s, are already theirs. For my own part,
there is one such eminence of which I cherish the most grateful
recollections. It stands (or stood; the road-makers had begun carting it
away) at a bend in the road just south of one of the Turnbull canals. I
climbed it often (it can hardly be less than fifteen or twenty feet
above the level of the sea), and spent more than one pleasant hour upon
its grassy summit. Northward was New Smyrna, a village in the woods, and
farther away towered the lighthouse of Mosquito Inlet. Along the eastern
sky stretched the long line of the peninsula sand-hills, between the
white crests of which could be seen the rude cottages of Coronado beach.
To the south and west was the forest, and in front, at my feet, lay the
river with its woody islands. Many times have I climbed a mountain and
felt myself abundantly repaid by an off-look less beautiful. This was
the spot to which I turned when I had been reading Keats, and wanted to
see the beauty of the world. Here were a grassy seat, the shadow of
orange-trees, and a wide prospect. In Florida, I found no better place
in which a man who wished to be both a naturalist and a nature-lover,
who felt himself heir to a double inheritance,

"The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part,"

could for the time sit still and be happy.

The orange-trees yielded other things beside shadow, though perhaps
nothing better than that. They were resplendent with fruit, and on my
earlier visits were also in bloom. One did not need to climb the hill to
learn the fact. For an out-of-door sweetness it would be hard, I think,
to improve upon the scent of orange blossoms. As for the oranges
themselves, they seemed to be in little demand, large and handsome as
they were. Southern people in general, I fancy, look upon wild fruit of
this kind as not exactly edible. I remember asking two colored men in
Tallahassee whether the oranges still hanging conspicuously from a tree
just over the wall (a sight not so very common in that part of the
State) were sweet or sour. I have forgotten just what they said, but I
remember how they _looked_. I meant the inquiry as a mild bit of humor,
but to them it was a thousandfold better than that: it was wit
ineffable. What Shakespeare said about the prosperity of a jest was
never more strikingly exemplified. In New Smyrna, with orange groves on
every hand, the wild fruit went begging with natives and tourists alike;
so that I feel a little