A CYPRESS SWAMP. 



THE AXHINGA. 



"Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress 

 Met in a dusky arch, and the trailing mosses in mid-air 

 Waved like banners that hang on the vealls of ancient cathedrals. 

 Deathlike the silence seemed, and unbroken, save by the herons 

 Home to their roosts in the cedar trees returning at sunset, 

 Or by the owl, as he greeted the moon with demoniac laughter." 

 — Henry W. Longfellow, Evangeline. 



To Florida next, the home of the herons and that strange 

 cousin of the gannet and the cormorant, the darter, or anhinga, 

 or snake-bird, or water-turkey. 



The cypress swamp is the home of these birds, who build 

 their nests among the hummocks. To seek them we must 

 have a boat ; for these swamps are vast morasses largely over- 

 flowed in the rainy part of the year, and always threaded with 

 black, winding creeks full of alligators and poisonous water- 

 snakes. 



The scene is semi-tropical. Vegetation luxuriates. The 

 trees grow so tall and are so thickly leaved that the sun is 

 shut out ; and beneath the canopy of their tops, among the 

 great gray trunks which rise like pillars, there is a gloom, so- 

 lemnity, and grandeur like that of some many-columned cathe- 

 dral, religiously quiet and dim. The cypress trees, rising from 

 the water, among large-leaved water-plants, grow to gigantic 

 size, and are draped with banners of the hanging gray tilland- 

 sia, which we know as " Spanish moss," or with air-plants that 

 trail their tendrils and blossoms from trunk and branches. 



48 



