[Illustration: EARLY UNPUBLISHED DRAWING IN WATER-COLOR OF THE CAROLINA PARROT, ON BRANCH OF THE HICKORY, DATED "HENDERSON, JUNE 9TH, 1811." THE ORIGINAL BEARS THE NOTE: "POOR IMITATION OF COLOR, THE NATURAL BIRD BEING EXTREMELY GLOSSY AND RICH." Published by courtesy of Mr. Joseph Y. Jeanes.] On January 6, 1832, the party started to visit a famous spring near the sources of the St. John's River, which was described in his third letter to Featherstonhaugh as well as in a later "Episode."[14] There his host, Colonel Rees, who utilized the abundant flow from this curious spring for grinding the whole of his sugar cane, took them down the Spring Garden Creek to a series of muddy lakes which emptied into the St. John's. The mud on this occasion was the cause of great disappointment to the naturalist, for it made it impossible for him to recover what he believed to represent a new species of Ibis, which was shot in one of those bottomless pits. "Being only a few yards distant from us," to quote from Audubon's third letter,[15] "and quite near enough to ascertain the extent of my loss, I submitted to lose a fine pair of a new species, the which if I ever fall in with it again, I shall call _Tantalus fuscus_." When they had reached the borders of Woodruff's Lake, after noon, fatigued and hungry, he continued: We landed on a small island of a few acres, covered with a grove of sour orange trees, intermixed with not a few live oaks. The oranges were in great profusion on the trees—everything about us was calm and beautiful and motionless, as if it had just come from the hand of the Creator. It would have been a perfect Paradise for a poet, but I was not fit to be in Paradise; the loss of my ibis made me as sour as the oranges that hung about me. I felt unquiet, too, in this singular scene, as if I were almost upon the verge of creation, where realities were tapering off into nothing. The general wildness the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked, and apparently never ending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps—all these things had a tendency to depress my spirits, notwithstanding some beautiful flowers, rich looking fruits, a pure sky, and ample sheets of water at my feet. Here I am in the Floridas, thought I, a country that received its name from the odours wafted from the orange groves, to the boats of the first discoverers, and which from my childhood I have consecrated in my imagination as the garden of the United States. A garden, where all that is not mud, mud, mud, is sand, sand, sand; where the fruit is so sour that it is not eatable, and where in place of singing birds and golden fishes, you have a species of ibis that you cannot get when you have shot it, and alligators, snakes, and scorpions.