traveled in the pine lands,--where, of all places, it is easy to get
lost and hard to find yourself,--and not only appreciated the value of
explicit instructions, but, being a Southerner, had leisure enough and
politeness enough to give them. I thanked him, and sauntered on. The day
was before me, and the place was lively with birds. Pine-wood sparrows,
pine warblers, and red-winged blackbirds were in song; two
red-shouldered hawks were screaming, a flicker was shouting, a
red-bellied woodpecker cried _kur-r-r-r_, brown-headed nuthatches were
gossiping in the distance, and suddenly I heard, what I never thought to
hear in a pinery, the croak of a green heron. I turned quickly and saw
him. It was indeed he. What a friend is ignorance, mother of all those
happy surprises which brighten existence as they pass, like the
butterflies of the wood. The heron was at home, and I was the stranger.
For there was water near, as there is everywhere in Florida; and
subsequently, in this very place, I met not only the green heron, but
three of his relatives,--the great blue, the little blue, and the dainty
Louisiana, more poetically known (and worthy to wear the name) as the
"Lady of the Waters."

On this first occasion, however, the green heron was speedily forgotten;
for just then I heard another note, unlike anything I had ever heard
before,--as if a great Northern shrike had been struck with
preternatural hoarseness, and, like so many other victims of the
Northern winter, had betaken himself to a sunnier clime. I looked up. In
the leafy top of a pine sat a boat-tailed grackle, splendidly
iridescent, engaged in a musical performance which afterward became
almost too familiar to me, but which now, as a novelty, was as
interesting as it was grotesque. This, as well as I can describe it, is
what the bird was doing. He opened his bill,--_set_ it, as it were, wide
apart,--and holding it thus, emitted four or five rather long and very