You can find no more distinctive Florida scene than this; the endless procession of rough-barked columnar trunks, topped with sparse limbs and tufted with needles a foot and more long, and beneath the lake of deep green, scrub palmetto with a surface infinitely diversified with the spatter of the split leaves. The three-foot stems of these leaves are so woody and the leaves themselves are so stiff that to ford the lake is difficult and your progress through the palmetto is accompanied by a wooden clatter that is like a parlor imitation of stage thunder. Breathing deep the aroma of the pines, resting in the golden warmth and quiet of the place I saw little of wild life moving. All nature seems to take a mid-day siesta, even in winter, here. The place seemed to lend itself to dreams for which all the mystic witchery of the morning had prepared me. How deep into these I sank I cannot say, but I was aroused from them by the approach of a beast. “The jabberwock with eyes of flame Came whiffling through the tulgy wood And burbled as he came.” I think it was his burbling that I first noticed, a grumbling undertone as of something with a deep throat and very large teeth that talks to itself. Even here within twenty miles of Jacksonville, Florida, is yet a wilderness, criss-crossed with roads and spattered here and there with clearings, but yet a wilderness where deer and bear still linger. This sounded like a very large bear; one with a toothache and a morose disposition. I noticed for the first time a sort of path that crossed mine, an enlarged rabbit-run under the palmettos. Perhaps he was coming down that. I could hear the palmettos clatter in crescendo and the morose voice come rapidly nearer, and still I sat motionless. It is hard to believe in bears, until you have met a few. But I sat too long. Suddenly out of the path burst a black bulk, and I sprang to my feet with a shout of dismay. A big, black creature with a shambling gait, a long snout and little fierce eyes, was right upon me. But my shout of dismay was nothing to the “woof” of terror and astonishment the jabberwock let out. He almost turned a somersault and, ignoring his path, went straight through the palmettos which waved about him, down the distance, with a noise like an anvil chorus played on many xylophones. It was really the biggest and fiercest razorback I have yet met. Razor-backs do not think it good to live alone. When they miss their fellows they gallop, mumbling and [Illustration: “Razor-backs do not think it good to live alone”]