Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/101

 my hand and touch his vibrating brown body. Then he withdraws a little and whistles till the cardinals lift their crested heads and listen and a tufted titmouse answers. "Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle," he cries, and the very spirit of an English garden descends into the golden air. Gossamer threads of spider-web float silverly from tree to tree, argent ghosts of the old-time net, till I hear in the bird notes the chatter of laughing voices, and for a moment the place is peopled with gay young folk in flannels and the game goes merrily on.

It may have been that the lady of the house served the tea for which the wren called so lustily in the shade of the garden tangle which now rises twenty feet on the house side and completely hides it, though it is but a stone-toss away. Here cedar, spice bush, bayberry and oleander crowd one another in a struggle for upward supremacy in which the oleanders win, their trunks, as large as a man's thigh at the base, dividing into long, aspiring branches that are pinnacled with pointed leaves and sprays of fragrant bloom. The jasmine climbs here, too, twining and straggling, loving and leaving, but the garden cherokees shoot upward in clean, noble sweeps that carry their brave stems almost to the oleander tops, whence they bound in long exultation, arching to the ground again.