A GOOD DAY AT DORADO. 
83 
well hooked, and we had had to work hard to 
avoid a blank. But hope rises with the sun, 
and it was a glorious morning. The air was 
caressingly hot, but fresh as new milk in an 
underground dairy, and body and mind were 
both composed and alert, exhilarated and 
steadied at the same time. Oh, you who talk 
as though healthy breezes and nimble airs were 
confined to temperate regions, and as though 
it were only there that the wind came pure and 
sweet, whilst tropic airs are heavy and 
languorous, charged with beauty no doubt, but 
with a beauty which is unwholesome and 
unnatural, like some heavy-smelling hothouse 
flower, or some over-scented woman, I wish you 
could have been with me that morning. You 
would have revised your opinions. You would 
have found that heat does not destroy freshness. 
You would have realised that a wind blowing 
over hundreds of miles of untrodden forest, 
even if the forest be tropical, can come as clean 
and life-giving as any that blows over peat or 
bog-myrtle or sphagnum moss. You would have 
felt a lightness of heart which a lightly-clad 
body induces, and that harmony of body and 
spirit, that rush of vitality and that security 
of happy enjoyment which comes from the 
warm, delicate and sparkling atmosphere of a 
hot country, which laps you round and soothes 
every nerve, and at the same time freshens and 
exhilarates you. 
