Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/126

 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.

At nightfall on this cool Christmas Eve the round moon stood in the eastern sky and shone as if all the Spanish doubloons and pieces of eight that sank in wrecked treasure ships in this Spanish main had been fused to one great, silver orb to make it. The keen wind must have blown most of the tropic mists out of the sky, so plainly visible on its surface was the man, his dog, and his bush which Shakespeare was wont to see there. Thus both Spain and England, both fitfully lords of the soil on which I stood, renewed their hold on it,