With closed eyes the sibillant song was the fairy tenor to the bass of the surf which was a memory of the roar of white pines, tossing in the gale. I had but to open my eyes and see these white, scurrying films of sandsnow to think myself really once more in Massachusetts. Inland the pale drifts whelm red cedar and bayberry outposts of the forests that are as flat-topped and wind-crippled as any shrubs that hold the outer defenses of zero-bitten, northern hilltops, moated, portcullised, with barbican and glacis in snow-mounded simulation of fortresses built by man. Surely nature had hung Christmas decorations on the forefront of St. Augustine in lavish profusion. I thought at one glance that Santa Claus himself had arrived on all this make-believe snow landscape and was resting his reindeer a moment behind the white drifts inland. I heard stamping hoofs and saw shaggy brown coats that might well be those of Prancer and Dancer, of Dunder and Blitzen. But a second look showed long ears instead of caribou antlers, and a band of the curious little half wild donkeys that roam the island trotted forth. Getting back from the roar of the surf, I began to find the Christmas decorations mingled with the warmer phase of Florida. There the sun warmed all things in sheltered hollows till it seemed as if the almanac had repented and Easter was trailing soft garments of spring through the place to soothe all winter’s ailments. Scrub palmettos lifted their heads from the sand [Illustration: Court of “The Alcazar” at St. Augustine] to wave palms, and in meadowy places the St. Andrew’s cross spread yellow petals beneath holly berries. In December you find corners of this land in Florida that are most perplexing. Out on the hard beach ran by twos and threes the semi-palmated plover, which are birds of Labrador and the Arctic coast, and just beyond them the great, gray pelicans sailed in military ranks between the combers. Here were birds of the arctic and birds of the tropic seas passing one another between a wind of winter and a sun of summer. Ashore it was the same. Hermit thrushes, born under cool hemlocks in the New Hampshire hills while yet the snow lingered in the northern gullies, peered beneath the palmettos and touched wing tips with fluttering mocking birds hatched while the June sun scorched the temperature up along the nineties.