Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/326

 A dollar wish will bring a bronze magician to your service for an hour and you glide majestically on air the while. You may be irreverent of tradition if you will and dub the Afreet and his conveyance an Afromobile, and say the air on which you glide majestically is but so much as is included in the inner tube of pneumatic tires, but the effect is the same.

But man! the sentence of banishment must still be heavy upon him, for he seems to me to tread The Garden somewhat fearfully, his glance over his shoulder expectant of another writ of ejectment. Often he pokes about with a grim solemnity which is much at variance with the laughing face of all nature. Very likely these are the newcomers who have not yet learned that from Paradise are barred all vengeful spirits. Man has been out so long that the habit of watchfulness and distrust is not to be lost in a day. You see none of this on the faces of children. They are from Paradise too recently to have forgotten.

Over on the bathing beach where beryl waves break on the amber sand these children play like fluffy sprites of foam blown inland from the spent waves, as much a part of the place as the fleets of rainbow-tinted nautilus that have made port on the same sands. Youth too belongs. Stretched in the shadow of a boat lie two, as lithe and keen