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,

“I breave anoder breff ebber sense, mistis, dat I do.”

Farther on I found a woman sitting at the door of a little shop with sweets to sell, and purchased some for the sake of making a mental sketch of her picturesque head with its white turban. “I have not the exact change, but will send it to you to-morrow,” I said, intending to fee the Sabre to execute the errand. “Who shall I say it is?”

“Why, Viny, course. Every body knows Aunt Viny.”

“I want to go over to Africa, Aunt Viny. Can you tell me the way?”

“Certain. You goes – You know St. Francis Street?”

“No.”

“De Bravo’s Lane, den?”

“No.”

“Well, nebber mind. You goes ’long down Bridge Street – you knows dat?”

“No.”

“I declar’ for’t, mistis, I don’t jes know how to tell you, but whenebber I wants to go dar, I jes goes.”

I laughed, and so did Aunt Viny. A colored girl came round the corner with a pail on her head. “Dar’s Victoria; she’ll show yar,” said Aunt Viny.

“Your daughter?”

“Yas. Victoria Linkum is her name, mistis. You see, she was jes borned when Linkum died, and so I named her from him,” said the woman, with simple earnestness.

The funny little Victoria showed me the way across a bridge over the Maria Sanchez Creek.

“Why is it called so – who was this Maria?” I asked. But Victoria Linkum did not know. Africa was a long straggling suburb, situated on a peninsula in shape not unlike the real Africa, between the Maria Sanchez Creek and the Sebastian River; it was dotted with cabins and an easy-going idle population of freedmen, who had their own little church there, and a minister whose large silver-rimmed spectacles gave dignity to his ebony countenance. “They do not quite know how to take their freedom yet,” said a lady, a fellow-boarder, that evening. “The colored people of St. Augustine were an isolated race; they had been family servants for generations, as there were few plantations about here, and, generally speaking, they were well cared for, and led easy lives. They held a great celebration over their freedom; but the truth is they don’t know what to do with it yet, and their ideas take the oddest shapes. The Sabre, for instance, always insists upon going and coming through the front-door; he calmly brings in all his provisions that way – quarters of venison, butter, fish, whatever it may be, no matter who is present.”

“Did you enjoy the afternoon, Sara?” I asked that evening.

“I can not tell you how much. If you could only have seen it – the blue inlet, the island, and the two light-houses, the surf breaking over the bar, and in front the broad ocean, thousands of miles of heaving water, with no land between us and Africa.”

“You absurd child! as though that made any difference.”

“But it does make a difference, Martha. If I thought there was so much as one Canary Island, the sense of vastness would be lost. I stood on that beach and drew in a long breath that came straight from the Nile.”

“And Aunt Diana?”

“Oh, she was happy.”

“Iris smiled upon Mokes, then?”

“Conspicuously.”

“Naughty little flirt! And Miss Sharp?”

“One summer day – with pensive thought – she wandered on – the sea-girt shore,” chanted Sara. “The madam-aunt had the Professor, and kept him!”

“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 dellsAre 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 harmonyIs 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 starsIn 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 spunBy dark-eyed Arab girl ne’er equaled this.Soon over? Yes, we seeThe summer’s fading; but, when all is done,There lives the thought that weWere 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.”