Aside from its celery, which should be glory enough, one of Sanford’s other claims to fame is that it is at the head of steamship navigation on the St. Johns. Here you embark on an amber-watered lake which is but the river, grown wide and lazy for a time. If you were to ask me for Florida’s most astounding characteristic I might hesitate, but I should eventually decide that it was the great number of fish which frequent its shallow waters. Looking from the Sanford dock as you go down to embark you see the sunny shallows full of schools of bream and in the deeper places, much bigger and a little more wary, other schools of “trout,” as the Floridians insist on calling the big-mouthed bass which swarm in all fresh waters. Farther down stream you may amuse yourself with watching the big silver mullet which here seem to teem in all brackish waters, leaping, sometimes five or six feet in air, then falling back with a resounding splash in the wave as if they like the spank of the water on their scaly sides. To name all that one sees on an April day while the boat surges round the curves of the lazy river might well be to write a catalogue of the commoner wild things of Florida, and a good many of those not so common. The paddle wheels suck the water from in front of the boat and the tide there falls a foot or two in a minute, for a minute. Then the hill of water thus heaped up behind rushes in again to fill the hollow and makes a miniature tidal wave. Creatures of the shallows are thus suddenly bared and again as suddenly flooded to fright and a hasty escape. The big Florida blue herons, standing in immobile alertness on the brink, are less alarmed at the approach of the steamer than by this fidgeting of the tides. If you will watch ahead you will often see one of these great stately birds bend his head and stand in astonishment at this falling off, then as the leaping wave splashes him give a croak of terror and flap rapidly away into the woods, to light in a big cypress, now all feathery green with new spring foliage, and stab the air this way and that with his keen beak, not knowing which way further to flee.