will be taken, I hope, as rather to my credit than otherwise; but it would be morally worthless if I did not add the story of another plant, which, in this same New Smyrna hammock, I frequently noticed hanging in loose bunches, like blades of flaccid deep green grass, from the trunks of cabbage palmettos.  The tufts were always out of reach, and I gave them no particular thought; and it was not until I got home to Massachusetts, and then almost by accident, that I learned what they were.  They, it turned out, were ferns (Vittaria lineata—­grass fern), and my discomfiture was complete.

This comparative dearth of birds and flowers was not in all respects a disadvantage.  On the contrary, to a naturalist blessed now and then with a supernaturalistic mood, it made the place, on occasion, a welcome retreat.  Thus, one afternoon, as I remember, I had been reading Keats, the only book I had brought with me,—­not counting manuals, of course, which come under another head,—­and by and by started once more for the pine lands by the way of the cotton-shed hammock, “to see what I could see.”  But poetry had spoiled me just then for anything like scientific research, and as I waded through the ankle-deep sand I said to myself all at once, “No, no!  What do I care for another new bird?  I want to see the beauty of the world.”  With that I faced about, and, taking a side track, made as directly as possible for the river road.  There I should have a mind at ease, with no unfamiliar, tantalizing bird note to set my curiosity on edge, nor any sand through which to be picking my steps.

The river road is paved with oyster-shells.  If any reader thinks that statement prosaic or unimportant, then he has never lived in southern Florida.  In that part of the world all new-comers have to take walking-lessons; unless, indeed, they have already served an apprenticeship on Cape Cod, or in some other place equally arenarious.  My own lesson I got at second hand, and on a Sunday.  It was at New Smyrna, in the village.  Two women were behind me, on their way home from church, and one of them was complaining of the sand, to which she was not yet used.  “Yes,” said the other, “I found it pretty hard walking at first, but I learned after a while that the best way is to set the heel down hard, as hard as you can; then the sand doesn’t give under you so much, and you get along more comfortably.”  I wonder whether she noticed, just in front of her, a man who began forthwith to bury his boot heel at every step?

In such a country (the soil is said to be good for orange-trees, but they do not have to walk) roads of powdered shell are veritable luxuries, and land agents are quite right in laying all stress upon them as inducements to possible settlers.  If the author of the Apocalypse had been raised in Florida, we should never have had the streets of the New Jerusalem paved with gold.  His idea of heaven, would have been different from that; more personal and home-felt, we may be certain.