The Ancient City

Beyond the house opened out the long orange-tree aisles – beautiful walks arched in glossy green foliage – half a mile of dense leafy shade.

“This is the sour orange,” said our guide, “a tree extensively cultivated in the old days for its hardy growth and pleasant shade. It is supposed to be an exotic run wild, for the orange is not indigenous here. When Florida was ceded to England in exchange for Cuba, most of the Spanish residents left, and their gardens were then found well stocked with oranges and lemons, figs, guavas, and pomegranates.”

“Poor Florida! nobody wanted her,” said John. “The English only kept her twenty years, and then bartered her away again to Spain for the Bahamas, and in 1819 Spain was glad to sell her to the United States. The latter government, too, may have had its own thoughts as to the value of the purchase, which, although cheap at five millions in the first place, soon demanded nineteen more millions for its own little quarrel with that ancient people, the Seminoles.”

“Headed, do not forget to mention, by Osceola,” added Sara.

“Beautiful fruit, at least in appearance,” I said, picking up one of the large oranges that lay by the hundreds on the ground. “Are they of no use?”

“The juice is occasionally sold in small quantities,” replied our guide. “At one time it commanded a price of a dollar per gallon, and was used in place of vinegar in the British navy. It makes a delicious acid drink when fresh – better than lemonade.”

We lingered in the beautiful orange aisles, and heard the story of the old place: how it had descended from father to son, and finally, upon the death of the owner who was childless, it came into the possession of a nephew. But among other papers was found one containing the owner’s purpose to bequeath his property to the poor colored people of St. Augustine. This will, if it could so be called, without witnesses, and in other ways informal, was of no value in the eyes of the law. The owner had died suddenly away from home, and there was no testimony to prove that the paper expressed even a cherished intention. Nevertheless, the heir at law, with rare disinterestedness, carried out the vague wish; the place was sold, and all the proceeds invested for the benefit of the colored people, the charity taking the form of a Home for their aged and infirm, which is supported by the income from this money, the building itself having been generously given for the purpose by another prominent citizen of St. Augustine.

“You must see old Uncle Jack,” concluded the speaker. “Before the war his master sent him several times to Boston with large sums of money, and intrusted him with important business, which he never failed to execute properly. By the terms of the will he has a certain portion of the land for his lifetime. That is his old cabin. Let us go over there.”

Close down under the walls of the grand new mansion stood a low cabin, shaded by the long drooping leaves of the banana; hens and chickens walked in and out the open door, and most of the household furniture seemed to be outside, in the comfortable Southern fashion. Uncle Jack came to meet us – a venerable old man, with white hair, whose years counted nearly a full century.

“The present owner of the place has ordered a new house built for Jack, a picturesque porter’s lodge, near the entrance,” said our guide, “but I doubt whether the old man will be as comfortable there as in this old cabin where he has lived so long. The negroes, especially the old people, have the strongest dislike to any elevation like a door-step or a piazza; they like to be right on the ground; they like to cook when they are hungry, and sleep when they are tired, and enjoy their pipes in peace. Rules kill them, and they can not change: we must leave them alone, and educate the younger generation.”

Returning down the arched walks, we crossed over into a modern sweet-orange grove, the most beautiful in St. Augustine or its vicinity. Some of the trees were loaded with blossoms, some studded with the full closed buds which we of the North are accustomed to associate with the satin of bridal robes, some had still their golden fruit, and others had all three at once, after the perplexing fashion of the tropics.

“There are about eight hundred trees here,” said our guide, “and some of them yield annually five thousand oranges each. There is a story extant, one of the legends of St. Augustine, that formerly orange-trees covered the Plaza, and that one of them yielded annually twelve thousand oranges.”

“What an appalling mass of sweetness!” said Sara. “I am glad that tree died; it was too good to live, like the phenomenal children of Sunday-school literature.”

“In the old Spanish days,” said John, “this neighborhood was one vast orange grove; ships loaded with the fruit sailed out of the harbor, and the grandees of Spain preferred the St. Augustine orange to any other. In Spain the trees live to a great age; some of them are said to be six hundred years old, having been planted by the Moors, but here an unexpected frost has several times destroyed all the groves, so that the crop is by no means a sure one.”

“So the frost does come here,” I said. “We have seen nothing of it; the thermometer has ranged from sixty-eight to seventy-eight ever since we arrived.”

“They had snow in New York last week,” said Aunt Di.

“It has melted, I think,” said John. “At least I saw this item last evening in a New York paper: ‘If the red sleigher thinks that he sleighs to-day, he is mistaken!’ ”

“Shades of Emerson and Brahma, defend us!” said Sara.

Then we all began to eat oranges, and make dripping spectacles of ourselves generally. I defy any one to be graceful, or even dainty, with an orange; it is a great, rich, generous, pulpy fruit, and you have got to eat it in a great, rich, generous, pulpy way. How we did enjoy those oranges under the glossy green and fragrant blossoms of the trees themselves! We gave it up then and there, and said openly that no bought Northern oranges could compare with them.

“I don’t feel politically so much disturbed now about the cost of that sea-wall,” said Sara, “if it keeps this orange grove from washing away. It is doing a sweet and noble duty in life, and herein is cause sufficient for its stony existence.”

We strolled back to the town by another way, and crossed again the Maria Sanchez Creek.

“Observe how she meanders down the marsh, this fairy streamlet,” I said, taking up a position on the stone culvert. “Observe how green are her rushes, how playful her little minnows, how martial her fiddler-crabs! O lost Maria! come back and tell your story. Were you sadly drowned in these overwhelming waves, or were you the first explorer of these marshes, pushing onward in your canoe with your eyes fixed on futurity!”

Nobody knew; so we went home. But in the evening John produced the following, which he said had been preserved in the archives of the town for centuries. “I have made a free translation, as you will see,” he said; “but the original is in pure Castilian.”

“THE LEGEND OF MARIA SANCHEZ CREEK“Maria SanchezHer dug-out launches,And down the stream to catch some crabs she takes her way,A Spanish maiden,With crabs well laden;When evening falls she lifts her trawls to cross the bay.“Grim terror blanchesMaria Sanchez,Who, not to put too fine a point, is rather brown;A norther coming,Already humming,Doth bear away that Spanish mai – den far from town.“Maria Sanchez,Caught in the branchesThat sweetly droop across a creek far down the coast,That calm spectator,The alligator,Doth spy, then wait to call his mate, who rules the roast.“She comes and craunchesMaria Sanchez,While boat and crabs the gentle husband meekly chews.How could they eat her,That señorita,Whose story still doth make quite ill the Spanish Muse?”

We heaped praises upon John’s pure Castilian ode – all save the Professor, who undertook to criticise a little. “I have made something of a study of poetry,” he began, “and I have noticed that much depends upon the selection of choice terms. For instance, in the first verse you make use of the local word ‘dug-out.’ Now in my opinion, ‘craft’ or ‘canoe’ would be better. You begin, if I remember correctly, in this way:

“ ‘Maria SanchezLaunches her dug-out – ’ ”

“Oh no, Professor,” said Sara; “this is it:

“ ‘Maria SanchezHer dug-out launches.’ ”

“The same idea, I opine, Miss St. John,” said the Professor, loftily.

“But the rhymes, Sir?”

The Professor had not noticed the rhymes; poetry should be above rhymes altogether, in his opinion.

The pleasant days passed, we sailed up and down the Matanzas, walked on the sea-wall, and sat in the little overhanging balcony, which, like all others in St. Augustine, was hung up on the side of the house like a cupboard without any support from below. Letters from home meanwhile brought tidings of snow and ice and storm, disasters by land and by sea. A lady friend, a new arrival, had visited the Ancient City forty years before, in the days of the ancien régime. “It is much changed,” she said. “These modern houses springing up every where have altered the whole aspect of the town. I am glad I came back while there is still something left of the old time. Another five years and the last old wall will be torn down for a horrible paling fence. Forty years ago the town was largely Spanish or Moorish in its architecture. The houses were all built of coquina, with a blank wall toward the north, galleries running around a court-yard behind, where were flowers, vines, and a central fountain. The halls, with their stone arches, opened out into this greenery without doors of any kind, tropical fashion. Those were the proud days of St. Augustine; the old families reigned with undisputed sway; the slaves were well treated, hospitality was boundless, and the intermixture of Spanish and Italian blood showed itself in the dark eyes that glanced over the balconies as the stranger passed below. It has all vanished now. The war effaced the last fading hue of the traditional grandeur, and broke down the barriers between the haughty little city and the outside world. The old houses have been modernized, and many of them have given place to new and, to my ideas, thoroughly commonplace dwellings. There is one left, however, the very mansion where I was so charmingly entertained forty years ago; its open arches remain just as they were, and the old wall still surrounds the garden. Up stairs is the large parlor where we had our gay little parties, with wines, and those delicious curled-up cakes, all stamped with figures, thin as a wafer, crisp and brittle, which seemed to be peculiar to St. Augustine.”

“Did you know there was a native artist here?” said John, calling up one morning as he sat on the balcony, Sara and myself endeavoring to write duty letters.

“Painter or sculptor?” I inquired, pen in hand, pausing over an elaborate description of a sunset with which I was favoring a soul-to-soul correspondent. “Let me see: standing on the glacis with the look-out tower outlined against – ”

“Sculptor,” answered John. “His studio is on Charlotte Street not far from here. Let us walk down and see him.”

“Look-out tower outlined against the golden after-glow. Is it worth going to see?”

“Indeed it is. There is a fine design – a lion carved in stone, and also a full-length figure of Henry Clay walking in the gardens of Ashland; and what is more, these statues are on top of the house outlined against – ”

“The golden after-glow,” I suggested.

“Certainly,” said John. “And inside you will find rare antique vases, Egyptian crocodiles, Grecian caskets, and other remarkable works, all executed in stone.”

“I have long craved an alligator, but could not undertake the cigar-box discipline,” I answered, rising. “A crocodile carved in stone will be just the thing. Come, Sara.”

We walked down Charlotte Street, and presently came to a small house with a low wing, whose open shutter showed the studio within. On the roof were two figures in coquina, one a nondescript animal like the cattle of a Noah’s ark, the other a little stone man who seemed to have been so dwarfed by the weight of his hat that he never smiled again.

“The lion, and Henry Clay,” said John, introducing the figures.

“Passé for the lion; but how do you make out the other?”

“Oh, Henry seems to be the beau ideal of the South. You meet him every where on the way down in a plaster and marble dress-coat, extending his hand in a conversational manner, and so, of course, I supposed this to be another one. And as to the gardens of Ashland, as he has his hat on – indeed, he is principally hat – he must be taking a walk somewhere, and where so likely as his own bucolic garden?”

“I shall go back to my after-glow, Mr. Hoffman. Your Henry Clay is a fraud.”

“Wait and see the artist, Martha,” said Sara. “He is a colored man and a cripple.”

We tapped on the shutter, and the artist appeared, supporting himself on crutches; a young negro, with a cheerful shining countenance, and an evident pride in the specimens of his skill scattered about the floorless studio – alligators, boxes, roughly cut vases, all made of the native coquina; or, as the artist’s sign had it,

“It must require no small amount of skill to cut any thing out of this crumbling shell-rock,” I said, as, after purchasing a charming little alligator, and conversing some time with the dusky artist, we turned homeward.

“It does,” replied John. “Ignorant as he is, that man is not without his ideas of beauty and symmetry – another witness to the capability for education which I have every where noticed among the freedmen of the South.”

“I too have been impressed with this capability,” said Sara – “strongly impressed. Last Sunday I went to the Methodist colored Sunday-school on St. George Street. The teachers are Northerners; some resident here, some winter visitors; and the classes were filled up with full-grown men and women, some of them aged and gray-haired, old uncles and aunties, eager to learn, although they could scarcely see with their old eyes. They repeated Bible texts in chorus, and then they began to read. It was a pathetic sight to see the old men slowly following the simple words with intense eagerness, keeping the place under each one with careful finger. The younger men and girls read fluently, and showed quick understanding in the answers given to the teachers’ questions. Then the little children filed in from another room, and they all began to sing. Oh, how they sang! The tenor voice of a young jet-black negro who sat near me haunts me still with its sweet cadences. Singularly enough, the favorite hymn seemed to be one whose chorus, repeated again and again, ended in the words,

“ ‘Shall wash me white as snow —White as snow.’ ”

“The negroes of St. Augustine were formerly almost all Romanists,” said John, “and many of them still attend the old cathedral on the Plaza, where there is a gallery especially for them. But of late the number of Methodists and Baptists has largely increased, while the old cathedral and its bishop, who once ruled supreme over the consciences of the whole population of la siempre fiel Ciudad de San Augustin, find themselves in danger of being left stranded high and dry as the tide of progress and education sweeps by without a glance. The Peabody Educational Fund supports almost entirely two excellent free schools here, one for white and one for colored children; and in spite of opposition, gradually, year by year, even Roman Catholic parents yield to the superior advantages offered to their children, and the church schools hold fewer and fewer scholars, especially among the boys. The Presbyterian church, with its pastor and earnest working congregation, has made a strong battle against the old-time influences, and it now looks as though the autocratic sway of the religion of Spain were forever broken in this ancient little Spanish city.”

“At least, however, the swarthy priests look picturesque and appropriate as they come and go between their convent and the old cathedral through that latticed gate in their odd dress,” said Sara. “Do you remember, in Baddeck, the pleasing historical Jesuit, slender too corpulent a word to describe his thinness, his stature primeval? Warner goes on to say that the traveler is grateful for such figures, and is not disposed to quarrel with the faith that preserves so much of the ugly picturesque.”

“The principal interest I have in the old cathedral is the lost under-ground passage which, according to tradition, once extended from its high altar to Fort San Marco,” I remarked. “I am perpetually haunted by the possibility of its being under my feet somewhere, and go about stamping on the ground to catch hollow echoes down below. We moderns have discovered at San Marco a subterranean dungeon and bones: then why not an under-ground passage?”

“And bones?” asked Sara.

“No; Spanish jewels, plate, and all kinds of mediæval treasures. I consider the possibility far more promising than Captain Kidd’s chest. I have half a mind to begin digging.”

“You would be obliged to take the shovel yourself, then, Miss Martha,” said John. “Do you suppose you could hire the St. Augustiners to dig, really dig, day after day, Northern fashion? Why, they would laugh in your face at the mere idea. I am inclined to think there would never be another house built here if regular foundations and cellars were required; as it is, they set up the timbers as the children set up their houses of blocks. How clearly that sail-boat is outlined against the gray water, like a sketch in India ink! Is not that Miss Carew on board?”

“Yes, with Mr. Mokes,” said Sara.

“And Aunt Diana,” I added. “I remember now; Mr. Mokes gives a chowder dinner to-day over on the North Beach.”

“I would not give much for chowder made by a Mokes,” said John, with the scorn of an old camper-out in his voice.

“Oh, Mokes does not make it, Mr. Hoffman. What are you thinking of? Mokes make chowder! By no means. He has his servant and the boatmen to do all the work, and sends over his wines and ice beforehand. It will be an elegant dinner, I assure you.”

“On the beach?”

“Yes, on the beach. Unfortunately, tables can not be transported, unless, indeed, Dundreary should arrive with his ‘waft.’ But the table-cloth will be damask, with a monogram worked in gold thread, and the conversation will be strictly Fifth Avenueish, I will answer for that.”

“Great is the power of youthful beauty,” I said, when we had reached our room again. “Here is Mokes with his money and wines, the Professor with his learning and bones, the Captain with his beauty and buttons, all three apparently revolving around that giddy little cousin of mine. And now comes John Hoffman!”

“With all his ancestors behind him! Has he taken her to the demi-lune yet?” said Sara, opening the Princess of Thule, which she read after a dose of Florida history, like sugar after a pill. “Do you know, Martha, I think poor Lavender is rather unfairly treated by the author of this book. He is ordered about by Ingram, and most unmercifully snubbed by Sheila, who, after all, manages to have her own way, ‘whatever.’ ”

Now I had thrown John Hoffman purposely into my list of Iris’s admirers in order to provoke something like a denial from Sara – these two seemed to feel such a singular kind of interested dislike toward each other; but my little bait caught nothing; Sara remained impassive.

Toward sunset the same evening we waited on the Plaza in company with the entire population of the town for the distribution of the one mail, accomplished with some difficulty by the efficient, active, Northern postmaster, in consequence of the windows being darkened with flattened noses, and the doorways blocked up, to say nothing of beatings on the walls, impatient calls through the key-hole, and raids round the back way by the waiting populace. Having wrestled manfully for our letters, we all strolled down Tolomato Street, reading as we went. Iris journeyed languidly through the sand; she had received no letters, and she had Mokes on her hands, Mokes radiant with the rejection of his private three-cornered chowder party, and the smiles she herself had bestowed upon him over on that wicked North Beach. “Oh, for a horse!” she sighed. “Nay, I would even ride in a Florida cart.”

Aunt Diana was weary, but jubilant; she had the Professor and the Trojan war, and did her duty by them. Miss Sharp ambled along on the other side, and said “Indeed!” at intervals. Sara read her letters with a dreary sort of interest; her letters were always from “Ed.,” she used to say. John and I, strolling in advance, carried on a good, comfortable, political fight over our newspapers.

“Another cemetery,” said Sara, as the white crosses and head-stones shone out in the sunset on one side of the road.

Mokes, stimulated to unusual conversational efforts by the successes of the day, now brought forward the omnipresent item. “This is – er, I suppose, the old Huguenot burying-ground, a – er – a spot of much interest, I am told.”

“Yes,” replied Sara. “This is the very spot, Mr. Mokes.”

“Oh no, Miss St. John,” said Aunt Diana, coming to the rescue, “you mistake. This is Tolomato.”

“It makes no difference. I am now convinced that they are all Huguenot burying-grounds,” replied Sara, calmly.

The little cemetery was crowded with graves, mounds of sand over which the grass would not grow, and heavy coquina tombs whose inscriptions had crumbled away. The names on the low crosses, nearly all Spanish, Minorcan, Corsican, and Greek, bore witness to the foreign ancestry of the majority of the population. We found Alvarez, La Suarez, Leonardi, Capo, Carrarus, Ximanies, Baya, Pomar, Rogero, and Hernandez. Among the Christian names were Bartolo, Raimauld, Rafaelo, Geronimo, Celestino, Dolorez, Dominga, Paula, and Anaclata.

“It looks venerable, but it only dates back about one hundred years,” said John. “Where the old Dons of two or three centuries ago buried their dead, no one knows; perhaps they sent them all back home, Chinese fashion. An old bell which now hangs in the cathedral is said to have come from here; it bears the inscription, ‘Sancte Joseph, ora pro nobis; D. 1682,’ and is probably the oldest bell in the country.”

“And what was it doing here?” said Mokes, with the air of a historian.

“There was once an Indian village here, called Tolomato, and a mission chapel; the bell is supposed to have come from the chapel.”

“Is that the chapel?” asked Mokes, pointing to a small building on the far side of the cemetery. He was getting on famously, he thought, quite historical, and that sort of thing.

“No; that is a chapel erected in 1853 by Cubans to the memory of Father Varela. The old Tolomato chapel was – was destroyed.”

“How?” inquired Mokes.

John glanced toward Sara with a smile. “Oh, go on,” she said, “I am quite prepared! A massacre, of course!”

“Yes, a massacre. The Indians stole into the chapel by night, and finding Father Corpa engaged in his evening devotions, they slew him at the altar, and threw his body out into the forest, where it could never afterward be found. The present cemetery marks the site of the old mission, and bears its name.”

Mokes, having covered himself with glory, now led the way out, and the party turned homeward. Sara and I lingered to read the Latin inscription over the chapel door, “Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur.” John beckoned us toward a shadowed corner where stood a lonely tomb, the horizontal slab across the top bearing no date, and only the initials of a name, “Here lies T – F – .”

“Poor fellow!” said John, “he died by his own hand, alone, at night, on this very spot: a young Frenchman, I was told, but I know nothing more.”

“Is not that enough?” I said. “There is a whole history in those words.”

“There was once a railing separating this tomb from the other graves, as something to be avoided and feared,” said John; “but time, or perhaps the kind hand of charity, has removed the barrier: charity that can pity the despairing, suffering, human creature whose only hope came to this – to die!”

Happening to glance at Sara, I saw her eyes full of tears, and in spite of her effort to keep them back, two great drops rolled down and fell on the dark slab; John saw them, and turned away instantly.

“Why, Sara!” I said, moved almost to tears myself by sudden sympathy.

“Don’t say any thing, please,” answered Sara. “There, it is all over.”