11.  From a train-window I had once beheld a cross-section of America from West to East; now I beheld another from North to South.  In the afternoon were the farms and country-homes of New Jersey; and then in the morning endless wastes of wilderness, and straggling fields of young corn and tobacco; turpentine forests, with half-stripped negroes working, and a procession of “depots,” with lanky men chewing tobacco, and negroes basking in the blazing sun.  Then another night, and there was the pageant of Florida:  palmettos, and other trees of which one had seen pictures in the geography books; stretches of vine-tangled swamps, where one looked for alligators; orange-groves in blossom, and gardens full of flowers beyond imagining.  Every hour, of course, it got hotter; I was not, like Sylvia, used to it, and whenever the train stopped I sat by the open window, mopping the perspiration from my face.

We were due at Miami in the afternoon; but there was a freight-train off the track ahead of us, and so for three hours I sat chafing with impatience, worrying the conductor with futile questions.  I had to make connections at Miami with a train which ran to the last point on the mainland, where the construction-work over the keys was going forward.  And if I missed that last train, I would have to wait in Miami till morning.  I had better wait there, anyhow, the conductor argued; but I insisted that my friends, to whom I had telegraphed two days before, would meet me with a launch and take me to their place that night.

We got in half an hour late for the other train; but this was the South, I discovered, and they had waited for us.  I shifted my bag and myself across the platform, and we moved on.  But then another problem arose; we were running into a storm.  It came with great suddenness; one minute all was still, with a golden sunset, and the next it was so dark that I could barely see the palm-trees, bent over, swaying madly—­like people with arms stretched out, crying in distress.  I could hear the roaring of the wind above that of the train, and I asked the conductor in consternation if this could be a hurricane.  It was not the season for hurricanes, he replied; but it was “some storm, all right,” and I would not find any boat to take me to the keys until it was over.

It was absurd of me to be nervous, I kept telling myself; but there was something in me that cried out to be there, to be there!  I got out of the train, facing what I refrain from calling a hurricane out of deference to local authority.  It was all I could do to keep from being blown across the station-platform, and I was drenched with the spray and bewildered by the roaring of the waves that beat against the pier beyond.  Inside the station, I questioned the agent.  The launch of the van Tuivers had not been in that day; if it had been on the way, it must have sought shelter somewhere.  My telegram to Mrs. van Tuiver had been received two days before, and delivered by a boatman whom they employed for that purpose.  Presumably, therefore, I would be met.  I asked how long this gale was apt to last; the answer was from one to three days.