The ruin is mentioned in the guide-books
as one of the historic features of the ancient settlement of New Smyrna,
but I had forgotten the fact, and was thankful to receive a description
of the place, as well as of the road thither,--a rather blind road, my
informant said, with no houses at which to inquire the way.
Two or three mornings afterward, I set out in the direction indicated.
If the route proved to be half as vague as my good lady's account of it
had sounded, I should probably never find the mill; but the walk would
be pleasant, and that, after all, was the principal consideration,
especially to a man who just then cared more, or thought he did, for a
new bird or a new song than for an indefinite number of
eighteenth-century relics.
For the first half-mile the road follows one of the old Turnbull canals
dug through the coquina stone which underlies the soil hereabout; then,
after crossing the railway, it strikes to the left through a piece of
truly magnificent wood, known as the cotton-shed hammock, because,
during the war, cotton was stored here in readiness for the blockade
runners of Mosquito Inlet. Better than anything I had yet seen, this
wood answered to my idea of a semi-tropical forest: live-oaks,
magnolias, palmettos, sweet gums, maples, and hickories, with here and
there a long-leaved pine overtopping all the rest. The palmettos, most
distinctively Southern of them all, had been badly used by their hardier
neighbors; they looked stunted, and almost without exception had been
forced out of their normal perpendicular attitude.
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