of the place, as well as of the road thither,--a rather blind road, my
informant said, with no houses at which to inquire the way.

Two or three mornings afterward, I set out in the direction indicated.
If the route proved to be half as vague as my good lady's account of it
had sounded, I should probably never find the mill; but the walk would
be pleasant, and that, after all, was the principal consideration,
especially to a man who just then cared more, or thought he did, for a
new bird or a new song than for an indefinite number of
eighteenth-century relics.

For the first half-mile the road follows one of the old Turnbull canals
dug through the coquina stone which underlies the soil hereabout; then,
after crossing the railway, it strikes to the left through a piece of
truly magnificent wood, known as the cotton-shed hammock, because,
during the war, cotton was stored here in readiness for the blockade
runners of Mosquito Inlet. Better than anything I had yet seen, this
wood answered to my idea of a semi-tropical forest: live-oaks,
magnolias, palmettos, sweet gums, maples, and hickories, with here and
there a long-leaved pine overtopping all the rest. The palmettos, most
distinctively Southern of them all, had been badly used by their hardier
neighbors; they looked stunted, and almost without exception had been
forced out of their normal perpendicular attitude. The live-oaks, on the
other hand, were noble specimens; lofty and wide-spreading, elm-like in
habit, it seemed to me, though not without the sturdiness which belongs
as by right to all oaks, and seldom or never to the American elm.

What gave its peculiar tropical character to the wood, however, was not
so much the trees as the profusion of plants that covered them and
depended from them: air-plants (_Tillandsia_), large and small,--like