A Thousand-Mile Walk 
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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