Here are tiny fenced-in gardens all about little unpretentious houses, gardens which are soft with turf underfoot, stately with palms overhead, and all between bowered with purple bougainvillea and violet bohenia, and passion vine and allamanda, almost, indeed, all the beauties of The Garden over yonder. There is none of the stateliness that space alone can give, but the shrubs and vines crowd lovingly together, till one might well wonder if Adam and Eve did not plant something of this sort just beyond the flash of that flaming sword and perhaps learn to love the home they had found better than the Eden they had lost. You may, if you will, go westward still from this ridge and get into another land of enchantment, the borderland of the Everglades. Here a road winds from one saw-grass island to another across Clearwater Lake. It is a region of marsh plants, of cat-tail and pipewort, of purple bladderwort and wild grasses and sedges, where nestling blackbirds make love with a boldness that might put the flower-margined walks of The Garden to the blush, and where you may look into the wayside ditch and see big-mouthed bass waving their square tails as they move leisurely off into deeper water. To plunge from the barren ridge into the marsh district is like going from the sackcloth and ashes of Lent into the full awakening joy of Easter. Here the Florida wilderness itself marks the season of the revival of life and joy, and with nothing more vividly than the cypress. [Illustration: The “traveler’s tree” in a Palm Beach garden] On the farther margin of Clearwater Lake the ground rises a bit into cypress swamp. All winter these close-set, gnarled trees have held bare and knotted, writhing arms to Heaven in mute repentance for misdeeds. Gray Spanish moss alone has draped them, waving in the winds most lugubriously. The water has been warm about their roots, the sun has steeped them in its heat that has kept the water gay with bloom of bladderwort and sagittaria and pickerel weed, yet the cypresses have held aloft their sackcloth moss and stretched their arms skyward, unforgiven, while the trade winds mumbled prayers in the gray gloom of their twining limbs. Now--it seems all of a sudden--the richest and softest drapery of green has hidden all their bareness as if they had taken off the sackcloth and put on the joy of forgiveness and new life. Spring green is always beautiful. It seems to me as if the cypresses must have picked their shade from the softest and richest of colors that soothe the eye in the shoaling sea outside. They are vivid indeed against the rising land beyond, where flatwoods pines and saw palmetto hold sway again in grim monotony.