Letters to a Friend 



when at last, stricken with faint like a crushed 

 insect, you hope to escape from all the terrible 

 grandeur of these mountain powers, other foun 

 tains, other oceans break forth before you, for 

 there, in clear view, over heaps and rows of foot 

 hills is laid a grand, smooth outspread plain, 

 watered by a river, and another range of peaky 

 snow-capped mountains a hundred miles in the 

 distance. That plain is the valley of the San 

 Joaquin, and those mountains are the great 

 Sierra Nevadas. The valley of the San Joaquin 

 is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, 

 one vast level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flow 

 ers, a smooth sea ruffled a little by the tree 

 fringing of the river and here and there of small 

 er cross streams from the mountains. Florida 

 is indeed a land of flowers, but for every flower 

 creature that dwells in its most delightsome 

 places more than a hundred are living here. 

 Here, here is Florida. Here they are not sprin 

 kled apart with grass between, as in our prai 

 ries, but grasses are sprinkled in the flowers ; not, 

 as in Cuba, flowers piled upon flowers heaped 

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