead is commonly at an extreme, either loquacious
or dumb; as if he could not let his moderation be known unto any man.
Sometimes I fancied him possessed with an insane ambition to match the
mocking-bird in song as well as in personal appearance. If so, it is not
surprising that he should be subject to fits of discouragement and
silence. Aiming at the sun, though a good and virtuous exercise, as we
have all heard, is apt to prove dispiriting to sensible marksmen. Crows
(fish crows, in all probability, but at the time I did not know it)
uttered strange, hoarse, flat-sounding caws. Everv bird of them must
have been born without a palate, it seemed to me. White-eyed chewinks