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Updated: June 29, 2025
The blackbirds puffed their feathers and sounded their singular call from the branches of the old pecan tree, and the flashing of the oriole enlivened the sombre foliage of the enormous live-oaks in the avenue.
That night, however, when they were comfortably and safely camped in Quindaro, amid the live-oaks and the tall sycamores that embowered the pretty little town, Oscar again brought the newspaper to his father, and, with kindling eyes, said, "Read it out, daddy; read the piece. Why, it was written just for us, I do declare. It is called 'The Kansas Emigrants. We are Kansas Emigrants, aren't we?"
We accordingly landed, tied our boat to a driftlog, and followed our guide through bushes to a frame-house, standing in a grove of live-oaks, near a row of negro quarters. General Hazen was there with his staff, in the act of getting supper; he invited us to join them, which we accepted promptly, for we were really very hungry.
Its low-arcaded quadrangle of mission buildings of yellow stone and heavy red tiles, nestling under high hills that run back to mountains, surrounded by wide grain fields flecked with rounded live-oaks and tall strange eucalyptus trees, and neighbored by great barns and well-kept paddocks and exercising tracks in which sleek trotting horses of famous Palo Alto breeding lounged or trained, was a strange new setting for studying Greek and Latin and mathematics and science.
In his morose abstraction he did not know how long or how aimlessly he had wandered among the mossy live-oaks, his head and shoulders often imperiled by the downcurving of some huge knotted limb; his feet straying blindly from the faint track over the thickly matted carpet of chickweed which hid their roots.
The house was likely to have a quiet dignity of its own; but most of such beauty as the homestead possessed was contributed by the canopy of live-oaks if on the rice or sugar coasts, or of oaks, hickories or cedars, if in the uplands.
Tall cypress-trees reared their heads amid the hollows and spread their branches like a wide canopy over our heads; huge live-oaks crowned the hummocks; and here and there great laurels lifted their pyramids of glossy, dark-green foliage.
Here and there, farther out, she saw the little cat-boats of the neighboring village crawling along the edge of the lake, taking their timid morning cruises. And far away she saw the titanic clouds; but on the horizon, no sail. In the evening she would see mocking-birds coming out of the savanna and flying into the live-oaks.
They last five years, and they won't absorb water. The alligator fishery is a Government monopoly. All the alligators are Government property just like the live-oaks. You cut down a live-oak, and Government fines you fifty dollars; you kill an alligator, and up you go for misprision of treason lucky duck if they don't hang you, too. And they will, if you're a Democrat.
With many rustlings the quail huddled in the live-oaks, complaining querulously until the darkness silenced them. The warm, acrid fragrance of the hills was drawn intermittently across the cooler level of the shadowy road. A little owl, softly reiterating his cadences of rue, made loneliness as a thing tangible, a thing groping in the dusk with velvet hands.
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