Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/114

 knights in armor ride the winding paths to be present at the tourney. There are days down here when I know the charging hoofs to be those of razorbacks scuttling through the underbrush and the amble of palfreys is but that of half wild cattle going down to feed in the river flats, but not on a morning like this. The gold haze of stillness after frost has put a spell upon all things.

The great Florida heron that frequents my favorite swamp and with whom I am beginning to feel neighborly intimate takes on goblin traits with the rest of the witchery. Out in the shallows of the pearl river was a new stump, gray and waterworn, with a long branch sticking straight upward. Something uncanny about this stump made me watch it long. It was the deadest gray stump I ever saw, evidently a swollen cypress root with the bark long worn off. By and by this stump grew a head and the wood changed to gray-blue feathers in the twinkling of an eye. Thus goblins arrive from underground and dryads step from trees; but what should a rotten cypress stump produce? Here was a chimera of a bird with a neck three feet long, a bob of a head and a body like that of a gray goose that did not sit on the water but was suspended just above it as a mirage sits on the desert horizon, separated from everything by a gray mist of nothing. Then the bob of a head wiggled, turned, I sup