As I sat in the cabin to note down Dick's music by the single candle therein, through the door came a slim line of dragon flies, of a small whitish species, out of the dark toward the candle flame, and proceeded incontinently to fly into the same, to get singed and to fall on the table in all varieties of melancholy mayhem, crisp-winged, no-legged, blind, aimlessly fluttering, dead. Now, it so happened that as I came down into Florida out of the North this spring, I passed just such a file of human moths flying toward their own hurt; and I could not help moralizing on it, even at the risk of voting myself a didactic prig. It was in the early April (though even in March I should have seen them all the same), and the Adam insects were all running back northward,- from the St. John's, from the Ocklawaha, from St. Augustine, from all Florida,-moving back indeed, not toward warmth, but toward a cold which equally consumes, to such a degree that its main effect is called consumption. Why should the Florida visitors run back into the catarrhal North in the early spring? What could be more unwise? In New York is not even May simultaneously warm water and iced vinegar? But in Florida May is May. Then why not stay in Florida till May? But they would not. My route was by the "Atlantic Coast Line," which brings and carries the great mass of the Florida pilgrims. When I arrived at Baltimore there they were; you could tell them infallibly. If they did not have slat boxes with young alligators or green orange-sticks in their hands, you could at any rate discover them by the sea beans rattling against the alligator's teeth in their pockets; when I got aboard the Bay Line steamer which leaves Baltimore every afternoon at four o'clock for Portsmouth, the very officers and waiters on the steamer were talking alligator and Florida visitors. Between Portsmouth and Weldon I passed a train load of them; from Weldon to Wilmington, from Wilmington to Columbia, from Columbia to Augusta, from Augusta to Savanna, from Savanna to Jacksonville, in passenger cars, in parlor cars, in sleeping cars, they thickened as I passed. And I wondered how many of them would, in a little while, be crawling about, crippled in lung, in liver, in limbs, like these flies. And then it was bedtime. Let me tell you how to sleep on an Ocklawaha steamer in May. With a small bribe persuade Jim the steward to take the mattress out of your berth and lay it slanting just along the rail ing that incloses the lower part of the upper deck, to the left of the pilot house. Then lie flat-backed down on the same, draw your blanket over you, put your cap on your head in consideration of the night air, fold your arms, say some little prayer or other, and fall asleep with a star looking right down into your eyes! When you awake in the morning your night will not seem any longer, any blacker, any less pure, than this perfect white blank in the page, and you will feel as new as Adam. At sunrise, when I awoke, I found that we were lying still with the boat's nose run up against a sandy bank, which quickly rose into a considerable hill. A sandy-whiskered native came down from the pine cabin on the knoll. "How air ye?" he sang out to our skipper, with an evident expectation is his voice. "Got any freight for me?" The skipper handed him a heavy parcel in brown wrapper. He examined it keenly with all his eyes, felt it over carefully with all his fingers; his countenance fell, and the shadow of a great despair came over it. "Look a here!" he said, "hain't you brought me no terbacker?" "Not unless it's in that bundle," said the skipper. "H-1!" said the native; "hit's nothin' but shot"; and he turned off toward the forest, as we shoved away, with a face like the face of the apostate Julian when the devils were dragging him down the pit. I would have let my heart go out in sympathy to this man for the agony of his soaked soul after "terbacker" during the week that must pass ere the Marion come again is not a thing to be laughed at-had I not believed that he was one of the vanilla gatherers. You must know that in the low grounds of the Ocklawaha grows what is called the vanilla plant, and that its leaves are much like those of tobacco. This "vanilla" is now extensively used to adulterate cheap chewing tobacco, as I am informed, and the natives along the Ocklawaha drive a considerable trade in gathering it. The process of their commerce is exceedingly simple, and the bills drawn against the consignments are primitive. The officer in charge of the Marion showed me several of the communications received at various landings during our journey, accompanying shipments of the spurious weed. They were generally about as follows: Deer Sir: I send you one bag Verneller, pleeze fetch one par of shus numb 8 and ef enny over fetch twelve yards hoamspin. Yrs. trly, The captain of the steamer takes the bags to Pilatka, barters the vanilla for the articles specified, and distributes them on the next trip up to their respective owners. In a short time we came to the junction of Silver Spring "Run," with the Ocklawaha proper. This "run" is a river formed by the single outflow of the waters of Silver Spring, nine miles above. Here new astonishments befell. The water of the Ocklawaha, which had before seemed clear enough, now showed but like a muddy stream as it flowed side by side, unmixing, for a little distance, with this Silver Spring water. The Marion now left the Ocklawaha and turned into the run. How shall one speak quietly of this journey over transparency? The run is in many places very deep; the white bottom is hollowed out in a continual succession of large spherical holes, whose entire contents of darting fish, of under mosses, of flowers, of submerged trees, of lily stems, of grass ribbons, revealed themselves to us through the lucid fluid as we sailed along thereover. The long series of convex bodies of water filling these great cavities impressed one like a chain of globular worlds composed of a transparent lymph. Great numbers of keen-snouted, long-bodied garfish shot to and fro in unceasing motion beneath us; it seemed as if the underworlds were filled with a multitude of crossing sword blades wielded in tireless thrust and parry by invisible arms. The shores too had changed. They now opened into clear savannas, overgrown with broad-leafed grass to a perfect level two or three feet above the water, stretching back to the boundaries of cypress and oak; and occasionally, as we passed one of these expanses curving into the forest with a diameter of half a mile, a single palmetto might be seen in or near the centreperfect type of that lonesome solitude which the Germans call "Einsamkeit" (one-some-ness.) Then, again, the palmettoes and cypresses would swarm toward the stream and line its banks. Thus for nine miles, counting our gigantic rosary of water wonders and lonelinesses, we fared on. Then we rounded to in the very bosom of Silver Spring itself, and came to the wharf. Here there were warehouses, a turpentine distillery, men running about with boxes of freight and crates of Florida vegetables for the Northern market, country stores with wondrous assortment of goods, physic, fiddles, groceries, schoolbooks, what-not, and, a little further up the shore of the spring, a tavern. I learned, in a hasty way, that Ocala was five miles distant, that I could get a very good conveyance from the tavern to that place, and that on the next day, Sunday, a stage would leave Ocala for Gainesville, some forty miles distant, being the third relay of the long stage line which runs three times a week between Tampa and Gainesville via Brooksville and Ocala. Then the claims of scientific fact and of guidebook information could hold me no longer. I ceased to acquire knowledge, and got me back to the wonderful Spring, drifting over it, face downward, as over a new world. It is sixty feet deep a few feet off shore, they say, and covers an irregular space of several acres; but this sixty feet does not at all represent the actual impression of depth which one gets as one looks through the superincumbent water down to the bottom. The distinct sensation is, that, although the bottom down there is clearly seen, and although all the objects in it are about of their natural size, undiminished by any narrowing of the visual angle, yet it and they are seen from a great distance. It is as if Depth itself, that subtle abstraction, had been compressed into a crystal lymph, one inch of which would represent miles of ordinary depth. As one rises from gazing into these quaint profundities, and glances across the broad surface of the spring, one's eye is met by a charming mosaic of brilliant hues. The water plain varies in color according to what it lies upon. Over the pure white limestone and shells of the bottom it is perfect malachite green; over the water grass it is a much darker green; over the moss it is that rich brown and green which Bodmer's forest engravings so vividly suggest; over neutral bottoms it reflects the sky's or the clouds' colors. All these hues are further varied by mixture with the manifold shades of foliage reflections cast from over-hanging boscage near the shore, and still further by the angle of the observer's eye. One would think that these elements of color variation were numerous enough, but they were not nearly all. Presently the splash of an oar in some distant part of the spring sent a succession of ripples circling over the pool. Instantly it broke into a thousandfold prism. Every ripple was a long curve of variegated sheen; the fundamental hues of the pool when at rest were distributed into innumerable kaleidoscope flashes and brilliancies; the multitudes of fish became multitudes of animated gems, and the prismatic lights seemed actually to waver and play through their translucent bodies, until the whole spring, in a great blaze of sunlight, shown like an enormous fluid jewel that, without decreasing, forever lapsed away upward in successive exhalations of dissolving sheens and glittering colors. Reproduced by permission. Complete. From Lippincott's Magazine 1875. |