A Florida Sketch-Book

From the train, Florida’s flat-woods look so bleak that a traveler might wonder why anyone would fight for them. Bradford Torrey can’t wait to get among them.

In late-nineteenth-century eastern Florida, Torrey leaves the roads and houses of St. Augustine to seek out the pine barrens: sandy tracks, flooded hollows, scattered pines and saw palmetto. What first seems empty soon fills with birdsong—and the small dramas of encounters with wood-carriers, curious strangers and birds he has never seen before. Torrey watches and listens with a naturalist’s care and a traveler’s dry humor, finding the nuthatches especially hard to mistake once he knows their voices. But what else might these unpromising woods reveal to someone patient enough to sit still and listen?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.