Florida roads have the same elusive quality. They part and bow to one another, meet and touch hands and glide away again as if dancing a minuet, leading you in a mazy dance hither and thither to the most delightful surprises. Here a tree has fallen before the wind or under the ax of a careless woodman, and blocks the way. Little does the road care for that. It leaves itself with an airy flourish of sandy ruts for good-bye as if just to avoid the obstruction. Then it may wander a dozen rods among slim trunks or along catbrier tangle, quietly seeking stray blue gentians or golden tufts of St. Peter’s wort, and saunter gently back to itself, or it may swing a wide corner and leave you at some man’s front gate, to admire his cherokee roses and negotiate with his dogs as best you may. To the traveler eager for some definite destination this quality may have its vexations. To the wood wanderer seeking but to find the true heart of a golden haze, conscious most of the mystic quality of all untrammeled nature and unexplored places, it is but an added delight. If on such a day the birds of the bush have their elfin quality most strongly evident, those always fay-like creatures the short-horned grasshoppers are not to be forgotten. In the still haze of the yellow pine forest their shrill voices seem to make the stillness audible, to give it pitch and quality. Here on a leaf sits one, catching the full heat of the sun twice, once direct and again as it is reflected from the leaf’s gloss. His antennæ are short and brown, arched most delicately from a straight brow that seems to denote dignity of thought. His long, brown wings fit neatly to his brown abdomen and his legs have the same shade. He seems cloaked in the soft, delicate color from head to foot, yet you can but suspect that this is a domino, which he will later cast aside and appear a glittering sprite. [Illustration: “A wilderness where deer and bear still linger”] Of those fairy creatures which attended Prospero on his island of shipwreck this well might be one in a fitting disguise. None of the flitting bird-fays is more beautifully cloaked than he in this exquisite brown. As I watch him the sun glints in a lenticular eye, and I know by this that he is full of laughter at my ignorance. Not one of the airy sprites that plagued Prospero’s guests could be more demure or more full of roguery than he. From the bushes beside the path as I pass, other fays of the true locust clan flip into the air on long, shimmering, silver wings and vanish after flying along in level flight for a hundred yards. And here in the grass at my feet is Caliban.