Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/372

 When the grateful coolness of the evening comes fast with the lengthening shadows the mocking birds carol their friendliest good-nights. The sun goes down in a flame of red as vivid as the color of the scarlet tanager which I heard in the pine tops at noon, warbling his cheery, robin-like notes through an air that quivered with gold and green, and was sticky with the aroma of pitchy distillations. The sun was the original distiller of naval stores. It is quite plain that he taught the Jacksonville millionaires the way to wealth, leading them by the nose, so to speak. The silver river of the morning is for a time a plain of burnished copper through which the sun burns a long straight trail of fire that vanishes into the blue mists of the distance. Up this trail flies the copper burnishing and the blue mists follow after, leaving an opaque mystery of darkness, an unknown, unexplorable country where was the river. Shadows well up in the orange groves, blurring the long aisles between the trees, while the mocking birds and red birds go to sleep with their heads under their wings. Silence has fallen on the cheery voices of the day, and out of the mystery of the darkness come the sourceless noises of the night.

Out of grass and shrubbery flood the shrill pipings of myriads of insects, beings that exist for us only as voices. The thought gives them