The Cecil Whig. [volume] (Elkton, Md.) 1841-current, 1870-09-17
"SiX Weeks i'm Florida"
ST. AUGU STINE.

ST. AUGUSTINE.
The architecture of this city is altogether
unlike that of any upon this continent
The streets are very narrow, while the
houses have wide balconies in the second
stories, which come very near to each other.
The material used in their constructive is
very beautiful, and is called the "coquina
stone 1t is formed of a concrete which
has a pleasant yellow-gray tone when seen
at distance and, examined in detail, pre-
sents an exquisite collection of various and
delicately formed shells. Although most
of the habtable buildings built in the way
described are of modern construction, yet,
except in their pitched roofs, they probably
resemble those built hundreds of years ago,
and whose ruins are met with at every
turn. Here you see the stained walls of
blacksmith shop, constructed by the hands
of the soldiers of the Spanish governor and
cut-throat, Menendez d. Avileis, in 1570.-
Out from graceful groves of orage-trees
will rise Jagged walls whose ruins came by
the hand of Governor Oglethorpe, of
Georgia, in 1872. Side by side with trim
Villas the residences of those seeking health
from the North, stand the crumbling
chmneys of houses destroyed by one or
another of the many conquerors who these
centuries past have made this oldest of
cities on this continent north of the Gulf of
Mexico their battle-ground.
We were at St. Augustine for several
weeks, and had an excellent opportunity to
judge of the influences of the climate. On
several occasions the air was freezing cold,
and then we suffered more discomfort than
during the severest season in the North,
for the reason that neither were the houses
constructed in regard to the cold nor were
we expecting it. But for the most of the
time the air was mild and gentle, so that
an invalid would be able to pass the hours
of the day out Of doors, for which, l take it,
Florida has become the winter home of SO
many thousands of persons having COM
plants. Whether or not st. Augustine is
the best locality for such invalids is seri-
Gus question, which must be left to the de-
csion Of physicians who have been there;
but have known of several persons within
my own limited experience who found the
frequent changes which take place from
the warm air of the land to the cool, salt
air of the sea to have injurious results,
which ceased upon going over to the St.
Johns River.
ON THE ST. JOHNS RIVER.
The trip of the Starlight to Enterprise,
back to Jacksonville, and the return to
Pilatka, occupied about three days, and
this interval was pleasantly passed, for we
saw, for the first time, the distinctive char
acteristics of physical nature in Florida
Heretofore we had passed through pine
barrens and over plains covered with pal
metto, but these may be seen in Georgia
and the Carolinas; now, however, we were
presented to new, a strange aspect, which
filled us with wonder and surprise.
Unlike the mountains and the sea-shore
of the North, the scenery of the tropics is
greatest in its little things. And so in a
row-boat we wandered along the shore,
past forests whose sombre depths were
yelled to us by vast screens of dropping
moss, or, pushing our little craft over and
through the widespread beds of water
lilies, we entered within the precincts of
this salemn Hades.
What weird, wondrous VISIONS then
greeted our thrilled senses, as, gliding
-, hui hoo, ol,
shut out from view, and there rose up be-
side and around us trunks of trees which
looked as though they might have been
human once, and, like the lost souls of
Dante's vision, condemned to this i'm
prisonment
"We had put ourselves within wood
That was not marked by any path what
ever:
Not foliage green, but of dusky color;
Not branches smooth, but gnarled and
intertangled;
Not apple-trees were there, but thorns
with poison;
Such tangled thickets have not, nor so
dense,
Those savage wild beasts that in hatred
'Twixt Cecina and Corneto the titled
places"
Now STOPPING as we passed underneath
some fallen monarch of the place, we
brushed aside the thickly trailing vines, or
passed into the embraces of that paradise
of DEATH the pendent moss; and then our
keel would disturb the perfect surface of
the most marvellous of mirrors, rejecting
countless forms of leaf and twig and moss
and tree, with here and there bits of blue
which told us that there was heave above.
How intense is the silence of this place,
broken only by the splash Of single blue
heron, who, wondering at this intrusion,
gazes and then, spreading its great wings,
rises slowly and disappears, leaving a
deeper silence than before This is not
the forest of Ohio, with its cheerful life
and health, its varied growth of beach and
birch and oak and buckeye and elm, and
hundred other varieties of tree and bush,
with all their beauty, grace, and strength,
and youth. All this seems to be in full
ness and reality what the spectacle at the
theatre suggests. 1t is not life: it is the
funeral pageant of nature.-From "Six
Weeks in Florida by George Ward Mich
OILS, in Harger's Magazine for October.
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