One or two cormorants were almost always about the river.  Sometimes they sat upon stakes in a patriotic, spread-eagle (American eagle) attitude, as if drying their wings,—­a curious sight till one became accustomed to it.  Snakebirds and buzzards resort to the same device, but I cannot recall ever seeing any Northern bird thus engaged.  From the south bridge I one morning saw, to my great satisfaction, a couple of white pelicans, the only ones that I found in Florida, though I was assured that within twenty years they had been common along the Halifax and Hillsborough rivers.  My birds were flying up the river at a good height.  The brown pelicans, on the other hand, made their daily pilgrimages just above the level of the water, as has been already described, and were never over the river, but off the beach.

All in all, there are few pleasanter walks in Florida, I believe, than the beach-round at Daytona, out by one bridge and back by the other.  An old hotel-keeper—­a rural Yankee, if one could tell anything by his look and speech—­said to me in a burst of confidence, “Yes, we’ve got a climate, and that’s about all we have got,—­climate and sand.”  I could not entirely agree with him.  For myself, I found not only fine days, but fine prospects.  But there was no denying the sand.

ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH.

Wherever a walker lives, he finds sooner or later one favorite road.  So it was with me at New Smyrna, where I lived for three weeks.  I had gone there for the sake of the river, and my first impulse was to take the road that runs southerly along its bank.  At the time I thought it the most beautiful road I had found in Florida, nor have I seen any great cause since to alter that opinion.  With many pleasant windings (beautiful roads are never straight, nor unnecessarily wide, which is perhaps the reason why our rural authorities devote themselves so madly to the work of straightening and widening),—­with many pleasant windings, I say,

    “The grace of God made manifest in curves,”

it follows the edge of the hammock, having the river on one side, and the forest on the other.  It was afternoon when I first saw it.  Then it is shaded from the sun, while the river and its opposite bank have on them a light more beautiful than can be described or imagined; a light—­with reverence for the poet of nature be it spoken—­a light that never was except on sea or land.  The poet’s dream was never equal to it.

In a flat country stretches of water are doubly welcome.  They take the place of hills, and give the eye what it craves,—­distance; which softens angles, conceals details, and heightens colors,—­in short, transfigures the world with its romancer’s touch, and blesses us with illusion.  So, as I loitered along the south road, I never tired of looking across the river to the long, wooded island, and over that to the line of sand-hills that marked the eastern