The other is a frog sound, too, the love call of the tree frog. The hyla’s voice with us, North, is the first sure call of spring. When we hear that we know that the ice is gone from the marshes and the tiny fellows have come out of their winter’s sleep and are down in the open water, piping, Panlike, their love songs among the reeds. Neither amorous scent of stephanotis bloom borne from islands of the Southern seas on the soft air, nor amorous tinkle of lark love songs could so mark to my Northern trained ear the presence of spring. There is no chorus as yet; just an occasional shrill peeping, such as I have heard in April out of the moist ruck of last year’s grasses in a cold meadow, while yet there is a touch of frost in the air and the low sun scarcely gives color in his slanting beams. Here it comes in warmth as of June out of pools where bewildered flowers bloom the year round, not knowing of a certainty where one summer ends and another begins. Yet the sound and its meaning are unmistakable, the final evidence whereby I know that spring came to the savannas yesterday. CHAPTER XII SEVEN THOUSAND PELICANS “Plumpskin, buffskin, pelican, gee! We think no bird so happy as we. Plumpskin, buffskin, pelican jill! We thought so then and we think so still.” So runs an ancient and foolish ditty. There is something about it which makes one think of pelicans as doing a little dance and thus happily singing, wing in wing, so to speak. Observing the pelicans that meet the steamers at Jacksonville and some others later in captivity, I had thought them of a grave and reverend dignity which belied the ditty and its suggestions. Now I know better. It is a bachelor pelican that first gave me an inkling of “how happy the life of a bird must be.” He has no home, this bachelor pelican, just a habitat which is a tiny cove in the long island which bars the Indian River from the sea five or six miles below Fort Pierce. So deep does this cove dent the island that the roaring surf of the east side is but a stone throw from its tip, yet the wind which blows almost always from the sea leaves its surface unruffled. Here my bachelor pelican lives to sail and soar and cut capers all day long in a snug harbor which is untenanted save by a winter fisherman’s houseboat.