You get off to walk upon the platform. The
row of hackmen and hotel porters stand there, in gloomy silent defiance
of the rapidly approaching end of things, each holding a sign bearing
the name of some hotel. In another week the railway company may, if it
wishes, lift the ban on shouting hotel runners. Let them shout. There
will be nobody to hear.

You buy a newspaper.

Ah! What is this? "Great Blizzard in New York--Trains Late--Wires Down."

You know what New York blizzards are. You picture the scenes being
enacted there to-day. You see the icy streets with horses falling down.
You see cyclonic clouds of snow whirl savagely around the corners of
high buildings, pelting the homegoing hoards, whirling them about,
throwing women down upon street crossings. 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. To all she
offers amusement plus her climate, and in no one section is the contrast
in what amusement constitutes, and costs, set forth more sharply than
where, on the west coast of the State, Belleair and St. Petersburg are
situated, side by side.

The Hotel Belleview at Belleair compares favorably with any in the
State, and is peopled, during the cold