Best of all I remember, over in the flatwoods, a young, long-leaf pine that had for a week been growing altar candles for the season as is the way of such trees. Only this tree in its love could not stop there. From every spike it grew on the right and the left exultant buds that made of each candle a little cross of pale bloom, lighting the little lonely tree in the level waste with a glorification and chaste beauty that made the worshipful onlooker forget all else. Nor in The Garden, nor in churches, nor even in the hearts of men has there grown, I believe, a lovelier or more acceptable Easter offering. CHAPTER XXII INTO THE MIRACULOUS SEA Flying southward by rail from Palm Beach one immediately leaves behind tropical gardens and enters semi-arid wastes. The contrast is most vivid. The traveler feels like Es-Sindibad of old who thus was transported by magic, or perchance by an Afreet or the talons of a roc, from king’s gardens to deserts, and anon back again. The dream of yesterday was of stately palms, of richly massed foliage plants, of broad-petaled flowers tiptoeing for a butterfly flight, of softly perfumed breezes and man and maid in rich garments wandering joyously among it all. The reality of to-day is sand and saw palmetto and dreary wind-bowed, stunted pines, and dust and desolation. Only by thus plunging back into bleakness can you realize what man and climate have done, working together, to redeem the wilderness from itself. By and by the arid levels of sand change to equally arid levels of rock. The coral formation which is the backbone of lowest Florida here rises to the surface, showing everywhere in minute, multitudinous, interlacing mountain ranges of gray that snarl the surface with ridges and peaks a foot high, entwining craters a foot in diameter. In the craters only is soil and in these grow tired and dusty saw palmettos. The railroad builders, seeking earth to put about the ties, have scooped the dirt out of these near-by craters, leaving the surface pitted with their yawning mouths till, looking down upon it at the stations, one is reminded of the moon’s surface as seen through a good-sized telescope. I say stations. These imply man, and here you find him, working in his own small, patient way with the climate for the redemption of the land. It may be that new gardens like those of Palm Beach are to be “wrested from the stubborn glebe” here and eventually make the wilderness blossom like the rose, with it. Certainly such gardening is done by main strength. Dynamite and sledge and pick are the tools and vast walls of rock surround such acreage as is partially subdued. They plant orange trees by blowing out a hole with dynamite, filling it in again with such soil as may be purloined from potholes and setting the young tree in the middle.