Durgan in his car; he had been to call for me to take me in to Charlottesville. We had a lovely morning together, especially as we agreed in the beginning not once to mention Beatrice and her affairs. When we were nearly home we saw a man walking from the station. We slowed up to see if it was some one to whom we could give a lift, and who should it be but Godfrey Gorham.

"Hel-lo!" Mr. Durgan said. "Then he got the special-delivery letter I wrote him."

"Mr. Durgan," I said, in a scandalized tone, "you didn't go and interfere in Godfrey's affairs like you said a man shouldn't do?”

"I never said a word to him about his affairs," Mr. Durgan protested. "What did you say?"

"I just wrote him a few words."
"What were they?"

"As well as I recall, they were: 'Dear Gorham, Renewed reflection convinces me that you are something of a damned fool. Durgan.""

"Oh!" I groaned; and then Mr. Durgan stopped the car.

"Want a lift, Gorham?" he said, just as amiably as if he had not mortally insulted Godfrey.

"I got your letter, Durgan," said Godfrey, grimly, as he climbed in beside

me.

"I thought you understood it," Mr. Durgan said, as he speeded up the car. "Miss Sallie, where is Miss Beatrice?" Godfrey asked me.

"I reckon she's cataloguing your library this morning," I said.

Just then we reached Godfrey's house, and he said, "I want you-all to come in.' He led the way into the library, and there sat Beatrice with her plain hair, and a white apron on, working at his books.

“Good morning, Miss Beatrice," Godfrey said; "I have something to say to you and to your friends. Perhaps they know that I addressed you a fortnight ago, and that you did me the honor of accepting. A few days later you wrote me a letter withdrawing. Miss Beatrice, what I said to you that night I have said to many girls before and in just the same words, because I have been the court fool of this county for more years than I

VOL. CXXX.-No. 775.-4

Mr. Durgan and I stared at each other. I don't think he looked any more embarrassed than I felt.

"When I got to thinking it over," Godfrey said, "and saw that my play had become earnest, I was so ashamed of myself that I went away. What had I to offer a brilliant, high-souled girl like you-I, who had flirted with 'most every woman in Virginia? Later on, as I expected, you refused me, but there was something in your letter that made me. see more than ever what I was losing. When I realized that you had actually read my article, and not only that, but had got it accepted by a magazine; when I remembered what a wonderful talker you are and how I've longed for years for real talk—I reckon I never felt more like jumping in the James River than I have these last few days. Then—”

Mr. Durgan gave him a warning. nudge, for he feared the mention of his pointed letter.

"Then," Godfrey continued, "I decided to come here and tell you the truth about myself, and see if there was any way of starting over, and I find you cataloguing my books—"

"Come away, Mr. Durgan," I said, starting for the door.

Mr. Durgan lingered. He said to me afterward that he never had heard any man propose except himself to me, and he couldn't remember what he had said, and he wanted to get a line on that sort of talk. But I dragged him away, for I saw Beatrice and Godfrey edging closer to each other, and I knew that here was another place where company wasn't wanted.

"Don't you see," I said, when we were driving to my house, "Beatrice must have been on the upper porch that morning when I said to you that Godfrey didn't mean anything by his proposal. She was saving her face by all these engagements.

"She saved Gorham's, too," Mr. Durgan said, "for, Sallie Rives, I truly would have smashed it for him. But,

say, don't you think I'm the great little match-maker?"

HAT it can be winter in one place while it is summer in another is the simplest fact of geography, yet it is for most of us a constant marvel. When the snow flies in our native North we childishly feel it to be quite impossible that in the South, so easily attainable in a Pullman car, the groves are fragrant with white blossoms.

Just to see the palmetto's plumy crest against the blue of the subtropic sky, or the orange's gold against the glossy green of its foliage, is a holiday. Merely to put on a linen suit and sit reading of blizzards in the North is a vacation. There is a quite absurd thrill which goes through one upon picking one's first orange from the tree. Stories of the old days of plenty in Florida and California when heaping baskets of the fruit stood in hotel offices for the free use of the guests now sound like legends of some earlier Arcadian golden age.

The shortest Southern trip has always something exotic and adventurous in it; in a quiet New England village a great position of authority in the community may be founded upon a trip to California or Florida. Indeed, over the Southern horizon toward the Gulf, the Indies, and old Mexico there always flickers and dances the will-o'-the-wisp of romance, leading the tourist on with memories of the gay ante-bellum time and earlier, cloudier legends of Spanish days, of the Fountain of Youth and the golden sands of El Dorado. There is glamour for young and old in the winter holiday, and for the latter what might at least be termed a fighting chance of finding weather warm enough to reach the marrow of their old bones. If letters from "the folks at home" convey the welcome news that they are shivering in arctic airs, the last touch of geniality is added to the Southern

sun.

This question of weather must, however, be delicately handled. The only

when she packs her trunk for the South she must put in her flannels, it is true, on the whole, that the South really is a land of filmy frocks and roses and orangeblossoms and sunshine.

It is possible that even while the Floridas-East and West as they were pleasantly called in those days-were successively British and Spanish, an occasional adventurous American passed the winter in the quiet little provincial capitals of St. Augustine and Pensacola. At any rate, it is certain that soon after the land became ours the tourist was seen. It was difficult traveling and sometimes dangerous living-the early nineteenth century saw a sanatorium on one of the Keys tragically visited by a marauding and murdering band of Seminole Indians. Now the sea-going railroad has been romantically flung to Key

West across these same low islands and turquoise waters, and limited trains, exotically loaded with gay, chattering, bediamonded Cubans and Mexicans, oddly mixed with nice old ladies from Michigan, rush to and fro in the modernest way. The modernest Florida is indeed the Florida to visit and to write about, but it is pleasant for an instant to try to recapture something of the nineteenth-century days before the great sleepy state had waked at the touch of Northern enterprise.

You went to St. Augustine then from the St. John's River by a little railroad on which the trains politely stopped if any of the passengers wished to gather magnolia flowers from the trees along the way. You made your way down the long east coast upon intermittent and spasmodic steamers, and at least once