You have a vision of the
muddy, slushy subway steps, and slimy platforms, packed with people,
their clothing caked with wet white spangles. You see them wedged, cross
and damp, into the trains, and hear them coughing into one another's
necks. You see emaciated tramps, pausing to gaze wanly into bakery
windows: men without overcoats, their collars turned up, their hands
deep in the pockets of their trousers, their heads bent against the
storm; you see them walk on to keep from freezing. You remember Roscoe
Conkling. That sort of thing can happen in a New York blizzard! Little
tattered newsboys, thinly clad, will die to-night upon cold corners.
Poor widows, lacking money to buy coal, are shuddering even now in
squalid tenements, and covering their wailing little ones with shoddy
blankets.
"Horrible!" you say, sighing upon the balmy air. Then, with the sweetly
resigned philosophy of Palm Beach, you add:
"Oh, well, what does it matter? _I'm_ in Florida anyhow. After all it is
a pretty good old world!"
CHAPTER LIV
ASSORTED AND RESORTED FLORIDA
"Some year or more ago, I s'pose,
I roamed from Maine to Floridy,
And,--see where them Palmettoes grows?
I bought that little key...."
--SIDNEY LANIER ("A FLORIDA GHOST.")
Florida in winter comes near to being all things to all men.
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