Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/161

 There is far more brown in the landscape than is wont to meet the eye and this tells the tale, not only of a temperature that has been below freezing, but just what plants are on the northern edge of their limit, just as the yellow-rump warblers are on the southern edge of theirs. The brown guava leaves whisper the story; the banana plants, killed to the stalk, shout it aloud. So do the fields of pineapples. This is a country of pineapple plantations. They cover that ridge next the Indian River, clothing it in prickly green lances from the river banks to the savanna behind it, for miles on miles, running north and south. In places these are under sheds, acres in extent. In others the wide lagoon of water on the west protected them and they are but little harmed. In others the full blight of the cold has worked in them and their green lances have turned a sickly, straw yellow. On such fields the crop for this year is ruined, and many acres of newly set young plants are killed to the root. Thus does winter set his mark occasionally even on this semi-tropic land.

But if it has been winter, I am quite convinced that it is now spring. I have surprised a suspicious tone of young green along the river edge, such a color as in Massachusetts I would know meant mid-April. It is the tender green of young willow leaves just opening out of gray