Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/66

 sank to sweet slumber with the sixties at night I was quite convinced that it must be the mocking-bird, just because I heard him first. Then quite a few mockers used to greet the coming of the sun with melody, rolling golden notes of delightful song over the dew-wet sands from some topmost twig. Just in front of the house on the river bank is a group of yuccas, fifteen feet tall or so, stabbing the soft air in all directions with their needle-pointed Spanish bayonets.

I fancy every Northerner has to learn the full stabbing power of these bayonets by experience. A thicket of them is beautiful in its dark green setting of slim-pointed rosettes and is impassable to a white man as the outer rim of a British square. It would take a Fuzzy-wuzzy of the Soudanese tribes to break through in the one case as in the other. I once read in a novel of a lover who followed the desire of his heart to Florida, and at the critical moment forced his way to her "penetrating a thicket of Spanish bayonet." I now realize that this lover was a man of steel, else the thicket had penetrated him. Inadvertently I leaned a little closer to one of these yucca groups the other day, and went to the repair shop with nineteen punctures, being fortunate that I did not permanently remain "hung" in the larder of the butcher bird—of whom more anon.

The top of a yucca is crowned each summer