WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 207 
lost at once all their attractiveness. So 
ineffaceable (oftenest for good, but this time 
for ill) is an early impression upon the least 
honorably esteemed of the five senses! As 
a boy, it was one of my tasks to keep down 
with a scythe the weeds and bushes in a 
rocky, thin-soiled cattle pasture. In that 
task, — which, at the best, was a little too 
much like work—my most troublesome 
enemy was the common wild indigo (Bapti- 
sia tinctoria), partly from the wicked _perti- 
nacity with which it sprang up again after 
every mowing, but especially from the fact 
that the cut or bruised stalk exhaled what 
in my nostrils was a most abominable odor. 
Other people do not find it so offensive, I 
suspect, but to me it was, and is, ten times 
worse than the more pungent but compara- 
tively salubrious perfume which a certain 
handsome little black-and-white quadruped 
— handsome, but impolite —is given to 
scattering upon the nocturnal breeze in mo- 
ments of extreme perturbation. 
Somewhere beyond the Suwanee River 
(at which I looked as long as it remained in 
sight — and thought of Christine Nilsson) 
there came a sudden change in the aspect of 
