Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/96

 outermost hedgerows and biding its time. For fifty years, since 1835, no harmful cold had reached this portion of Florida, but the jungle knew. Fifty years was but as a day in its experience.

It was on a February day in 1886 that it came. That noon the mercury stood at eighty degrees and all the gorgeous profusion of semi-tropical spring growth filled the air about with perfume of flowers that spangled all things. The kind sun steeped the land in content and the negroes sang at their work, knowing and loving its fervor on their bent backs. By mid-afternoon clouds had come up out of the southwest and much rain fell bringing a chill in the air such as may often be felt here in February, or indeed at any time between November and April. But this chill instead of passing with the clouds grew with the setting sun and when his last red light came across the river the rain had turned to icicles that hung in alien glory from all the trees. There they swayed and clashed in the keen north-*west wind all night, and before morning the astonished glass had registered the temperature of a Northern winter night, fifteen above or thereabouts.

The very jungle itself must have been black in the face with dismay and a thousand acres of orange groves that were bearing five to fifteen