So I sat dreaming, when suddenly there was a stir in the grass at my
feet. A snake was coming straight toward me. Only the evening before a
cracker had filled my ears with stories of "rattlers" and "moccasins."
He seemed to have seen them everywhere, and to have killed them as one
kills mosquitoes. I looked a second time at the moving thing in the
grass. It was clothed in innocent black; but, being a son of Adam, I
rose with involuntary politeness to let it pass. An instant more, and it
slipped into the masonry at my side, and I sat down again. It had been
out taking the sun, and had come back to its hole in the wall. How like
the story of my own day,--of my whole winter vacation! Nay, if we choose
to view it so, how like the story of human life itself!
As I started homeward, leaving the mill and the cabin behind me, some
cattle were feeding in the grassy road. At sight of my umbrella (there
are few places where a sunshade is more welcome than in a Florida
pine-wood) they scampered away into the scrub. Poor, wild-eyed,
hungry-looking things! I thought of Pharaoh's lean kine. They were like
the country itself, I was ready to say. But perhaps I misjudged both,
seeing both, as I did, in the winter season. With the mercury at 80 deg., or
thereabout, it is hard for the Northern tourist to remember that he is
looking at a winter landscape. He compares a Florida winter with a New
England summer, and can hardly find words to tell you how barren and
poverty-stricken the country looks.
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