Complete. From Lippincott’s Magazine, 1875.

FOR a perfect journey God gave us a perfect day. The little Ocklawaha steamboat Marion—a steamboat which is like nothing in the world so much as a Pensacola gopher with a preposterously exaggerated back—had started from Pilatka some hours before daylight, having taken on her passengers the night previous; and by seven o’clock of such a May morning as no words could describe, unless words were themselves May mornings, we had made the twenty-five miles up the St. John’s to where the Ocklawaha flows into that stream nearly opposite Welaka.

  Just before entering the mouth of the river, our little gopher boat scrambled alongside a long raft of pine logs which had been brought in separate sections down the Ocklawaha, and took off the lumbermen to carry them back up the stream for another descent, while this raft was being towed by a tug to Jacksonville.

  That man who is now stepping from the wet logs to the bow guards of the Marion,—how can he ever cut down a tree? He is a slim, melancholy native, and there is not bone enough in his whole body to make the left leg of a good English coal heaver; moreover, he does not seem to have the least suspicion that a man needs grooming. He is disheveled and wry-trussed to the last degree; his poor weasel jaws nearly touch their inner sides as they suck at the acrid ashes in his dreadful pipe; and there is no single filament of either his hair or his beard that does not look sourly and at wild angles upon its neighbors’ filament. His eyes are viscidly unquiet; his nose is merely dreariness come to a point; the corners of his mouth are pendulous with that sort of suffering which involves no particular heroism, such as gnats, or waiting for the corn bread to get done, or being out of tobacco; and his—But, poor devil! I withdraw all that has been said; he has a right to look disheveled and sorrowful; for listen: “Well, sir,” he says, with a dilute smile, as he wearily leans his arm against the low deck and settles himself so, though there are a dozen vacant chairs in reach, “ef we didn’ have ther sentermentalest rain right thar on them logs last night, I’ll be dadbusted!” He had been in it all night.

  I fell to speculating on his word “sentermental,” wondering by what vague associations with the idea of “centre”—e.g., a centre shot, perhaps, as a shot which beats all other shots—he had arrived at such a form of expletive, or, rather, intensive.

  But not long, for presently we rounded the raft, abandoned the broad and garish highway of the St. John’s and turned off to the right into the narrow lane of the Ocklawaha, the sweetest water lane in the world—a lane which runs for a hundred miles of pure delight betwixt hedgerows of oaks and cypresses and palms and magnolias and mosses and manifold vine growths; a lane clean to travel along, for there is never a speck of dust in it, save the blue dust and gold dust which the wind blows out of the flags and the lilies; a lane which is as if a typical woods ramble had taken shape, and as if God had turned into water and trees the recollection of some meditative stroll through the lonely seclusions of his own soul.

  As we advanced up the stream our wee craft seemed to emit her steam in more leisurely whiffs, as one puffs one’s cigar in a contemplative walk through the forest. Dick, the pole man,—a man of marvelous fine function when we shall presently come to the short narrow curves,—lay asleep on the guards, in great peril of rolling into the river over the three inches that intervened between his length and the edge; the people of the boat moved not, spoke not; the white crane, the curlew, the limpkin, the heron, the water turkey were scarcely disturbed in their several vocations as we passed, and seemed quickly to persuade themselves, after each momentary excitement of our gliding by, that we were really, after all, no monster, but only a mere daydream of a monster. The stream, which in its broader stretches reflected the sky so perfectly that it seemed a ribbon of heaven, bound in lovely doublings upon the breast of the land, now began to narrow; the blue of heaven disappeared, and the green of the overleaning trees assumed its place. The lucent current lost all semblance of water. It was simply a distillation of many-shaded foliages, smoothly sweeping along beneath us. It was green trees fluent. One felt that a subtle amalgamation and mutual give and take had been effected between the natures of water and of leaves. A certain sense of pellucidness seemed to breathe coolly out of the woods on either side of us, while the glassy dream of a forest over which we sailed appeared to send up exhalations of balms and stimulant pungencies and odors.

  “Look at that snake in the water!” said a gentleman as we sat on deck with the engineer, just come up from his watch.

  The engineer smiled. “Sir, it is a water turkey,” he said gently.

  The water turkey is the most preposterous bird within the range of ornithology. He is not a bird; he is a Neck, with such subordinate rights, members, appurtenances, and hereditaments thereunto appertaining as seem necessary to that end. He has just enough stomach to arrange nourishment for his neck, just enough wings to fly painfully along with his neck, and just enough legs to keep his neck from dragging on the ground; and, as if his neck were not already pronounced enough by reason of its size, it is further accentuated by the circumstance that it is light colored, while the rest of him is dark.

  When the water turkey saw us, he jumped up on a limb and stared. Then suddenly he dropped into the water, sank like a leaden ball out of sight, and made us think he was certainly drowned, when presently the tip of his beak appeared, then the length of his neck lay along the surface of the water, and in this position, with his body submerged, he shot out his neck, drew it back, wriggled it, twisted it, twiddled it, and spirally poked it into the east, the west, the north, and the south, with a violence of involution and a contortionary energy that made one think in the same breath of corkscrews and of lightning.

  But what nonsense! All that labor and perilous asphyxiation for a beggarly sprat or a couple of inches of water snake! Yet I make no doubt this same water turkey would have thought us as absurd as we him if he could have seen us taking our breakfast a few minutes later. For as we sat there, some half-dozen men at table in the small cabin, all that sombre melancholy which comes over the average American citizen at his meals descended upon us. No man talked after the first two or three feeble sparks of conversation had gone out; each of us could hear the other crunching his bread in faucibus, and the noise thereof seemed to me, in the ghastly stillness, like the noise of earthquakes and of crashing worlds. Even our furtive glances toward each other’s plates were presently awed down to a sullen gazing of each into his own; the silence increased, the noises became intolerable, a cold sweat broke out over me. I felt myself growing insane, and rushed out to the deck with a sigh as of one saved from a dreadful death by social suffocation.

  There is a certain position a man can assume on board the Marion which constitutes an attitude of perfect rest, and leaves one’s body in such blessed ease that one’s soul receives the heavenly influences of the voyage absolutely without physical impediment. Know, therefore, tired friends that shall hereafter ride up the Ocklawaha,—whose name I would fain call legion,—that if you will place a chair just in the narrow passageway which runs alongside the cabin, at the point where this passageway descends by a step to the open space in front of the pilot house, on the left-hand side as you face the bow, you will, as you sit down in your chair, perceive a certain slope in the railing where it descends by a gentle angle of some thirty degrees to accommodate itself to the step just mentioned; and this slope should be in such a position that your left leg unconsciously stretches itself along the same by the pure insinuating solicitations of the fitness of things, and straightway dreams itself off into Elysian tranquillity. You should then tip your chair in a slightly diagonal direction back to the side of the cabin, so that your head will rest there against, your right arm will hang over the chair back, and your left arm will repose along the level railing. I might go further and arrange your right leg, but upon reflection I will give no specific instructions for it, because I am disposed to be liberal in this matter, and to leave some gracious scope for personal idiosyncrasies, as well as a margin of allowance for the accidents of time and place. Dispose, therefore, your right leg as your own heart may suggest, or as all the precedent forces of time and of the universe may have combined to require you.

  Having secured this attitude, open wide the eyes of your body and of your soul; repulse with heavenly suavity the conversational advances of the natty drummer who fancies he might possibly sell you a bill of white goods and notions, as well as the far-off inquiries of the real-estate person, who has his little private theory that you desire to purchase a site for an orange grove; thus sail, sail, sail, through the cypresses, through the vines, through the May day, through the floating suggestions of the unutterable that come up, that sink down, that waver and sway hither and thither; so shall you have revelations of rest, and so shall your heart forever afterward interpret Ocklawaha to mean Repose.

  Some twenty miles from the mouth of the Ocklawaha, at the right-hand edge of the stream, is the handsomest residence in America. It belongs to a certain alligator of my acquaintance, a very honest and worthy saurian, of good repute. A little cove of water, dark green under the overhanging leaves, placid, pellucid, curves round at the river edge into the flags and lilies with a curve just heartbreaking for the pure beauty of the flexure of it. This house of my saurian is divided into apartments,—little subsidiary bays which are scalloped out by the lily pads according to the sinuous fantasies of their growth. My saurian, when he desires to sleep, has but to lie down anywhere; he will find marvelous mosses for his mattress beneath him; his sheets will be white lily-petals; and the green disks of the lily pads will rise above him as he sinks, and embroider themselves together for his coverlet. He never quarrels with his cook, he is not the slave of a kitchen, and his one housemaid, the stream, forever sweeps his chambers clean. His conservatories there under the glass of that water are ever and without labor filled with the enchantments of strange under-water growths; his parks and his pleasure grounds are bigger than any king’s. Upon my saurian’s house the winds have no power; the rains are only a new delight to him, and the snows he will never see! Regarding fire, as he does not employ its slavery, so he does not fear its tyranny. Thus, all the elements are the friends of my saurian’s house. While he sleeps he is being bathed; what glory to awake sweet and clean, sweetened and cleaned in the very act of sleep! Lastly, my saurian has unnumbered mansions, and can change his dwelling as no human householder may. It is but a mere fillup of his tail, and, lo! he is established in another palace, as good as the last, ready furnished to his liking.

  For many miles together the Ocklawaha is, as to its main channel, a river without banks, though not less clearly defined as a stream for that reason. The swift, deep current meanders between tall lines of forests; beyond these, on both sides, there is water also—a thousand shallow runlets lapsing past the bases of multitudes of trees. Along the immediate edges of the stream every tree trunk, sapling, stump, or other projecting coign of vantage is wrapped about with a close-growing vine. At first, like an unending procession of nuns disposed along the aisle of a church, these vine figures stand. But presently, as one journeys, this nun imagery fades out of one’s mind; a thousand other fancies float with ever-new vine shapes into one’s eyes. One sees repeated all the forms one has ever known, in grotesque juxtapositions. Look! here is a graceful troop of girls, with arms wreathed over their heads, dancing down into the water; here are high velvet armchairs and lovely green fauteuils of divers patterns and of softest cushionment; now the vines hang in loops, in pavilions, in columns, in arches, in caves, in pyramids, in women’s tresses, in harps and lyres, in globular mountain ranges, in pagodas, domes, minarets, machicolated towers, dogs, belfries, draperies, fish, dragons; yonder is a bizarre congress—Una on her lion, Angelo’s Moses, two elephants with howdahs, the Laocoon group; Arthur and Lancelot, with great brands extended aloft in combat; Adam, bent with love and grief, leading Eve out of Paradise; Cæsar shrouded in his mantle, receiving his stab; Greek chariots, locomotives, brazen shields and cuirasses, columbiads, the Twelve Apostles, the stock exchange;—it is a green dance of all things and times!

  The edges of the stream are further defined by flowers and water leaves. The tall blue flags; the ineffable lilies sitting on their round lily pads like white queens on green thrones; the tiny stars and long ribbons of the water grasses; the cunning phalanxes of a species of bar net which, from a long stem that swings off down stream along the surface, sends up a hundred graceful stemlets, each bearing a shield-like disk, and holding it aloft as the antique soldiers held their bucklers to form the testudo in attacking,—all these border the river in infinite varieties of purfling and chasement.

  The river itself has an errant fantasy and takes many shapes. Presently we came to where it seemed to branch off into four separate curves, like two opposed S’s intersecting at their middle point. “Them’s the winding Blades,” said my raftsman.

  To look down these lovely vistas is like looking down the dreams of some young girl’s soul; and the gray moss-bearded trees gravely lean over them in contemplative attitudes, as if they were studying, in the way that wise old poets study, the mysteries and sacrednesses and tender depths of some visible reverie of maidenhood.

  And then after this day of glory came a night of glory. Down in these deep-shaded lanes it was dark, indeed, as night drew on. The stream, which had been all day a ribbon of beauty, sometimes blue and sometimes green, now became a black band of mystery. But presently a brilliant flame flares out overhead; they have lighted the pine knots on top of the pilot house. The fire advances up these dark sinuosities, like a brilliant god that for his mere whimsical pleasure calls the black chaos into instantaneous definite forms as he floats along the river curves. The white columns of the cypress trunks, the silver-embroidered crowns of the maples, the green and white galaxies of the lilies,—these all come in a continuous apparition out of the bosom of the darkness, and retire again; it is endless creation succeeded by endless oblivion. Startled birds suddenly flutter into the light, and, after an instant of illuminated flight, melt into the darkness. From the perfect silence of these short flights one derives a certain sense of awe. The mystery of this enormous blackness which is on either hand appears to be about to utter herself in these suddenly articulated forms, and then to change her mind and die back into mystery again.

  Now there is a mighty crack and crash; limbs and leaves scrape and scrub along the deck; a bell tinkles below; we stop. In turning a short curve the boat has run her nose smack into the right bank, and a projecting stump has thrust itself sheer through the starboard side. Out, Dick! out, Henry! Dick and Henry shuffle forward to the bow, thrust forth their long white pole against a tree trunk, strain and push and bend to the deck, as if they were salaming the god of night and adversity. The bow slowly rounds into the stream, the wheel turns, and we puff quietly along.

  Somewhere back yonder in the stern Dick is whistling. You should hear him! With the great aperture of his mouth and the rounding vibratory surfaces of his thick lips he gets out a mellow breadth of tone that almost entitles him to rank as an orchestral instrument. Here is what he is whistling:—

    It is a genuine plagal cadence. Observe the syncopations marked in this tune; they are characteristic of negro music. I have heard negroes change a well-known air by adroitly syncopating it in this way, so as to give it a barbaric effect scarcely imaginable; and nothing illustrates the negro’s natural gifts in the way of keeping a difficult tempo more clearly than his perfect execution of airs thus transformed from simple to complex times and accentuations.

  Dick has changed his tune: allegro!—

    Da capo, of course, and da capo indefinitely; for it ends on the dominant! The dominant is a chord of progress; there is no such thing as stopping. It is like dividing ten by nine, and carrying out the decimal remainders,—there is always one over.

  Thus the negro shows that he does not like the ordinary accentuations, nor the ordinary cadences of tunes; his ear is primitive. If you will follow the course of Dick’s musical reverie,—which he now thinks is solely a matter betwixt himself and the night, as he sits back there in the stern alone,—presently you will hear him sing a whole minor tune without once using a semitone; the semitone is weak, it is a dilution, it is not vigorous and large like the whole tone; and I have heard a whole congregation of negroes at night, as they were worshiping in their church with some wild song or other, and swaying to and fro with the ecstasy and the glory of it, abandon, as by one consent, the semitone that should come according to the civilized modus, and sing in its place a big lusty whole tone that would shake any man’s soul. It is strange to observe that some of the most magnificent effects in advanced modern music are produced by the same method—notably in the works of Asger Hamerik of Baltimore and of Edward Grieg of Copenhagen. Any one who has heard Thomas’s orchestra lately will have no difficulty in remembering his delight at the beautiful Nordische Suite by the former writer and the piano concerto by the latter.

  As I sat in the cabin to note down Dick’s music by the single candle therein, through the door came a slim line of dragon flies, of a small whitish species, out of the dark toward the candle flame, and proceeded incontinently to fly into the same, to get singed and to fall on the table in all varieties of melancholy mayhem, crisp-winged, no-legged, blind, aimlessly fluttering, dead. Now, it so happened that as I came down into Florida out of the North this spring, I passed just such a file of human moths flying toward their own hurt; and I could not help moralizing on it, even at the risk of voting myself a didactic prig. It was in the early April (though even in March I should have seen them all the same), and the Adam insects were all running back northward,—from the St. John’s, from the Ocklawaha, from St. Augustine, from all Florida,—moving back indeed, not toward warmth, but toward a cold which equally consumes, to such a degree that its main effect is called consumption. Why should the Florida visitors run back into the catarrhal North in the early spring? What could be more unwise? In New York is not even May simultaneously warm water and iced vinegar? But in Florida May is May. Then why not stay in Florida till May?

  But they would not. My route was by the “Atlantic Coast Line,” which brings and carries the great mass of the Florida pilgrims. When I arrived at Baltimore there they were; you could tell them infallibly. If they did not have slat boxes with young alligators or green orange-sticks in their hands, you could at any rate discover them by the sea beans rattling against the alligator’s teeth in their pockets; when I got aboard the Bay Line steamer which leaves Baltimore every afternoon at four o’clock for Portsmouth, the very officers and waiters on the steamer were talking alligator and Florida visitors. Between Portsmouth and Weldon I passed a train load of them; from Weldon to Wilmington, from Wilmington to Columbia, from Columbia to Augusta, from Augusta to Savanna, from Savanna to Jacksonville, in passenger cars, in parlor cars, in sleeping cars, they thickened as I passed. And I wondered how many of them would, in a little while, be crawling about, crippled in lung, in liver, in limbs, like these flies.

  And then it was bedtime.

  Let me tell you how to sleep on an Ocklawaha steamer in May. With a small bribe persuade Jim the steward to take the mattress out of your berth and lay it slanting just along the railing that incloses the lower part of the upper deck, to the left of the pilot house. Then lie flat-backed down on the same, draw your blanket over you, put your cap on your head in consideration of the night air, fold your arms, say some little prayer or other, and fall asleep with a star looking right down into your eyes!

  When you awake in the morning your night will not seem any longer, any blacker, any less pure, than this perfect white blank in the page, and you will feel as new as Adam.

  At sunrise, when I awoke, I found that we were lying still with the boat’s nose run up against a sandy bank, which quickly rose into a considerable hill. A sandy-whiskered native came down from the pine cabin on the knoll. “How air ye?” he sang out to our skipper, with an evident expectation is his voice. “Got any freight for me?”

  The skipper handed him a heavy parcel in brown wrapper. He examined it keenly with all his eyes, felt it over carefully with all his fingers; his countenance fell, and the shadow of a great despair came over it. “Look a here!” he said, “hain’t you brought me no terbacker?”

  “Not unless it’s in that bundle,” said the skipper.

  “H—l!” said the native; “hit’s nothin’ but shot”; and he turned off toward the forest, as we shoved away, with a face like the face of the apostate Julian when the devils were dragging him down the pit.

  I would have let my heart go out in sympathy to this man—for the agony of his soaked soul after “terbacker” during the week that must pass ere the Marion come again is not a thing to be laughed at—had I not believed that he was one of the vanilla gatherers. You must know that in the low grounds of the Ocklawaha grows what is called the vanilla plant, and that its leaves are much like those of tobacco. This “vanilla” is now extensively used to adulterate cheap chewing tobacco, as I am informed, and the natives along the Ocklawaha drive a considerable trade in gathering it. The process of their commerce is exceedingly simple, and the bills drawn against the consignments are primitive. The officer in charge of the Marion showed me several of the communications received at various landings during our journey, accompanying shipments of the spurious weed. They were generally about as follows:—

    The captain of the steamer takes the bags to Pilatka, barters the vanilla for the articles specified, and distributes them on the next trip up to their respective owners.

  In a short time we came to the junction of Silver Spring “Run,” with the Ocklawaha proper. This “run” is a river formed by the single outflow of the waters of Silver Spring, nine miles above. Here new astonishments befell. The water of the Ocklawaha, which had before seemed clear enough, now showed but like a muddy stream as it flowed side by side, unmixing, for a little distance, with this Silver Spring water.

  The Marion now left the Ocklawaha and turned into the run. How shall one speak quietly of this journey over transparency? The run is in many places very deep; the white bottom is hollowed out in a continual succession of large spherical holes, whose entire contents of darting fish, of under mosses, of flowers, of submerged trees, of lily stems, of grass ribbons, revealed themselves to us through the lucid fluid as we sailed along thereover. The long series of convex bodies of water filling these great cavities impressed one like a chain of globular worlds composed of a transparent lymph. Great numbers of keen-snouted, long-bodied garfish shot to and fro in unceasing motion beneath us; it seemed as if the underworlds were filled with a multitude of crossing sword blades wielded in tireless thrust and parry by invisible arms.

  The shores too had changed. They now opened into clear savannas, overgrown with broad-leafed grass to a perfect level two or three feet above the water, stretching back to the boundaries of cypress and oak; and occasionally, as we passed one of these expanses curving into the forest with a diameter of half a mile, a single palmetto might be seen in or near the centre—perfect type of that lonesome solitude which the Germans call “Einsamkeit” (one-some-ness). Then, again, the palmettoes and cypresses would swarm toward the stream and line its banks.

  Thus for nine miles, counting our gigantic rosary of water wonders and lonelinesses, we fared on. Then we rounded to in the very bosom of Silver Spring itself, and came to the wharf. Here there were warehouses, a turpentine distillery, men running about with boxes of freight and crates of Florida vegetables for the Northern market, country stores with wondrous assortment of goods,—physic, fiddles, groceries, schoolbooks, what-not,—and, a little further up the shore of the spring, a tavern. I learned, in a hasty way, that Ocala was five miles distant, that I could get a very good conveyance from the tavern to that place, and that on the next day, Sunday, a stage would leave Ocala for Gainesville, some forty miles distant, being the third relay of the long stage line which runs three times a week between Tampa and Gainesville via Brooksville and Ocala.

  Then the claims of scientific fact and of guidebook information could hold me no longer. I ceased to acquire knowledge, and got me back to the wonderful Spring, drifting over it, face downward, as over a new world. It is sixty feet deep a few feet off shore, they say, and covers an irregular space of several acres; but this sixty feet does not at all represent the actual impression of depth which one gets as one looks through the superincumbent water down to the bottom. The distinct sensation is, that, although the bottom down there is clearly seen, and although all the objects in it are about of their natural size, undiminished by any narrowing of the visual angle, yet it and they are seen from a great distance. It is as if Depth itself, that subtle abstraction, had been compressed into a crystal lymph, one inch of which would represent miles of ordinary depth.

  As one rises from gazing into these quaint profundities, and glances across the broad surface of the spring, one’s eye is met by a charming mosaic of brilliant hues. The water plain varies in color according to what it lies upon. Over the pure white limestone and shells of the bottom it is perfect malachite green; over the water grass it is a much darker green; over the moss it is that rich brown and green which Bodmer’s forest engravings so vividly suggest; over neutral bottoms it reflects the sky’s or the clouds’ colors. All these hues are further varied by mixture with the manifold shades of foliage reflections cast from over-hanging boscage near the shore, and still further by the angle of the observer’s eye. One would think that these elements of color variation were numerous enough, but they were not nearly all. Presently the splash of an oar in some distant part of the spring sent a succession of ripples circling over the pool. Instantly it broke into a thousandfold prism. Every ripple was a long curve of variegated sheen; the fundamental hues of the pool when at rest were distributed into innumerable kaleidoscope flashes and brilliancies; the multitudes of fish became multitudes of animated gems, and the prismatic lights seemed actually to waver and play through their translucent bodies, until the whole spring, in a great blaze of sunlight, shown like an enormous fluid jewel that, without decreasing, forever lapsed away upward in successive exhalations of dissolving sheens and glittering colors.