Next morning we borrowed a gun from the engineer of the steamboat, and I bought some powder and shot at a shop where they kept two young alligators under the counter for the children to play with. The creeks and lagoons of the island are full of them, and the negroes told us that in a certain lake not far off there lived no less a personage than “the crocodile king”—“el rey de los crocodilos;” but we had no time to pay his majesty a visit. Two of the Floridan negroes rowed us up the river. Even at some distance from the mouth, sting-rays and jelly-fish were floating about. As we rowed upwards, the banks were overhung with the densest vegetation. There were mahogany trees with their curious lop-sided leaves, the copal-plant with its green egg-like fruit, from which copal oozes when it is cut, like opium from a poppy-head, palms with clusters of oily nuts, palmettos, and guavas. When a palm-tree on the river-bank would not grow freely for the crowding of other trees, it would strike out in a slanting direction till it reached the clear space above the river, and then shoot straight upwards with its crown of leaves.
We shot a hawk and a woodpecker, and took them home; but, not many minutes after we had laid them on the tiled floor of our room, we became aware that we were invaded. The ants were upon us. They were coming by thousands in a regular line of march up our window-sill and down again inside, straight towards the birds. When we looked out of the window, there was a black stripe lying across the court-yard on the flags, a whole army of them coming. We saw it was impossible to get the skins of the birds, so threw them out of the window, and the advanced guard faced about and followed them.
On the sand in front of the village the Castor-oil plant flourished, the Palma Christi; its little nuts were ripe, and tasted so innocent that, undeterred by the example of the boy in the Swiss Family Robinson, I ate several,