/ID^ Minter 0arben 



the roses loose in the open air — sweets 

 rarer than summer's best. 



Skirting the indefinite area called the 

 semi-tropic, a thermal dream hangs in the 

 air. You enter it when, on your southward 

 flight, your railway-train w^hisks round a 

 sharp curve by the Gulf- shore. The first 

 hint of it is a dash of salt in the air; then 

 you catch the shimmer flung from rollicking 

 whitecaps; and presently, far away, in a 

 turquoise film, an island comes to view 

 with a lighthouse, a clump of palmettos, 

 and some mossy live-oaks behind its daz- 

 zHng sand-spit, which cuts the haze and 

 seems obtrusively real in the midst of a 

 dream. The change is so easy and so 

 sudden that it gives the fine surprise of a 

 new rhyme in a song. 



Doubtless our migrant birds have an ob- 

 scure sense of the beauty which even we 

 cannot fully reahze — the dreamy, elusive 

 display of formless and tenuous sub- 

 stance hovering along the line where 

 summer is a perpetually resident spirit. 

 The first thing I note, on arriving at my 

 Winter Garden each year, is the apparent 

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