Meanwhile it is long to wait, and tourists and residents alike must find
what comfort they can in the lesser hills which, thanks to the good
appetite of their predecessors, 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.
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