I did, and the agent, in turn, advised me to walk up the track to the
"Junction," and be sure to tell the conductor, when the evening train
arrived, as it probably would do some hours later, that I had a trunk at
the landing. Otherwise the train would not run down to the river, and my
baggage would lie there till Monday. He would go down presently and put
it under cover. Happily, he fulfilled his promise, for it was already
beginning to thunder, and soon it rained in torrents, with a cold wind
that made the hot weather all at once a thing of the past.

It was a long wait in the dreary little station; or rather it would have
been, had not the tedium of it been relieved by the presence of a newly
married couple, whose honeymoon was just then at the full. Their delight
in each other was exuberant, effervescent, beatific,--what shall I
say?--quite beyond veiling or restraint. At first I bestowed upon them
sidewise and cornerwise glances only, hiding bashfully behind my
spectacles, as it were, and pretending to see nothing; but I soon
perceived that I was to them of no more consequence than a fly on the
wall. If they saw me, which sometimes seemed doubtful,--for love is
blind,--they evidently thought me too sensible, or too old, to mind a
little billing and cooing. And they were right in their opinion. What
was I in Florida for, if not for the study of natural history? And
truly, I have seldom seen, even among birds, a pair less sophisticated,
less cabined and confined by that disastrous knowledge of good and evil
which is commonly understood to have resulted from the eating of
forbidden fruit, and which among prudish people goes by the name of
modesty. It was refreshing. Charles Lamb himself would have enjoyed it,
and, I should hope, would have added some qualifying footnotes to a
certain unamiable essay of his concerning the behavior of married
people.