In St. Augustine the shops and theaters are open on Sunday, as in any continental European town, but the same may be said of the churches, which are abundantly frequented. The favorite dissipation of the local youth was apparently the ice-cream served at small tables in the drug-stores, where with the bane the antidote could be promptly supplied; but I should say, or almost say, that the favorite dissipation of the aliens of every age was the sail to the nearer and farther North Beaches. This could be afforded at twenty-five cents, which paid the sail both ways, and the transit of the sandy stretch of the island to the ocean shore in a horse-car drawn by a mule hitched at the side of the car, but did not include the roast oysters at the restaurants. If you wish to lose yourself in the sandy jungles of Anastasia Island you may cross by trolley-car on a pro rata payment of that supremely extortionate toll which I have already lamented. But I hope you do not wish to cross as yet, but will be willing to keep with me along the bay-front, either way you like, past some minor hotels and pleasant dwellings southward and the ruins of old Spanish houses and dwellings northward, when suddenly the fort of San Marco, now misnamed Marion, blocks your way with its mass, darkly but not gloomily Spanish, and incomparably monumental. It is the most perfect example of the Vauban ideal of military architecture anywhere remaining; yet neither for this, nor for anything else are you to leave the Plaza, which is the heart of St. Augustine, until you have exhausted all the emotions it can impart. They are not many, and for me the chiefest of them came from my affectionate interest in those minor hotel guests and roomers who seemed to resort there much more in the March of last year than of this. Then they arrived, with their home-town papers (bought of the blind newsman at the corner of the post-office) and sat, rows upon rows of them, on the benches converging upon the stand where a very admirable band of musicians, claiming to be Venetian, but upon confidential approach owning themselves Neapolitan, seemed to play day-long and night-long while my home-towners exchanged personal histories, and declared their opinions of the climate and the weather of St. Augustine. [Illustration: A BIT OF OLD ST. AUGUSTINE] With the wind in the right quarter, and the sun in a forenoon sky either entirely blue, or a soft blend of white clouds melting in spaces of azure, the play of light through the palmetto and cedar tops on the facade of the cathedral across the street or on the curves of the triune belfry beside it, left nothing to be asked of the climate or weather. But both are subject to strange vicissitudes, and especially from melting warmth to cold of the ice-brook’s temper. You should especially beware of the wind that blows with soft insistence from the southeast till the first thing you know it has got round you, as if [Illustration: THE CITY GATES]