This confession of botanical amateurishness and
incompetency will be taken, I hope, as rather to my credit than
otherwise; but it would be morally worthless if I did not add the story
of another plant, which, in this same New Smyrna hammock, I frequently
noticed hanging in loose bunches, like blades of flaccid deep green
grass, from the trunks of cabbage palmettos. The tufts were always out
of reach, and I gave them no particular thought; and it was not until I
got home to Massachusetts, and then almost by accident, that I learned
what they were. They, it turned out, _were_ ferns (_Vittaria
lineata_--grass fern), and my discomfiture was complete.
This comparative dearth of birds and flowers was not in all respects a
disadvantage. On the contrary, to a naturalist blessed now and then with
a supernaturalistic mood, it made the place, on occasion, a welcome
retreat. Thus, one afternoon, as I remember, I had been reading Keats,
the only book I had brought with me,--not counting manuals, of course,
which come under another head,--and by and by started once more for the
pine lands by the way of the cotton-shed hammock, "to see what I could
see." But poetry had spoiled me just then for anything like scientific
research, and as I waded through the ankle-deep sand I said to myself
all at once, "No, no! What do I care for another new bird? I want to see
the beauty of the world.
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