A FROSTY MORNING 95 



occasional mockingbird (more than once in 

 splendid song), a shrike now and then, a flock 

 of myrtle-birds, and another of palm warblers, 

 a good many white-breasted swallows and turkey 

 buzzards overhead, with a bunch of silent spar- 

 rows skulking beneath the dwarf palmettoes, 

 these are what I now remember. 



Birds or no birds, flowers or no flowers, I 

 should have enjoyed the eight miles. The bright 

 sunshine, the temperate, genial warmth, the 

 endless, widely spaced woods, the blue sky, and 

 on one side the blue expanse of Biscayne Bay, 

 summer in winter, I am not so long from 

 snowy Massachusetts but that these things are 

 enough to make for me a kind of perpetual fiesta. 

 As I said to begin with (and it is as true of 

 thoughts and feelings as of the tenderest of 

 garden crops), there is nothing like weather. 



