English: Caption:"On the Ocklawaha River, Florida." 1873. "The richly variegated colors of the far-extending thickets were mirrored so completely in the water, that we seemed suspended or floating over an enchanted forest. The clumps of saplings garnished with vines; the stately bosquets of palms, now growing a score together on a little hillock, and now standing apart, like sentinels; the occasional magnolias; the long swamp-ways out of which barges, rowed by negroes, would come to receive the mail, and into which they vanished again, the oarsmen hardly exchanging a word with our captain; the fierce-faced, bearded men, armed with rifles and revolvers, who sometimes hailed us from a point of land, to know if we "wanted any meat," and showed us deer and turkeys, and perhaps the skin of a gray wolf or a black bear,--all these novelties of the tropics and the backwoods kept us in perplexed wonder. When evening came slowly on again, a round moon silvered the water, and enabled us to see even the ducks that floated half submerged, and curiously eyed our little boat. By day, one sees hundreds of turtles, as on the St. John's, sunning themselves. The birds are legion. They chatter in the tree-tops; they offer themselves freely as marks for revolver-bullets; they scold at night as the torchlight awakes them; and they accompany the echo of each unsuccessful shot with loud derisive singing."