The river road, then, as I have said, and am glad to say again, was shell-paved.  And well it might be; for the hammock, along the edge of which it meandered, seemed, in some places at least, to be little more than a pile of oyster-shells, on which soil had somehow been deposited, and over which a forest was growing.  Florida Indians have left an evil memory.  I heard a philanthropic visitor lamenting that she had talked with many of the people about them, and had yet to hear a single word said in their favor.  Somebody might have been good enough to say that, with all their faults, they had given to eastern Florida a few hills, such as they are, and at present are supplying it, indirectly, with comfortable highways.  How they must have feasted, to leave such heaps of shells behind them!  They came to the coast on purpose, we may suppose.  Well, the red-men are gone, but the oyster-beds remain; and if winter refugees continue to pour in this direction, as doubtless they will, they too will eat a “heap” of oysters (it is easy to see how the vulgar Southern use of that word may have originated), and in the course of time, probably, the shores of the Halifax and the Hillsborough will be a fine mountainous country!  And then, if this ancient, nineteenth-century prediction is remembered, the highest peak of the range will perhaps be named in a way which the innate modesty of the prophet restrains him from specifying with greater particularity.

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.