The bobolinks, bound for South America and perpetual summer, go by a route which most birds, strange to say, shun. They pass down through Florida and over the Caribbean Sea, touching at Cuba, Jamaica and Yucatan. Why this is not the popular route with all birds it is difficult to say. It offers the most land surface for food and the shortest sea flights on the way, being in its comfort and elegance a sort of Pullman train route which the Florida East Coast pleasure seekers imitate. Yet there seem to be only about ten of the migrating birds which follow it. The yellow-billed cuckoo is one of these, and last night I heard him spring his musical rain-call in the guava bushes while the wind in the palm trees overhead beat a zylophonic accompaniment. It is now mid-January, and I am a little in doubt whether this cuckoo has paused on his southward way and winter is yet to come, or whether he is one of the first of the spring migrants to turn his flight northward, so gently does one summer fade into the next as one gets well down the Florida peninsula on “the bobolink route.” The bank swallows are of the ten that take up this route, and the air is often full of their whirling flocks. Here at White City we are about two-thirds the way down the Florida peninsula, about east of the northern end of Lake Okeechobee, which sits at the northern end of the Everglades. The southeast trade winds, blowing across the Gulf Stream and over the Bahamas, bringing fresh sea odors to Florida, here pass a long line of the islands which bar off the Indian River from the ocean. Then they cross the river, and top another wave of the sea of billowy sand. The Indian River is the first hollow between these long north and south extending billows. Over the ridge to westward you come to a shallow lagoon in which all kinds of marsh life flourish, from alligators to the lovely yellow blooms of _Utricularia inflata_ and the heart-shaped leaves of _Limnanthemum lacunosum_, both these last Northern friends whom it is cheery to find so far south. Here, rather more than two hundred miles south of St. Augustine, north and south meet and merge most curiously and at this time of year one has reminders of winter or of summer according to the direction of the wind. Ten days ago this came out of the north and froze oranges [Illustration: “The southeast trade-winds here pass a long line of the islands which bar off the Indian River from the ocean”]