If the reader is still, as I hope, in the Plaza with me, I would have him leave our places on the Mid-Western benching, and come and lean over the rail which keeps the dogs and boys from throwing themselves to the alligator in his pool there, where he lies stiller than the stone of his bath. In some moment when the water is coldest he rises to the sun and basks motionless and soundless on the stone curbing, but no one ever saw him unlid those loathly eyes of his, or stir those antediluvian limbs. Ever, do I say? This is wrong. I myself have seen the monster raise himself on his hideous arms and legs and, “being wrought upon in the extreme” by his intolerable prescience of a change in the weather, lift his head and roar--roar as the jungled lion roars, or as the bull that sees his rival cross the meadow where he ranges in challenge to mortal combat. Nothing in nature has more surprised me, and the effect with my fellow home-towners was the same; they came running from, the benches--men, women, and children--and hung upon the alligator’s fence and wondered and worshiped like so many idolaters of some serpent of Old Nile, till his bellow subsided into a hoarse bleat, and then a long sigh that shook the disgusting folds of his throat into silence. Several times already in this study of the Plaza I have tried to mention the ivied Gothic of the Episcopal church which faces the southwestern corner, and then the galleried upper stories of the line of shops stretching eastward forming a picturesque recall of the St. Augustine which was once so much more all galleries than the ancient city now is. But I could not somehow leave the intersecting paths and the flower-beds beside them, or that gentle little Canovan figure with ankles crossed and wrists on hips which discreetly invites from its pedestal the home-towner unfolding his paper as he advances to place himself with his back to the sun on a favorite bench. Still less could I leave the somewhat plain, not to say severe, obelisk near the fountain which celebrates in stately inscriprional Spanish the promulgation of the constitution of 1812. Which king of the several constitution-giving sovereigns of Spain it was who gave that charter of the national liberties I do not know or much care to know. The charm, the provincial-patriotic charm of the obelisk remains, as it remains with every crumbling ruin of the city which the Spanish colonists builded and as you feel it at many points on the swerving, rather than curving, narrow ways between St. George Street and the bay-front. I here the wooden balconies droop from the drooping wall of time-stained coquina; the doors and windows open flush upon the sidewalks; the little gardens cherish a few onions and heads of lettuce; the dooryard trees support themselves in the friendly angles and ripen, slowly ripen their plums, their peaches, their guavas, their figs, and such other fruits as love a sunny exposure in literature. [Illustration: THE SPANISH FORT]