The scorching heat of the sun is gone and the river damp wraps all things in a coolness that is grateful to the wearied skin. The boat glides forward into white river mists, out of which fly wonderful winged creatures of the night. These, invisible in the darkness, become spirits of fire in the white shaft of the searchlight, up which they fly to the lantern itself, then vanish again. It is the moth and the flame, only there the moth is the flame itself, a winged, magical creature of gold, fluttering in a rainbow-tinted white light that has called it out of the black invisibility. It is no wonder that many of the travelers sit up all night. These have their reward, for they see the sudden sun flash all the white river mists with fire, through which they glide up to a magical city, which after all is only Jacksonville, the end of the route. CHAPTER XXIV HOLLY BLOSSOM TIME A swoon of heat and blue tropic haze brings holly blossom time to northern Florida in mid-April. In this haze the distant shores of the St. Johns slip away until the silver gleam of the water seems to lift them and toss them over the horizon’s rim, out of sight, making a boundless sea of the placid river. The thermometer climbs with the day into the eighties and stays there till the sun is well on his way down again. The noon weather has the dog-day feel of a New England August and gives little invitation to exercise in the full sun. It is then that one is apt to give thanks to the great oaks which grow upon all the high hammock land and whose glossy green leaves and pendent masses of gray moss shut out the sun. Here in a druidical twilight one may roam in safety and near-comfort following the quaint odor of the holly blooms to the trees themselves. The oaks are mighty of trunk but soon divide into proportionately mighty limbs that lean far over the road till the moss that swings down from them is like banners swung across city streets in holiday decorations. Often the wild grapes, now with tender, crinkle-edged leaves two-thirds grown, swing in stout ropes across the street too, from one oak to another, and all these are also hung with the moss flags till they make the gloom grayer and deeper and in spite of the festive suggestion one half expects in the duskier corners to see the stones, the flash of the sacrificial knife, and hear the eerie chant of the elder priests. It takes the cheerful holly to remove this impression. Compared with the oaks the holly is a Noah’s ark tree, with one central shaft from roots to apex and numerous short, slender limbs that shape the outline into a modified cylinder. At Christmas time this cylinder was of dense, dark green with red berries giving it a ruddy glow in all shadows, as if ingle-nook embers glowed therein. The stiff, prickly-edged leaves stippled the whole into a delightful decoration that has become hallowed by conventional association.