Excerpt from The Garden of Eden Place: A Garden of Eden. Persons: Adam, aged eleven: Eve, aged seven. Serpent: deeming his office a sinecure in the councils of these children, absent. The Tree of Knowledge: a small Bartlett pear tree bearing its first fruits, three perfect pears, caressed by the gardener with tender thumb and finger light as air and destined for my lady's breakfast on the morrow. Time: Twilight, and a Sunday. Adam and Eve, having seen for weeks that the little tree was good for food, and pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise, approached and hung about it tentatively. "I'll just see if they are ripe," quoth Adam. "So will I," said Eve, his devotee and echo. Adam pinched a pear. Eve did likewise. Adam squeezed a second pear. Eve followed her leader. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.