Otherwise our days went by in a summer succession the whole winter through, but if now and then a day was unseasonably wintry, we justly blamed our native North for it. I have tried, faithfully if not successfully, to give some notion of the place and its resources for the exile who has merely come away to escape care, and I hope I have not exaggerated them. I have confessed that the drives were not so many as I could wish, but the pleasant walks were more than I could take, and our excursions in suburb or beyond always offered some interesting spectacle or experience. There would be a house, left unoccupied by its owner for the winter, which we would occupy for the moment at a merely nominal rent; there was a certain ship’s carpenter whom we liked to see building a small yacht in his back yard, remote from any of the surrounding waters; and in a garden beside a house not otherwise memorable there was the passion of a half-grown kitten for a hen which, as the cat rubbed against the scandalized and indignant fowl, afforded a spectacle of unrequited affection that might well have been studied for a painting on the cover of a popular magazine; there were wide, wilding spaces which the prosperity of former years had meant for house-lots, and there were others where houses had once stood, and then fallen away, leaving flowery tangles of bushes and briers behind them. But the great charm of the town was in the town itself, and chiefly characteristic of it was our own St. George Street, which, whether it followed the Maria Sanchez away in cottages or bungalows of divers ideals to the border of the far-reaching southward savannah, or led northward beyond the Plaza, was somehow more Old World in effect than other thoroughfares of the town. There were not merely the shops where everything you wanted or did not want was offered you, but there was here and there a Spanish house, sometimes tottering with age, but in one instance at least keeping its ancient state of coquina walls flush with the street and with a stretch of garden beside it, and on the street beyond it the appealing ruin of like houses left by the last fire. Somewhat early in the season, the old thoroughfare entered into a generous commercial rivalry with King Street, and equipped itself with colored electric lamps strung overhead in gay strands from side to side. By night or by day, with its little shops and its cracking walls, and people walking up and down its middle among the vehicles, it was very, very South-European. But it had places where you could hardly keep from buying the latest magazines, or deny the claim of your home-paper wherever your home was in the Middle West. Promptly, twenty-four hours late, there were not only the New York papers, but the Chicago, the Cleveland, the Cincinnati papers, with news which had kept quite fresh on the long way south. But, above all, St. George Street was the directest way to the old fort San Marco, and to