Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/302

 of the upper waters of the river and venturing onward in companionable explorations wherever a half-inch of water might let their agile bodies slip.

We were on the border of "Little Cane Slough," and we fared on amphibiously thus some miles farther, coming at last to the country of islands which was our destination. In the geology of things Florida was once sea bottom, having been pushed up by a fold in the earth's strata which made the Appalachian mountain range. The giant force which raised these mountains thousands of feet high was nearly spent when it came to this part of the country and barely succeeded in getting the State above high tide. Thus the waters subsiding slowly made no extensive erosion. Yet they did their work and Little Cane Slough was once a river of salt water flowing out of the surgent State. In its slow, broad passage, the flood took some surface with it, leaving a bare, sandy bottom in the main free from any hint of humus in which vegetation might grow. In other spots it left the surface mud in higher islands of unexampled fertility.

Some of these islands are scarcely a hundred feet in diameter. Others measure a half mile or so, but all to-day are covered with a dense growth of vegetation from grass and shrubs to