The cocoanut trees are beautiful, picturesque and romantic. You might well call them stately, yet there is a touch of the swashbuckler about each that forbids you to call them dignified. They should be the patron tree of buccaneers and wild sea rovers, and one cannot look upon them without peopling the strand beneath them with such gentry. The lawless, sea-roving life of the South Seas is theirs as it was that of Bluebeard and Teach and Morgan and Pizarro. They add to Eden a spice of dare-deviltry that makes it doubly dear. Far different are the royal palms, the trees of kings’ courtyards. I saw but four of these in The Garden. They stood apart, erect columns as smooth as if built out of gray masonry for fifty feet in height. You would sooner think this smooth but unpolished gray granite than wood. Miraculously from the top of this stone column, which swells outward as it progresses upward, then recedes as slightly, grows a green stem for a distance of a fathom, from the top of which spread the majestic, leafy fronds. Such columns should grace the stone palaces of the Pharaohs. So stately and impressive are these that I never see them but I fancy that they stood thus as pillars to the gateway by which stood the angel with the flaming sword, while our first parents fled with averted faces, outward. At Easter time The Garden blossomed with white stems of femininity, bearing aloft Easter flowers of gorgeous millinery. The violet of bohenia blooms, the purple of bougainvillea, the soft pink and pure white of blooming oleanders were all outdone and the butterfly-like flowers of hibiscus nodded and poised unnoticed as these passed by. Yet I saw three things outside The Garden that typified Easter to me with far more potentiality than these. One was the green of repentant cypresses in the gray swamp at the back of Clearwater Lake. Another was a cactus in the jungle on the outer rim of The Garden. Here was a stubborn thing, its oval, dusty, lifeless joints hideous with thorns. Seemingly nothing could give this thing life or beauty. It stood in arid sand, and rough, dusty ridges to seaward shut off even the reviving, purifying winds. Yet the time came and out of the very thorns sprang a wondrous, yellow bloom of satiny-cupped petals that was more lovely than any flower of sweetest wood in any rose garden in the world. Butterfly and bee that had so long passed by came to this and caressed it, nor could anyone remember the thorns or the hideous crooked joints for love of the beauty of this Easter bloom.