To-day is January of a new year, and all Florida is once more steeped in golden sunshine. Soft airs out of Eden, or some place just as good, breathe over the landscape, and the genial warmth is that of a fine, June day at home. But so far I have failed to hear the familiar salutation of the old bean man. I fancy he is not yet thawed out. I hope no harm has come to him, for I have bought my beans and I like to stand smiling by and see the other fellows get theirs. Perhaps he is still a little distrustful, for this is the first comfortable day since Christmas, and that was something of an oasis in a raw desert of chill. There had been several frosty mornings before that, somewhat to the disturbance of the purveyors to tourists, though they had said, grudgingly, “Oh, well, we do have a light frost some winters.” The morning after Christmas saw the thermometer at twenty-six, and the purveyors of summer, unlimited, in time of winter, were properly horrified. “Oh, but we assure you that this is quite extraordinary,” they vociferated. “The weather is always warm in Florida.” The morning after that the wind came roaring down from the northwest, full of needles. The temperature was below freezing and it kept steadily going lower. The water front, steeped in the midday sun and sheltered from the keen wind, was the warmest place in town, and there my old colored man lingered, shivering beneath an old overcoat that, I trow, belonged to that grand, old master whom we all resemble. Beneath it he still clung to his lucky beans, but he found small comfort in the dimes that he took in from overcoated and shivering tourists. “Uncle,” I asked, “what makes it so cold?” “Huh,” he replied, and his usually beaming, shiny black face was ashy gray and twisted into a tragic discontent with the chill, “Hit’s dese Nordern people. We ain’t had nothin’ like dis ontwel dey began to come down here, so much. Pears like dey brought it in dere cloes.” I fancy that is as good an explanation of the freeze as any, though if the Northern people brought it thus they did it against their will. Out on the water front the first severe morning I found an old man from Missouri. When they had told him about the perpetual summer that reigns in Florida during the winter time he had said, “show me,” and started for the peninsular State with his big overcoat under his arm. Wrapped to the eyes in his big coat he sat, this morning that the thermometer registered at only seventeen above in St. Augustine, on a bench that faced the morning sun. I thought he must be warm, for his face was flushed, but it was only the warmth of his indignation.