A Thousand-Mile JValk 



upon their lovely, changing pathways to the 

 sea. And hills rise over hills, and mountains 

 over mountains, heaving, waving, swelling, in 

 most glorious, overpowering, unreadable maj- 

 esty. 



When at last, stricken and 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 

 foothills, 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 Nevada. The valley of the San 

 Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever 

 walked, one vast, level, even flower-bed, a 

 sheet of flowers, a smooth sea, ruffled a little in 

 the middle by the tree fringing of the river and 

 of smaller cross-streams here and there, from 

 the mountains. 



Florida is indeed a "land of flowers," but 

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