Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/240

 lulled me into forgetfulness of what every man who tramps the wilds of southern Florida must not forget. So I landed right eagerly and marched up under the palmettos with an armful of short, stout slats, a pocket full of nails, a hammer and a small saw. I would nail the slats, ladderwise, one above another up the trunk of my chosen palmetto, saw an entrance to the very center of the branching fronds at its top, and there I should sit, the very head of the palmetto cabbage, in a bower of green, watching my neighbors in a score or so of nests a little below me. I submit that it was a proper scheme, and the only reason why it was not carried out to immediate success was that I had not reckoned on the tenants of the lower flat.

Upstairs everything was all right. The herons flapped away with croaking dismay as I came beneath their trees. I could see the long necks of some of the half-mature birds stretched upward from the nests of slender crossed reeds and sticks, and I glanced from them to the ground beneath the selected palmetto as I strode over brittle rubbish of their dead leaves and brush and royal ferns. And then I stopped with one foot in the air and a little whoop of dismay and utter terror of what was about to happen, for there beneath my selected palm, almost beneath my raised foot, was the body of a great snake. His head and tail