recognition ("plums" is the technical term, I believe) for men so
deserving. The first baseman certainly, who had oftenest to wade into
the scrub, should have received a consulate, at the very least. Yet they
were a merry crew, those national gamesters. Their patriotism was of the
noblest type,--the unconscious. They had no thought of being heroes, nor
dreamed of bounties or pensions. They quarreled with the umpire, of
course, but not with Fate; and I hope I profited by their example. My
errand in Sanford was to see something of the river in its narrower and
better part; and having done that, I did not regret what otherwise might
have seemed a profitless week.

First, however, I walked about the city. Here, as already at St.
Augustine, and afterward at Tallahassee, I found the mocking-birds in
free song. They are birds of the town. And the same is true of the
loggerhead shrikes, a pair of which had built a nest in a small
water-oak at the edge of the sidewalk, on a street corner, just beyond
the reach of passers-by. In the roadside trees--all freshly planted,
like the city--were myrtle warblers, prairie warblers, and blue
yellowbacks, the two latter in song. Once, after a shower, I watched a
myrtle bird bathing on a branch among the wet leaves. The street gutters
were running with sulphur water, but he had waited for rain. I commended
his taste, being myself one of those to whom water and brimstone is a
combination as malodorous as it seems unscriptural. Noisy boat-tailed
grackles, or "jackdaws," were plentiful about the lakeside, monstrously
long in the tail, and almost as large as the fish crows, which were
often there with them. Over the broad lake swept purple martins and
white-breasted swallows, and nearer the shore fed peacefully a few
pied-billed grebes, or dabchicks, birds that I had seen only two or
three times before, and at which I looked more than once before I made
out what they were. They had every appearance of passing a winter of