Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/250

 go your mile and with the houses at your back you stand within the untamed wilderness. A mile farther and you may look which way you will and you are lost from all touch with man. But before you make the mile you will pause and turn, for there, upside down upon a tree, but with an arrow pointing due south, is a sign which says, "To Miami" The last warning, guiding word of civilization is humorous and you plod southward into the primeval with a laugh.

After a little the spaces take you in and make you one with their fraternity. The sun and the wind spy upon you. The broad blue eye of the heavens looks you through and finds you fit. Thereafter you begin to see this barren, lonely world as it is, and find it neither barren nor lonely. The absolute level begins to show undulations, and after you have walked it a half-score of miles you may tell the hills from the valleys though the variation be but that of a half-foot in a quarter section. Here is the top of a ridge which you might need a theodolite to find if it were not that it has its own peculiar vegetation. Along this the taller pines have crept and found permanent foothold. With them have come the saw palmetto, accentuating the rise of inches by the dense green vegetation of a foot or two in height. No summer floods have long topped this ridge, else the palmettos had failed to find perma