a latitude several degrees nearer the Equator.  When you leave the Poinciana or the Breakers at the season’s close, your waiter may, for all you know, be in the Jim Crow car, ahead, and when you go in to dinner at the Ponce de Leon at St. Augustine, or the Mason at Jacksonville, you may discover that he too has stopped off there for a few days, to gather in the final tips.  Nor must you fancy, when you depart for the North, that you have seen the last of him.  Next summer when you take a boat up the Hudson, or go to Boston by the Fall River Line, or drop in at a hotel at Saratoga, there he will be, like an old friend.  The bartender who mixes you a pick-me-up on the morning that you leave the Breakers, will be ready to start you on the downward path, at the beginning of the summer, at some Northern country club; the barber who cuts your hair at the Royal Palm in Miami will be ready to perform a like service, later on, at some hotel in the Adirondacks or the White Mountains; the neat waitress who serves you at the Belleview at Belleair will appear before you three or four months hence at the Griswold near New London; the adept waiter from the Beach Club at Palm Beach will seem to you to look like some one you have seen before when, presently, he places viands before you at Sherry’s, or the Ritz, or some fashionable restaurant in London or Paris.  Likewise, when you enter the barber shop of a large hostelry just off the board walk in Atlantic City, next July, you will find there, in the same generously ventilated shirt waist, the manicurist who caused your nails to glisten so superbly in the Florida sunlight; and if she has the memory for faces which is no small part of a successful manicurist’s stock in trade, she will remember you, and where she saw you last, and will tell you just which of the young women from “The Follies” and the Century Theater are to be seen upon the beach that day, and whether they are wearing, here on the Jersey coast, those same surprising bathing suits which, last February, caused blase gentlemen basking upon the Florida sands to sit up, arise, say it was time for one last dip before luncheon, and then, without seeming too deliberate about it, follow the amazing nymphs in the direction of a matchless sea—­that sea which, as a background for these Broadway girls in their long silken hosiery, takes on a tone of spectacular unreality, like some fantastic marine back drop devised by Mr. Dillingham or Mr. Ziegfeld.

CHAPTER LV

A DAY IN MONTGOMERY

    I have walk’d in Alabama
      My morning walk....

    —­WALT WHITMAN.

As I have remarked before, it is a long haul from the peninsula of Florida to New Orleans.  There are two ways to go.  The route by way of Pensacola, following the Gulf Coast, looks shorter on the map but is, I believe, in point of time consumed, the longer way.  My companion and I were advised to go by way of Montgomery, Alabama—­a long way around it looked—­where we were to change trains, catching a New Orleans-bound express from the North.