The last-named birds, by the way, I had
expected to find known as "partridges" at the South, but as a matter of
fact I heard that name applied to them only once. On the St. Augustine
road, before breakfast, I met an old negro setting out for his day's
work behind a pair of oxen. "Taking some good exercise?" he asked, by
way of a neighborly greeting; and, not to be less neighborly than he, I
responded with some remark about a big shot-gun which occupied a
conspicuous place in his cart. "Oh," he said, "game is plenty out where
we are going, about eight miles, and I take the gun along." "What kind
of game?" "Well, sir, we may sometimes find a partridge." I smiled at
the anti-climax, but was glad to hear Bob White honored for once with
his Southern title.
A good many of my jaunts took me past the gallinule swamp before
mentioned, and almost always I stopped and went near. It was worth while
to hear the poultry cries of the gallinules if nothing more; and often
several of the birds would be seen swimming about among the big white
lilies and the green tussocks. Once I discovered one of them sitting
upright on a stake,--a precarious seat, off which he soon tumbled
awkwardly into the water. At another time, on the same stake, sat some
dark, strange-looking object. The opera-glass showed it at once to be a
large bird sitting with its back toward me, and holding its wings
uplifted in the familiar heraldic, _e-pluribus-unum_ attitude of our
American spread-eagle; but even then it was some seconds before I
recognized it as an anhinga,--water turkey,--though it was a male in
full nuptial garb.
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