It was my first encounter with a harmless inhabitant of the sandy barrens, the hog-nosed snake. The reptile may grow to a length of three feet. He has neither fangs nor venom, but he does not need them. When cornered he simply swells up to thrice his usual size, hisses, and acts generally as if built out of mowing machines and loaded with cyanide of potassium. I am still congratulating myself that this sand baby was not full-grown. If he had been, and terror can kill, the tiny frog-chaser of the water hyacinths would surely have been avenged. CHAPTER IV BIRDS OF A MORNING An early December bird student in northern Florida suffers from embarrassment of riches. Never elsewhere have I seen so many varieties of birds in such numbers. Never elsewhere have I seen such abundant opportunities for watched birds to hide themselves. The live-oaks range from shrubs to huge trees, their dense, glossy leaves reflecting the sunlight and making the spaces behind them vague with shadows. These may be full of birds; except for a twitter or the flirt of a wing you would never know it. One after another draws away the drapery of Spanish moss from an entrance and slips in, or a flock may whirl out and into another tree, portières of gray lace opening to let them out, and closing behind them as they enter. I have spent many mornings trying to determine which bird is the first up. During the hot spell of two weeks ago, when the thermometer danced in the shade with the eighties all day and sank to sweet slumber with the sixties at night I was quite convinced that it must be the mockingbird, 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.