The Ancient City

“And John Hoffman?”

“Mr. Hoffman said that we ought to be very thankful for the simple, unalloyed enjoyment of the perfect day; how much better it was than the gaudy glare of cities, and so forth.”

“I have noticed that no one ever says that who has not been well through the g. g. aforesaid, and especially the and-so-forth, Sara, my dear.”

The sunny days passed; the delicious, indolent atmosphere affected us all; we wandered to and fro without plan or purpose in a lazy enjoyment impossible with Northern climate and Northern consciences.

“I feel as though I had taken hasheesh,” said Sara.

Crowds of tourists came and went, and liked or liked not the Ancient City according to their tastes.

“You must let yourself glide into the lazy tropical life,” I explained to a discontented city friend; “it is dolce far niente here, you know.”

But the lady did not know. “Very uninteresting place,” she said; “nothing to see – no shops.”

“What! going, Mr. Brown?” I asked one morning.

“Yes, Miss Martha, I am going,” replied the old gentleman, decidedly. “I have been very much disappointed in St. Augustine – nothing to do, no cemeteries to speak of.”

“Stay longer? No, indeed,” said a lady who had made three toilets a day, and found nobody to admire them. “What you find to like in this old place is beyond me!”

“She is not far wrong there,” commented Sara, sotto voce; “it is beyond her; that is the very point of the thing.”

But, on the other hand, all those in search of health, all endowed with romance and imagination, all who could appreciate the rare charming haze of antiquity which hangs over the ancient little city, grew into love for St. Augustine, and lingered there far beyond their appointed time. Crowds of old ladies and gentlemen sunned themselves on the south piazzas, and troops of young people sailed and walked every where, waking up the sleeping woods and the dreaming water with song and laughter. The enterprising tourists came and went with their accustomed energy; they bought palmetto hats and twined gray moss around them; they carried orange-wood canes and cigar boxes containing young alligators. (Why young alligators must always travel North in cigar boxes in preference to any other kind of box is a mystery; but in cigar boxes they always go!) Once a hand-organ man appeared, and ground out the same tune for two whole days on the Plaza.

“And what may be the name of that melody, Miss Iris – the one he is playing now?” asked the Professor, endeavoring to assume a musical air.

“He can only play one tune, and he has been playing that steadily for two days,” replied Iris. “As far as I can make out from the discords it is intended to be Strauss’s Tausend und Eine Nacht.”

But the Professor, an expert in Hebrew, Greek, and Sanskrit, had never condescended to a modern tongue.

“Pray translate it for me,” he said, playfully, with the air of an affable Sphinx.

“It is a subject to which I have given profound thought, Sir,” said Iris, gravely. “It is not ‘A thousand and one nights,’ because the last night only is intended, and therefore the best way to translate it is, I think, ‘The thousand and oneth.’ I will give you some verses on the melody, if you like.”

The Professor liked, and Iris began:

“ ‘TAUSEND UND EINE NACHT

“ ‘The birds within their dells
Are silent; hushed the shining insect throng —
Now human music swells,
And all the land is echoing with song;
The serenade, the glee,
The symphony – and forth, mit Macht und Pracht,
Orchestral harmony
Is thrilling out Tausend und Eine Nacht.

“ ‘O thousand nights and one!
The witching magic of thy opening bars,
In little notes begun,
Might move to swaying waltzes all the stars
In all their shining spheres;
Then, soft, a plaintive air the music sings —
We dance, but half in tears —
To dearest joy a sadness always clings.
“ ‘O thousand nights and one!
Could we but have a thousand nights of bliss!
The golden stories spun
By dark-eyed Arab girl ne’er equaled this.
Soon over? Yes, we see
The summer’s fading; but, when all is done,
There lives the thought that we
Were happy – not a thousand nights, but one!’

“Dancing at a watering-place, you know – two young people waltzing – orchestra playing Tausend und Eine Nacht. You have danced to it a hundred times I dare say.”

No, the Professor had neglected dancing in his youth, but still it might not be too late to learn if —

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said Iris, waking up from her vision. “I forgot it was you, Sir; I thought you were – were somebody else.”

So the days passed. Iris strolled about the town with Mokes, talked on the piazza with Hoffman, and wore his roses in her hair (Hoffman was always seen with a fresh rose every morning); she even listened occasionally to extracts from the Great Work. But the sea-wall by moonlight was reserved for Antinous. Thus we dallied with the pleasant weather until Aunt Diana, like a Spartan matron, roused herself to action. “This will never do,” she said; “this very afternoon we will all go over to the island and see the tombs.”

Aunt Di’s temper had been sorely tried. Going out with Mokes the preceding evening to find Iris, who was ostensibly “strolling up and down the wall” in the moonlight with the Captain, she had found no trace of her niece from one end of the wall to the other – from the glacis of San Marco to the flag-staff at the Barracks. Heroically swallowing her wrath, she had returned to the hotel a perfect coruscation of stories, bon-mots, and compliments, to cover the delinquency of her niece, and amuse the deserted Mokes; and, to tell the truth, Mokes seemed very well amused. He was not an ardent lover.

“Where do you suppose they are?” I said, sotto voce, to John Hoffman.

“The demi-lune!” he answered.

A sail-boat took us first down to Fish Island, which is really a part of Anastasia, separated from it only by a small creek. The inlet, which is named Matanzas River south of the harbor, and the North River above it, was dotted with porpoises heaving up their unwieldy bulk; the shores were bristling with oysters; armies of fiddler-crabs darted to and fro on the sands; heavy old pelicans, sickle-bill curlews, ospreys, herons, and even bald-headed eagles flew around and about us. We ran down before the wind within sight of the mysterious old fortification that guards the Matanzas channel – mysterious from the total absence of any data as to its origin. “Three hundred and fifty Huguenots met their death down there,” said John Hoffman; “massacred under the personal supervision of Menendez himself. Their bones lie beneath this water, or under the shifting sands of the beach, but the river perpetuates the deed in its name, Matanzas, or slaughter.”

“Is there any place about here where there were no massacres?” asked Sara. “Wherever I go, they arise from the past and glare at me. Between Spanish, Huguenot, and Indian slaughter, I am becoming quite gory.”

The Professor, who was holding on his tall hat with much difficulty in the fresh breeze, here wished to know generally if we had read the remarkable narrative of Cabeça de Vaca, the true discoverer of the Mississippi, who landed in Florida in 1527.

“Alas! the G. W. again,” murmured Sara in my ear. Miss Sharp, however, wanted “so much to hear about it” that the Professor began. But the hat kept interfering. Once Mokes rescued it, once John Hoffman, and the renowned De Vaca suffered in consequence. The governess wore a white scarf around her neck, one of those voluminous things called “clouds.” She took it off, and leaned forward with a smile. “Perhaps if you were to tie this over your hat,” she said, sweetly offering it.

But the Professor was glad to get it, and saw no occasion for sweetness at all. He wanted to go on with De Vaca; and so, setting the hat firmly on the back of his head, he threw the scarf over the top, and tied the long ends firmly under his chin. The effect was striking, especially in profile, and we were glad when the landing at Fish Island gave us an opportunity to let out our laughter over hastily improvised and idiotic jokes, while, all unconscious, the Professor went on behind us, and carried De Vaca into the thirteenth chapter.

The island began with a morass, and the boatmen went back for planks.

“ ‘Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds,’ ” said Iris, balancing herself on an oyster shell, Mokes by her side (the Captain was absent – trust Aunt Diana for that!). “Those verses always haunt one so, don’t they?”

Mokes, as usual in the rear, mentally speaking, wanted to know “what verses?”

“Moore’s Dismal Swamp, of course. Sometimes I find myself saying it over fifty times a day:

‘They have made her a grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;