morally, and holds you in the clutch of a cold snap, incredibly prophesied from the northwest. The Floridian winter, which is not a season, but merely an incident of the year-long summer of the latitude, seldom comes from New York or Boston, but arrives from Chicago by way of Chattanooga, and its affiliations are with the Middle West, as most of its visitors are. Sometimes it comes like a thief in the night, and twice it has happened with me to be resting on one of the home-towners’ benches in the Plaza, and with head thrown back to be admiring the mildest of full moons, and then before morning to hear the rush and trample of a sudden shower on my roof and to wake in the morning eager for the fire of live-oak logs on my hearth. This was so in the gentle January of one of my sojourns, and in either of the two Marches I have known for the maddest months of the St. Augustine winter. They say that December is commonly mild, as with the resignation of the declining year, and that February is not so very bad, but I search my lexicon in vain for a good word to say of March, though by then the mocking-birds have long been in full chorus and are making believe that all the songsters of the northing spring are lingering with us. I am sorry to say that our noisy, big, vulgar robin was never among these, but in compensation there was now and then audibly a blue-jay, whether in its authentic note, or the mocking-bird’s thin reproduction, and welcomer still was the simulated fluting of the red-bird, sweet as if it came from the Middle-Western woods of my boyhood. With these sylvan voices the hymning of the nuns joined from their school-garden across the way, and the far-floating call of the crows from the upper blue. Their call was never the harsh cawing of our Northern crows, but something more like the colloquies of the English rooks among their “immemorial elms.” As the January and February days follow one another in an almost unbroken succession of sunny days one is apt to see turkey-buzzards that spread their wider wings among the crows. A trio of them, I remember, liked to perch on the cupola of a neighboring house, where they seemed in the early morning to be discussing the business of the coming day, and consulting upon matters of grave importance, but were probably settling some question of recently discovered carrion. I liked best to have them far aloof, and I particular fancy for the way their pinions bent thinly upward at the edge.