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Updated: June 29, 2025
It was dry with the fine dust of waste places, and wet with the warm mists of slumbering swamps; it seemed to Gideon to tremble with the songs of birds, the dry murmur of palm leaves, and the almost inaudible whisper of the gray moss that festooned the live-oaks. "Um-m-m," he murmured, apostrophizing it, "yo' 's the right kind o' breeze, yo' is. Yo'-all's healthy."
Pancho munched away cheerfully, the stream tinkled and purred; the first star telegraphed its friendly signal down through the ether: to be lost in the Simi was not half bad. Some two hundred yards from camp, at a point where the stream made a turn, I stopped in sudden surprise at the sight of a light shining among a clump of small live-oaks near by to my right.
"Struck by lightning," said Gray; "the buzzards will get him." And he drew a folding butterfly net from his saddle boot, affixed ring and gauze bag, and cantered forward briskly in the wake of a great velvety black butterfly which was sailing under the live-oaks above his head. His father, wishing to talk to Eudo Stent, rode ahead with the guide, leaving Shiela and Hamil to follow.
He felt awkward and out of place, for most of the boys of the country round left at sixteen, just as they were tangled up in fractions and syntax. Now he was close to the twenties, and the only big boy left in the Frost Creek school, whose white walls peeped out through a grove of live-oaks where the creek babbled merrily over the rocks.
Farther down the line fence, he could see Collie in the distance, riding slowly toward the three live-oaks. The foreman found a convenient seat on a ledge, rolled another of his eternal cigarettes, and watched the boy approach from below. Collie had already dismounted three times that morning; twice to mend fence, and once more involuntarily.
Somehow it seemed to her an unusually delightful experience to ride with this nice boy through the beautiful shaded road of arching live-oaks richly draped with old gray moss.
There was also a network of vines and llianas that, stretching upward, twined around the limbs of the live-oaks the latter forming the highest and largest timber of all. The underwood was impenetrable to the eye, though a hunter could have crept through it in pursuit of game. At night, however, even under moonlight, it appeared a dark and impassable thicket.
And here grow the magnolias in their wild, barbaric splendor of bloom, and the live-oaks, mighty of girth and spread, draped in somber gray moss as if for the funeral of some god of the deep green wood. At the fringe of the swamp, tempting you until near to jumping into the morass after them, are the huge fleurs-de-lis, each gorgeous blossom fully seven inches across its purple top.
So the Ocklawaha River and a score of its kind roam through the woods, or maybe it is the woods that roam through them, and the moss sways from the live-oaks, and the cypress trees stick their knees up through the water in the oddest way imaginable. In Florida one may have another odd experience: a river ride in an ox-cart.
At first sight, one might have thought that this pretty service was rendered only from loving sentiments of loyalty to one's ancestors, for under the great live-oaks, the sturdy brick walls about the family burying-places and the gravestones themselves were moss-grown and ancient-looking; yet here and there the wounded look of the earth appealed to the eye, and betrayed a new-made grave.
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