Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/384

 is best. But as the pine of the Southern forests is more stately and taciturn than the maple, so the movements of life within its veins are slower and more dignified. On a warm spring morning in Vermont you may hear the patter of the sap in the pails and see it drip from the very trees. A man may watch a Southern pine for long before he sees any amber tear pass from the trunk into the receptacle placed to hold it. That drumming of the rising sap is never heard.

The solemn quiet of the flat-woods seems to be on the whole thing, and it is no wonder that the songs the negroes sing while working in the woods have minor cadences in them. One must learn to know these lonesome and at first monotonous pine forests before he understands them and comes to love them. Once that is accomplished, their charm for him is perennial. The endearing aroma of the pines follows him far and seems most potent when the fervent warmth of spring suns turns his thoughts toward the cool winds of Northern hillsides.

So long as the southwest winds follow his home-bound ship, so long he sniffs, or thinks he sniffs, the wild freedom of the pine levels, and the chant of the wind in the sparse tree tops seems to come to his ears and whine that wild, minor, endless tune of the elder world, fragments of which the care-free negroes chant as they gather the