William Dean Howells

“ There, if it could have spoken, San Marco might well have forbidden the ravage of the flames which have consumed large spaces of the Spanish houses on the bay-front, and left only the crumbling coquina walls and arches and the scorched palmettoes to attest the tragedy of their destruction; but it is not till you pass San Marco that you come upon the means of enforcing such a mandate—not till you come in fact to the city water-works where the splendid up-gush from the deeply subterranean springs diffuses their odor through the air. ”

“ Sometimes it comes like a thief in the night, and twice it has happened with me to be resting on one of the home-towners’ benches in the Plaza, and with head thrown back to be admiring the mildest of full moons, and then before morning to hear the rush and trample of a sudden shower on my roof and to wake in the morning eager for the fire of live-oak logs on my hearth. ”

“ Augustine, and is more comprehensive of the general interest than any other. The bridge which you presently cross gives one of the fairest prospects of the city, with its Andalusian towers and roofs, and then you are on the way back to them, by a shell road winding through the reaches and expanses of palmetto scrub, among the stems of the rather spindling pines. The scrub is the wonder and the terror of the local landscape, and, so far as I know, the whole Floridian landscape. Of all the vegetable enemies of man it seems the most inexorable. ”

“ Augustine form a Tolstoyan romance. But this is not the place to tell the story which, as your colored driver murmurs it, lends its poetry to your course through the winding ways of the natural park, with their outlooks upon the still waters of the bays and bayous around. You need not otherwise believe all that your driver says, especially all he says of the serpents which frequent these groves and climb the vines of the scuppernong to share its fruit with the colored boys competing for the grapes. ”

“ It is better, though, to own at once that the charm of St. Augustine derives nothing from any thing like grandeur in the domestic architecture of the past. In the Spanish city there were probably no dwellings of such stateliness as the three or four mansions of our own Colonial classic, which with their groves and gardens redeem the American town from the reproach of those deplorable ’seventies and ’eighties, when our eclectic architecture tried its ’prentice hand on so many of the cottages. ”

“ Nothing in nature has more surprised me, and the effect with my fellow home-towners was the same; they came running from, the benches—men, women, and children—and hung upon the alligator’s fence and wondered and worshiped like so many idolaters of some serpent of Old Nile, till his bellow subsided into a hoarse bleat, and then a long sigh that shook the disgusting folds of his throat into silence. ”

“ Augustine. There was the like fineness in some of the men’s faces which earned later into life than in the women’s; but the Spaniards have left so little trace otherwise in the city, that they were probably those insular Spanish, the Minorcans, whose touching story is a minor strain in the romance of the city’s life.
In all public places the American girl prevailed in the excess of fashion which it is her prerogative to exploit everywhere, with the helpless American father fettered to her high-heeled, sharp-toed little shoes, and the American mother distractedly struggling to keep up with her. ”

“ That famous orange orchard which we must not leave behind yet, is admirable for the avenues first of palms, and then of live-oaks which form its approach; the oaks stretch their writhing limbs across the driveway, and put a still weirder disposition on from their hearsing with long plumes of Spanish moss, in perhaps the least endearing appeal of nature to human nature. ”

“ Hastings’s hotels, and keep along King Street eastward on the town plan, you are almost at once in the Plaza, which is the heart of every Spanish town, and which begins here with the fountained and palmettoed oblong inclosing what was once the Spanish governor’s palace, or so said to be. It is now the American post-office and custom-house, but is inalienably dignified and venerable, with some galleried façades of the same period on one side, and a compendious reach of cheerful shops on the other. ”

“ If the reader is still, as I hope, in the Plaza with me, I would have him leave our places on the Mid-Western benching, and come and lean over the rail which keeps the dogs and boys from throwing themselves to the alligator in his pool{687} there, where he lies stiller than the stone of his bath. In some moment when the water is coldest he rises to the sun and basks motionless and soundless on the stone curbing, but no one ever saw him unlid those loathly eyes of his, or stir those antediluvian limbs. ”

“ The Old Religion, as distinguished from the New Religion which the Huguenots professed, is the faith which now perhaps not unfitly prevails in St. Augustine, but there is a great variety in the Protestant faiths, let alone that difference of white and black which is of such marked emphasis that I do not suppose any one could get to heaven from a church where he was not properly segregated. ”

“ On a single occasion last year a company of three hundred combatants—white and black, men, women, and children, hired overnight for the purpose—thronged the noble place and repelled each other in an invasion by the Japanese, with a constant explosion of old-fashioned musketry which sounded like the detonations of the unmuffled motors of a fleet of such boats as infest all our inland or coastwise waters. ”

“ Matron or maid, Señora or Señorita, it would not be more endearing if it were of the oldest Spanish derivation than if it were of that Minorcan origin which lends to the history of St. Augustine the pathos of a people cruelly injured. The children of this people have multiplied and prospered in the friendly air of the place for more than a hundred years, now, since an alien governor rescued them from a wrong which an alien oppressor had done them. ”

“ George Street was the directest way to the old fort San Marco, and to the city gates which remain another monument ol the Spanish will to be fair as well as strong. Our great architect McKim could not find a nobler suggestion for his Harvard gates than these gave, and one who goes to Cambridge may imagine from them the chief ornament of St. Augustine. They are indeed only the pillars of the gates, with a bit of the ancient wall beside each, and how the fortification was continued from them I never could quite realize, or whether in palmetto logs or coquina walls. ”

“ One heard of teas in the afternoons and of balls at night which filled these rooms, but, as I have owned, I am afraid of the great world, and am so eager to despise the pride of life when I think I see it that I make myself unhappy in the vision, and I would rather invite the reader to fly with me to the more congenial society of the Plaza. ”

“ Augustine seem to have a peculiar appetite for the older edifices. One steps into it from the twentieth century and finds oneself in the serious silence which is the same in all the temples of that faith, and which one might almost persuade oneself was a religious emotion and not the esthetic impression it really is. It makes one wish for the moment that one were of the Old Religion, and this was the effect with me when I woke in the morning and heard the nuns’ sweet voices rising in their matins over the gardens of the{880} girls’ school across the way from us. ”

“ Their mellow murmurs, especially when the nights are warm, rise in what seems perpetual joking, as if from their humorous pleasure at being alive together in the same amusing world; and if you have no worse conscience than the talkers, their voices will lull you again to the slumbers they have broken. ”

“ I myself have seen the monster raise himself on his hideous arms and legs and, “being wrought upon in the extreme” by his intolerable prescience of a change in the weather, lift his head and roar—roar as the jungled lion roars, or as the bull that sees his rival cross the meadow where he ranges in challenge to mortal combat. ”

“ San Marco has never been attacked since, for when our revolution broke out, Florida did not join the other colonies in their revolt against the British, who remained peaceably enough in possession till they ceded the province back to Spain. Then the old city resumed its slumbers in her keeping, till Spain in her turn ceded Florida, with its Seminole War, to the United States, when the name of the fort was changed, fatuously enough, from San Marco to Fort Marion, in honor of a hero whose side Florida had not taken in our revolt. ”

“ They do not mean to deceive the stranger, and their own ignorance may have been first abused. As I heard them passing our gate in St. George Street (where we dwelt in the winter of our second sojourn at St. Augustine) , and pointing out the objects of interest, I could have wished to share in both the illusion and delusion. Their race apparently rested content in its lowly employs, with seldom the hope or endeavor for higher things. ”

“ Any one could share the pleasure of the tango-teas in the most fashionable restaurants by simply coming to them and either dancing them or drinking them. The dancing was actually the affair of young couples who seemed to stray in from the street, and
AN ANCIENT DOORWAY circled round between the tables in those rhythmical embraces of the dance to the harsh clatter of the band and the applause of those who preferred the tea form of tango. ”

“ While I am about owning this unavailing regret, I may as well remember how I one day bought a wagon-load of fat pine from a thin little old woman, who proved, on the testimony of our colored maid, a widow trying to work the bit of farm her husband’s death had left her, and whom I ought to have bought a load of fat pine from every day, but I did not think to order even another load, and so never saw her again. ”

“ Augustine. They have their own scattering quarters which they are not strictly kept to; they are segregated, but not concentrated, though their souls are saved in separate churches, and their minds informed in separate schools. They even have their own picture-theaters, but they are softly insinuated through the white population in all subordinate service, and I never knew the slightest unkindness of word or deed offered them. ”

“ Many of the colored people, however, are broadly Roman Catholic, but they also have their own churches apart from the white.
When the king of Spain ceded Florida to the king of England, late in the eighteenth century, the Spanish inhabitants of St. Augustine largely, if not mostly, went away to Cuba, but their religion continued in the primacy which it still enjoys. The cathedral fronting the Plaza from the north is not the cathedral of former days, but a dignified reproduction of the cathedral devoured by the flames which in St. ”

“ The general vulgarity and worse seemed the more pity because the theaters were always well filled not only with prouder visitors from the great hotels, and the friendly roomers from everywhere, but with nice-looking townspeople, who had brought their children with them when they had not let them come alone. ”

“ Augustine who compiled it. The Lutherans, as Menendez, like all the Spaniards of his time, called the Huguenots, were by the laws and usage of the time illegally there, and it was his duty as a loyal subject and a good Christian to destroy them. He was much concerned besides in saving the souls of the savages from these Lutherans who had the gift of insinuating affection for themselves among the Indians along with their heretical instruction. ”

“ Augustine. Age is no handsomer there than in other places, and now and then country folks of the cadaverous cracker type appeared with the produce of their sandy fields or groves; but the beauty and grace of the young girls of city birth was extraordinarily great. Perhaps it was from my lifelong fondness for the Spanish that I chose to think these divine creatures, so, slimly shaped and darkly fair, were ol the Spanish race which for three{683} hundred years ruled or misruled in St. ”

“ More crops will grow in what looks like mere sand than you would imagine, or the Northern farmer or gardener could hope to harvest from it. If you transplant the young trees from among the scrub, they willingly flourish, when encouraged with a little water, into columnar palmettoes, such as make the promise of a noble avenue on the drive to the beautiful woodland called Lewis’s Point, after a philanthropist whose public and private beneficences at St. ”

“ This may have been the excuse of racial unthrift, and I have to urge, to the contrary the signal instance of a colored man living in a very comfortable house of his own in his own grounds, without molestation from any lowest or spitefullest white witness of his condition. ”