Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/379

 down into a point in the middle. In our great-grandmother's day young children wore short flaring skirts and projecting white garments beneath, the lower edges of which were cut into saw points. Looking into the gold-green depths of a Florida pine wood which is being turpentined you catch the flash of these white garments beneath the skirts of the forest as your train rushes by, and you smile. Here is all the world in pantalets. The flitting perspective flips these before your eyes in bewildering changes till you recall the lines of one who sang—

Oh, had I lived when song was great, And legs of trees were limber, And ta'en my fiddle to the gate And fiddled in the timber!

Old elms came breaking from the vine, The vine streamed out to follow. And, sweating rosin, danced the pine From many a cloudy hollow—

and you make sure that the days of old Amphion have come again. Here are the stately trees that buttress this solemn temple of the deep pine woods, doing a weaving maypole dance in pantalets. Surely this could happen only in an American forest.

The pitch sweats from the wood in curdy white cream and imperceptibly flows down into the boxes cut for it in the base of the tree. When