A Confession of St. AugustineHowells, William Dean
History
A Confession of St. Augustine
Howells, William Dean
Saint Augustine (Fla.) -- Guidebooks
oysters and their multifarious finny kindred to the excellent
fish-market; and, on stated days, the great, swelling stern-wheel
steamboat arriving from Jacksonville as from the Western rivers of sixty
years ago formed the pleasure and business of the port; though I must
not forget the two gasolene packets running to the North beaches, at
hours which it took them the whole of January to ascertain and specify.
Otherwise the port offered a good reproduction of the two centuries of
calm which it must have enjoyed during the Spanish rule; to be sure
there was now the rattling of the trolley-car over the extortionate
toll-bridge to the island which could not have been heard then, or even
imagined. I like to fancy that time as one of entire peacefulness for
all not of the New Religion who after the time of the devout Menendez
are scarcely imaginable there. The spirit of the time lingers yet in a
few half-dozen old coquina houses standing flush upon the streets. One
of them stood next to our own, covered, roof and wall, with ivy and with
roses and yellow bignonia flowers, where Prince Murat, the Bonapartist
heir of the Neapolitan throne, lived and died in a long, unmolested
exile. We found it a charmingly simple interior, much like that of the
little house so lately owned and occupied by a gentle, elderly Spanish
lady who received us like friends upon fit introduction, but had to keep
her street door locked against the tourists apt to make themselves at
home by walking in without ceremony. The door was overhung by a true
Spanish balcony, and behind the house reposed an old garden of trees and
flowers and vegetables, with the only staircase of the house climbing
the outer wall from it. The gentle lady was proud of the age of her
house, which she held as great as that of the oldest house in St.
Augustine in the same street, or even greater. There is a rivalry
between oldest houses in St. Augustine, but after making friends with
her we would admit no competition. We always looked for her in the
quaint garden as we passed, and we were always hoping to go into it
again, when one day suddenly, as such things seem to come to one in St.
Augustine, we heard that she was dead of pneumonia. By chance also we
saw her funeral starting from the cathedral, and then, keeping our own
course, we fell in behind the sad train by another chance, and followed
till it left us to keep its way to the arid and sandy new cemetery of
her church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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