IN springtime the mornings fill Tallahassee with a glory not to be found anywhere else. No stranger, chancing to stop in the city for a day or two, can fail to notice so striking a local feature of the climate. It may rain all night, and it sometimes does, with a driving wind howling a mad accompaniment to the swashing flood; but the morning will break up the clouds, and the sunrise will be supremely fine. From the middle of February to the middle of May, the true Tallahassee springtime, it is very seldom that the sun gets up behind a cloud.
Day had just fairly appeared in the east, with gray lines of sky and spears of amber light alternating above the billowy horizon, when Cauthorne was called, and informed that Col. Vance's carriage was waiting for him. Would he take a cup of coffee in his room, before starting? He would: he took two cups, a biscuit, and a glass of wine. Willard was already in the carriage by Col. Vance's side, when Cauthorne made his appearance.
"You do not intend to kill the birds on their roosting-grounds, I hope?" said the latter, mildly grumbling.
"You don't call this early, sir," replied Vance. "Remember we have five miles to drive. The sun will be fairly up by the time we reach the first hill-top on the Augustine road, and the quails will be whistling before we arrive at my kennels."
Willard yawned, and said, —
"Really, it is a late start. You were a horrible while dressing."
"I was bolting my breakfast," rejoined Cauthorne.
"Your breakfast! Why didn't you ask me to join you? I haven't had a morsel since tea," said Willard.
Col. Vance smiled grimly. He had broken his fast before dawn.
"At my plantation house," he said, "I will give you a country lunch before we take to the fields. It will be ready for us at ten. We will not dine till our shooting is over."
Cauthorne got into the carriage. The horses' heads were turned eastward. They were driven at a swinging trot past the Capitol, down the long incline to where the street ends in the Augustine road, and farther, faster down into a rippling little stream of clear water. They dashed noisily across this, and along a level sandy stretch, then up a bold hill, broad fields on one hand, a dense wood on the other. The air, with just a touch of chilliness in it, hung, like the atmosphere in some pictures, still and slightly misty over every thing, without so much as stirring a leaf, destroying the effect of distance by making all objects, near and far, present the same gray-blue dimness of body, the same uncertainty of outline. However, when they had reached the summit of the hill, they saw a great flare in the east, and, almost startlingly soon, the sun leaped above the horizon. All the highest points of land were glorified. The landscape now looked like a sea whose billows were phosphorescent with the troughs between inky black. The wild ducks in small flocks whirred overhead, going from their resting-places in La Fayette Lake to their feeding-places in the shallow weedy ponds farther up among the swamps.
On their right as they passed, they saw a delightfully homelike country house withdrawn among luxuriant foliage. It was flanked with spacious barns and cotton-houses. Blooming orchards of peach and pear and plum trees clothed the hill-sides hard by. A little farther on a party of colored men were ploughing with mules. The soil they turned over was almost Indian red, with every appearance of incomparable fertility. And now, the road rising a few feet higher, they had a fine bird's-eye view of a shallow valley, a miniature lake, and a dark cypress-swamp. The foliage of the trees took on every tinge of green, gray, and brown; the fields, mostly fresh-ploughed, were red and chocolate; the sky was turquoise overhead, paler farther down, and rose-color at the horizon.
Cauthorne and Willard forgot to regret longer the loss of their morning nap. Such a sunrise and such air, with the quietly charming landscapes and bucolic accompaniments, more than compensated for the fleeting inconvenience.
For much of the way a neglected hedge of Cherokee rose-bushes, or rather vines, showed upon one or the other side of the road, the blooms shining fair and sweet amid the dark tangles. The yellow jasmine was everywhere. Its perfume filled space. In spots the ground was blue with violets.
"The planters here once indulged the belief that a fence could be made of these rose-vines," said Vance. "Those tangled rows are the result."
"What a beautiful theory it was!" exclaimed Willard. "Just imagine a plantation in this favored climate, enclosed with a hedge of roses, and jasmines! Take this place, for instance,"' he continued after a pause, waving his hand toward a broad stretch of level fields: "fling round it such a fence, plant odorous white lilies in the pond yonder, build a model cottage in among those oaks on the hill, and then" —
"What then?" demanded Cauthorne as Willard hesitated.
"Why, swing in a hammock, and listen to the mocking-birds, and sip scuppernong, and be a poem!" was the reply.
Col. Vance laughed as a man does who likes poetry, but who does not believe it is the whole of life.
Cauthorne's face relaxed into an expression of friendly contempt as he said, "Have you a lily in your button-hole, Willard?"
There was a gush of music from the dewy trees, a swell of wind from the Gulf, a throb of warmth, a deepening of colors, a lessening of perfumes: the sunrise was accomplished. Day was in full bloom.
"If we had come out this morning to fight a duel, it would be over about now," said Willard, after some moments of silence.
"What an inconsequent remark!" exclaimed Cauthorne.
"I don't know about that," was the rejoinder. "I have always coupled duelling with Southern life. It is one of the accepted characteristics of sun-land society."
"I hope," said Col. Vance gravely, "that the great duel lately fought between the North and the South has forever driven from the hearts of men in this country all love of mortal combat."
"Amen," said Cauthorne.
Willard's mind was in a skipping mood. The question of duelling thus peremptorily settled, he said, —
"Since I have been here I have been every day more and more impressed with the great error into which I had fallen, as to the topography of Florida. Somehow I had always indulged the idea of one vast tropical plain covered with trees and reeds and bay-thickets, half-submerged in water. I never dreamed of a picturesque hill-country like this. The most beautiful parts of Lombardy are not more restful, and not nearly so suggestive of artistic effects."
"Why are you not prosperous here?" said Cauthorne, turning from Willard to Vance. "You certainly have the most fertile country in the South."
"Our curse, sir, will be apparent to you when you have closely studied our agricultural situation, and the conditions of our connection with the great centres of commerce. We are isolated. We have but one railroad; and its interests are against us, and in favor of the orange-region up the St. John's River. Consequently we have no means of rapid transit for our products. But our great curse, and I say it with the deepest sympathy for that unfortunate race, is the negro. In this county, for instance, there are twenty thousand inhabitants: less than four thousand are whites; the rest are illiterate, indolent, worthless negroes. Viewed in an agricultural way, here is a dead element, comprising more than four-fifths of our population, — an element which used to be the motor of our immense prosperity. Once it was a thing of vast material moment: now it has ceased to be accounted as of value except in a doubtful political sense. To make it plain, suppose all your teeming hordes of agricultural laborers in the North should suddenly lay down the plough, and quit your fields for political pursuits! At the end of five or six years how would your prairies compare with our plantations here?"
To Cauthorne's mind this was a new way of putting the facts. He would have been glad to press the question further; but they had reached the gate of Vance's plantation, and the matter in hand was to prepare for the day's sport.
