I have devoted a chapter to fern pools and there are two of them in this bit of forest. In the upper one, which is not badly infested with land crabs, I have a great variety of exotic ferns and other shade and moisture loving vegetation. Down one side of this pool I have worked out an irregular, sloping path which leads to a seat also worked out in the wall of the pool, and from the seat it turns and goes down to the water. In this seat I often sit and visit with the plants, the fish and tadpoles in the pool, and the various little woodsy people that come to it. Birds come to drink and look curiously at the old man. Mud wasps hang about the water and make up balls of limy mud which they bear off to build their nests with.

This pool is a great resort for butterflies and there is rarely a time when the sun is shining that some of them are not hovering about it. Conspicuous among them is Heliconius charitonius, a lovely, slender winged species of a jet black with diagonal yellow bars. Sometimes fifty or more of them may be seen on the wing moving about with a peculiar trembling flight. When at rest they hang themselves up by the feet, allowing the wings to drop down; the color of the lower sides of the wings often fades, and in this position they look exactly as though they were dead. I have seen a dozen or more of them clinging to a dead twig, a habit no doubt adopted as a means of protection from enemies. The family is widely distributed and abundant in the American Tropics but this species is its only representative in the United States. Occasionally the dainty Comptie butterfly (Eummenia atala) drifts into the forest, though for the most part it prefers the open, and yellow and orange Catopsilias and some of the great Papilios visit the pool. Several other rare tropical forms, some of which are supposed not to occur in this country, are occasionally seen here.

The birds are perfectly at home here and have increased in numbers since I have lived on this place. I am sure that they understand that they are welcome and that they are safe with-me from the guns of hunters. They flit about and peer curiously but wholly unafraid at the old, white bearded man who sits in the seat and talks to them, and sometimes they chatter at him in reply.

There are about three and a half acres of swamp and low land on the place, reaching from the high hammock to the bay. The former owner had cut down the timber on most of this area, and it lay a festering, rotting, tangled mass in the mud and saw grass, grown over in part with thorny Smilax vines. I hardly knew what to do with it but while I was busy with other matters new growth began to spring up from the stumps and I conceived the idea of making of it a sort of low hammock park. This idea has been carried out as I could get time to attend to it; a large variety of ornamental trees and shrubs suitable to salt marsh were planted, two pools were dug and a half mile or so of walk of broken rock was made. A rough rock bridge was built over a narrow part of one of the pools and a couple of similarly constructed seats were made. A small piece of mangrove forest was left standing by the former owner and of course this was not disturbed. Already this lowland hammock is beginning to foreshadow the beauty that is to come.

Here within an area of a half dozen acres there are growing wild over eighty species of trees and large shrubs which sometimes attain to tree-like proportions, a larger number, I have no doubt, than can be found in any state in the Union lying north of the fortieth parallel. There are places in the hammock where within a radius of thirty feet fully that number of species of trees are growing wild. Some half dozen species of these trees are naturalized in Florida from other warm countries; the rest are native. There are some seventeen species belonging to the low land and fifty that are strictly tropical.

To me the hammock is, by far, the most attractive part of my garden, it is the part which is nearest to nature; the jungle is the thing that visitors ask after and rave over. When I am lonely and depressed I wander down into it to be alone with nature, to get away from the artificialities and annoyances of civilization, to let myself become a part and parcel of it all. I feel that the dear trees are my friends and comforters; I can take counsel with them and trust them; and I always come back to the world and its duties strengthened and refreshed. 7

I want to lift up my voice and plead for the hammocks. Like the wild game they are disappearing fast before the destroyer, man. It is only a question of time, and little time at that, when, at the rate they are being wiped out now the last of them will be gone. Along the shores of Biscayne Bay and on the nearby keys there are over one hundred species of tropical trees which are found growing wild nowhere else in the United States. It seems to me that it is almost a crime to exterminate these rare and beautiful things. Just within the boundaries of Miami and to the south of it there was, probably, the finest body of tropical hammock within the state and it ought to have been preserved for a park and arboretum but it is rapidly being destroyed and turned into building lots.

If you have a bit of hammock on your premises save it; if you have already cut it down it may be that it would grow up again if it was not disturbed. Don't thin out the trees or in any way trim it up, for nature has made it more interesting and beautiful than it is possible for you to do.