“Was it not some old reportorial ruse played upon the credulity of the ancients that made the story of Aladdin’s wonderful lamp to live in literature and come down to us through the ages to make us listen with open ears, gape with open mouth, and wonder with open eyes at the wonders of it--and I wonder if that ancient reporter could prove in any way the foundation of his story of the lamp and the rubbing of it. Aye, there’s the rub--I think he couldn’t prove it. He might show the lamp, but no palace would rise up at his rubbing, however hard. _But_, to-day, the vision may be produced and the palace reared, and yet no lamp to rub. I would lead to a land where balmy breezes blow and sigh among the pines, and make the feathery palm trees wave as nodding plumes. Coming out from under these, on a night when the moon is bright, to the banks of a beautiful river with banks fringed with ferns, look across its waters where the moon and stars are reflected and so many, many lights that are on the river’s other shore, there the palace is, a brighter than Aladdin’s, and more beautiful. That’s Tampa Bay. That your coming under these pines and palms may be in a palace car, produces no disillusion,--there’s a palace at Tampa Bay. “It might have been, in the long centuries agone, when his ship floated lazily and his barges glided noiselessly over the waters to the fern-fringed banks of Tampa’s river, that that ancient and original tourist, on the same mission bent as those of to-day, in search of the fount of perpetual youth, might have looked, disheartened, on the tangled forest and heard the moaning of the winds through the pines that brought no tidings of a land of life.