Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/287

 ungainly, motionless for hours in the steep of the sun, again plunging for a fish and flopping back to the perch to be greeted by most amazing grunts from their companions. Lone pelicans sit slumping down into mere bunches of sleepy feathers with mighty bills laid across the top. You see brown-back gulls fishing and above them soaring a big bald eagle, ready to rob cormorant, gull or pelican with the cheerful indiscrimination of the overlord.

Such is the life that you glimpse through the open spaces as you fare southward toward the sun. But much of the way the river is screened from your view by dense growth of palmettos. In one spot a rubber tree has twined its descending roots about a palmetto till it has crushed the fibrous trunk to a debris of rotten wood and the roots have joined and become a tree, the tree, while the palmetto that nourished it passes to make the white sand fertile for the rootlets of the one-time parasite. Here are hickory and shrubby magnolias and many forms of cactus. Some of these climb the palmettos, vine-like, to spread the vivid scarlet of their blossoms high among the fronds. These creeping cacti are like creeping, thorny, jointed green snakes of a bad dream. The cherokee bean sends out its crimson spikes of tube-like blooms from leafless stems, roadside spurges show red involucres, and everywhere you