The Ancient City

“To keep the town from washing away, I suppose,” said Sara.

“Of course; but why should the United States government concern itself over the washing away of this ancient little village with its eighteen hundred inhabitants, when it leaves cities with their thousands unaided? The one dock has, as you see, fallen down; a coasting schooner once a month or so is all the commerce, and yet here is a wall nearly a mile in length, stretching across the whole eastern front of the town, as though vast wealth lay behind.”

“The town may grow,” I said.

“It will never be any thing more than a winter resort, Miss Martha.”

“At any rate, the wall is charming to walk upon,” said Iris, dancing along on her high-heeled boots; “it must be lovely here by moonlight.”

“It is,” replied the Captain, with a glance of his blue eyes. He was a marvel of beauty, this young soldier, with his tall, well-knit, graceful form, his wavy golden hair, and blonde mustache sweeping over a mouth of child-like sweetness. He had a cleft in his chin like the young Antinous that he was, while a bold profile and commanding air relieved the otherwise almost too great loveliness of a face which invariably attracted all eyes. Spoiled? Of course he was; what else could you expect? But he was kind-hearted by nature, and endowed with a vast fund of gallantry that carried him along gayly on the topmost wave.

“There is a new moon this very night, I think,” observed Aunt Diana, suggestively, to Mokes.

But Mokes “never could walk here after dark; dizzy, you know – might fall in.”

“Oh, massive old ruin!” cried Iris, as we drew near the fort; “how grand and gray and dignified you look! Have you a name, venerable friend?”

“This interesting relic of Spanish domination was called San Juan de Pinos – ” began the governess, hastily finding the place in her guide-book.

“Oh no, Miss Sharp,” interrupted Aunt Diana, who had noticed with disapprobation the clinging of the lisle-thread glove to the Professor’s lank but learned arm. “You are mistaken again; it is called Fort Marion.”

“It used to be San Marco,” said John.

“I vote for San Marco; Marion is commonplace,” decided Iris, sweeping away the other names with a wave of her dainty little glove.

“A magnificent specimen of the defensive art of two centuries ago,” began the Professor, taking up a position on the water-battery, and beginning to point out with his cane. “It is built, you will observe, in a square or trapezium – ”

“Let us go up and have a dance on the top,” said Iris.

“This is very instructive,” murmured Aunt Diana, moving nearer to her niece. “Miss Sharp, pray call your pupil’s attention to this remarkable relic.” For Mokes had seated himself sulkily on one of the veteran cannon which frowned over the harbor like toothless old watch-dogs. There was no objection to an army Antinous as a picturesque adjunct, Aunt Diana thought; but it was well known that there was very little gold in the service outside of the buttons, while here at hand was a Crœsus, a genuine live Crœsus, sitting sulky and neglected on his cannon!

“Oh, certainly,” said Miss Sharp, coming to the rescue. “Iris, my child, you observe that it is in the form of a trapezoid – ”

“Trapezium,” said the Professor – “trapezium, Miss Sharp, if you please.”

“ ‘That daring young man on a – ’ ” chanted the Captain under his breath, as if in confidence to the southeast tower.

“In the salient angles of the bastions are four turrets or bartizans,” continued the Professor.

“Oh yes; how interesting!” ejaculated the governess, clasping her lisle-threads together. “Partisans!”

“Bar-ti-zans,” repeated the Professor, with cutting distinctness. “The moat, as you will notice, is fortified by an internal barrier, and there is an outer wall also which extends around the whole, following its various flexuses. By close observation we shall probably be able to trace the lines of the abatis, scarp, counterscarp, and fraise, all belonging to the period of mediæval fortification.”

“The Great Work is evidently to the fore now,” whispered Sara, as we sat together on a second cannon.

“The lunette, now, is considered quite a curiosity,” said the Captain, briskly breaking in. “Miss Carew, allow me to show it to you.”

“Lunette!” said the Professor, with lofty scorn.

“That is what we call it down here, Sir,” replied Antinous, carelessly. “Miss Iris, there, is an odd little stairway there – ”

“Lunette!” repeated the Professor again. “But that is an example of the lamentable ignorance of the age. Why, that is a barbacan, the only remaining specimen in the country, and, indeed, hard to be excelled in Europe itself.”

“I have heard it described as a demi-lune,” I remarked, bringing forward my one item, the item I had been preserving for days. (I try to have ready a few little pellets of information; I find it is expected, now that I am forty years old.) The Professor took off his tall silk hat and wiped his forehead despairingly. “Demi-lune!” he repeated – “demi-lune! The man who said that must be a – ”

“Demi-lunatic,” suggested John. “Forgive me, Miss Martha; it isn’t mine, it’s quoted.”

We crossed a little draw-bridge, and passed through the ruined outwork, barbacan, lune, or demi-lune, whichever it was. Iris and the Captain had disappeared. At the second draw-bridge we came face to face with the main entrance, surmounted by a tablet bearing an inscription and the Spanish coat of arms.

“It seems to be two dragons, two houses for the dragons, and a supply of mutton hung up below,” said Sara, irreverently making game of the royal insignia of Spain. “Oh dear!” she sighed in an under-tone, “I ought to have all this written down.”

“Here are the main facts, Miss St. John,” said John Hoffman, taking out his notebook. “I collected them several years ago out of piles of authorities; they are authentic skeletons as far as they go, and you can fill them out with as many adjectives, fancies, and exclamation points as you please.” He walked on, joining the others in the inner court-yard, where the Professor, the old sergeant in charge, the piles of cannon-balls, and all the ruined doorways were engaging in a wild mêlée of information. Left alone, Sara and I read as follows: “Fort here as far back as 1565. Enlarged several times, and finally finished much as it now stands in 1755. The Appalachian Indians worked on it sixty years; also Mexican convicts. The inscription over the entrance says that the fort was finished when Ferdinand Sixth was King of Spain, and Hereda Governor of Florida. It has been many times attacked, twice besieged, never taken. Occupied in 1862 by the Fourth New Hampshire regiment.”

We had read so far when Aunt Diana came out through the sally-port. “Have you seen Iris?” she asked. “The sergeant is going to show us the window through which the Coochy escaped.”

“The Coochy?”

“A cat, I believe; some kind of a wild-cat,” said Aunt Diana, vaguely, as her anxious eyes scanned every inch of the moat and outworks in search of the vanished niece. At length she spied a floating blue ribbon. “There they are, back in that – in that illumined thing.”

“Oh, Aunt Di! Why, that is the demi-lune.”

“Well, whatever it is, do call Iris down directly.”

I went after the delinquents, discovering after some search the little stone stairway, nicely masked by an innocent-looking wall, where was a second stone tablet containing the two dragons, their two houses, and the supply of mutton hung up below. There on the topmost grassy stair were the two young people, and had it not been for that floating blue ribbon, there they might have remained in ambush all the morning.

“Come down,” I cried, looking up, laughingly, from the foot of the stair – “come down, Iris. Aunt Di wishes you to see the escaped cat.”

“I don’t care about cats,” pouted Iris, slowly descending. “I am glad he escaped. Let him go; I do not want to see him.”

“Iris,” began Aunt Di, “pray what has occupied you all this time?”

“The study of fortifications, aunt; you have no idea how interesting it is – that demi-lune.”

“Many persons have found it so,” observed John.

“We could not quite decide whether it was, after all, a demi-lune or a barbacan,” pursued Iris.

“Many persons have found the same difficulty; indeed, visit after visit has been necessary to decide the question, and even then it has been left unsettled,” said John, gravely.

Following Aunt Diana, we all went into a vaulted chamber lighted by a small high-up window, or rather embrasure, in the heavy stone wall.

“Through that window the distinguished Seminole chieftain Coa-coo-chee, that is for to say, the Wild-cat, made his celebrated escape by starving himself to an atomy, squirming up, and squeezing through,” announced the sergeant, who stood in front as torch-bearer.

“Then it wasn’t a cat, after all,” said Iris.

“Only in a Pickwickian sense,” said John.

“Now I thought all the while it was Osceola,” said Sara, wearily.

“The Seminole war – ” began the Professor.

“Captain, I am sure you know all about these things,” said Iris; “pray tell me who was this Caloochy.”

“Well,” said Antinous, hesitating, “I believe he was the son of – son of King Philip, and he had something to do with the Dade massacre.”

“King Philip? Oh yes, now I know,” said Iris. “Chapter twenty-seven, verse five: ‘Philip, while hiding at Mount Hope, was heard to exclaim, Alas, I am the last of the Wampanoags! Now indeed am I ready to die.’ ”

“Oh no, Iris dear,” said Miss Sharp, hastily correcting; “that was the New England chieftain. This Philip was a Seminole – Philip of the Withlacoochee.”

“Osceola is in it somewhere, I feel convinced,” persisted Sara; “he is always turning up when least expected, like the immortal Pontiac of the West. There is something about the Caloosahatchee too.”

“Are you not thinking of the distinguished chieftains Holatoochee and Taholoochee, and the river Chattahoochee?” suggested John.

“For my part, I can’t think of any thing but the chorus of that classical song, The Ham-fat Man, ‘with a hoochee-koochee-koochee,’ you know,” whispered the Captain to Iris.

“Don’t I!” she answered. “I have a small brother who adores that melody, and plays it continually on his banjo.”

The next thing, of course, was the secret dungeon, and we crossed the court-yard, where the broad stone way led up to the ramparts, occupied during the late war by the tents of the United States soldiers, who preferred these breezy quarters to the dark chambers below. We passed the old chapel with its portico, inner altar, and niches for holy-water; the hall of justice. The furnace for heating shot was outside, and the southeast turret still held the frame-work for the bell which once rang out the hours over the water.

Standing in the gloomy subterranean dungeon, we listened to the old sergeant’s story – the fissure, the discovery of the walled-up entrance, the iron cage, and the human bones.

“Oh, do come out,” I said. “Your picturesque Spaniards, Sara, are too much for me.”

“But who were the bones, I wonder?” mused Iris.

“Yes,” said Aunt Diana, “who were they? Mr. Mokes, what do you think?”

Mokes thought “they were rascals of some kind, you know – thieves, perhaps.”

“Huguenots,” from John.

“Recreant priests,” from myself.

“The architect of the fort, imprisoned that the secrets of its construction might die with him,” suggested Miss Sharp.

“A prince of the blood royal, inconvenient to have around, and therefore sent over here to be out of the way,” said Iris.

“For my part, I feel convinced that the bones were the mortal remains of ‘Casper Hauser,’ the ‘Man with the Iron Mask,’ and ‘Have we a Bourbon among us,’ ” said Sara. Mokes looked at her. He never was quite sure whether she was simply strong-minded or a little out of her head. He did not know now, but decided to move a little farther away from her vicinity.

The Professor had left us some time before, and as we came out through the sally-port we saw him down in the moat in company with the fiddler-crabs, an ancient horse, and two small darkies.

“I have discovered the line of the counterscarp!” he cried, excitedly. “This is undoubtedly the talus of the covered way. If we walk slowly all around we may find other interesting evidences.”

But there was mud in the moat, not to speak of the fiddlers, whose peculiarity is that you never can tell which way they are going – I don’t believe they know themselves; and so our party declined the interesting evidences with thanks, and passing the demi-lune again, went down to the sea-wall. Miss Sharp looked back hesitatingly; but Aunt Diana had her eye upon her, and she gave it up.

In the afternoon all the party excepting myself went over to the North Beach in a sail-boat. I went down to the Basin to see them off. “Osceola” was painted on the stern of the boat. “Of course!” said Sara. She longed to look out over the broad ocean once more, otherwise she would hardly have consented to go without me. The boat glided out on the blue inlet, and Miss Sharp grasped the professor’s arm as the mainsail swung round and the graceful little craft tilted far over in the fresh breeze.

“If you are frightened, Miss Sharp, pray change seats with me,” I heard Aunt Diana say. The Captain was not there, but Mokes was; and John Hoffman was lying at ease on the little deck at the stern, watching the flying clouds. The boat courtesied herself away over the blue, and, left alone, I wandered off down the sea-wall, finding at the south end the United States Barracks, a large building with broad piazzas overlooking the water, and a little green parade-ground in front, like an oasis in the omnipresent sand. At the north end of the wall floated the flag of old San Marco, here at the south end floated the flag of the barracks, and the two marked the limits of the Ancient City. The post is called St. Francis, as the foundations of the building formed part of the old Franciscan monastery which was erected here more than two centuries ago. Turning, I came to a narrow street where stood a monument to the Confederate dead – a broken shaft carved in coquina. Little St. Augustine had its forty-four names inscribed here, and while I was reading them over a shadow fell on the tablet, and, turning, I saw an old negro, who, leaning on a cane, had paused behind me. “Good afternoon, uncle,” I said. “Did you know the soldiers whose names are here?”

“Yas, I knowed ’em; my ole woman took car’ ob some ob dem when dey was babies.”

“The war made great changes for your people, uncle.”

“Yas, we’s free now. I tank de Lord dat day de news come dat my chil’en’s free.”

“But you yourself, uncle? It did not make so much difference to you?” I said, noticing the age and infirmity of the old man. But straightening his bent body, and raising his whitened head with a proud happiness in his old eyes, he answered,

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