Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/361

 and the wilderness ahead blends with it, while the goblin-like voices of Florida frogs sound from the swamps. I would hate to be lost in a Florida swamp over night. There are more strange voices there that gasp and gurgle and screech and choke than anywhere else in the world. By and by the sudden shaft of the searchlight leaps ahead, transforming a single ever-changing circle into fairyland walled within impenetrable murk.

Never before was a forest so green as that which this light penetrates till trunks and foliage bar it off. Never before were tree-trunks edged with such quivering rainbows and built of such corrugated gold. On any stump, once black and slimy with decay, now coruscating with jeweled light, might well sit a fairy with wand, transparent wings, and diaphanous garments of green and gold. You get to watch, breathless, for this as the rich circle slides on and on down the bank ahead or jumps like rainbowed lightning to another side or shoots far ahead along a straight stretch of river, perhaps firing with smokeless splendor some crazy dock or ancient river-bank house.

The scorching heat of the sun is gone and the river damp wraps all things in a coolness that is grateful to the wearied skin. The boat glides forward into white river mists, out of which fly wonderful winged creatures of the night. These, in