These little sympathetic lanes continue to King Street, but seldom cross it. There at the end of the Plaza, where the old Spanish market-house consents to the modern legend of having been a slave-mart, other kind avenues take up the tale and tell it, mostly in the terms of the gentle Charlotte Street, till they bring you almost suddenly upon the great fortress of San Marco set impregnable across your path. There, if it could have spoken, San Marco might well have forbidden the ravage of the flames which have consumed large spaces of the Spanish houses on the bay-front, and left only the crumbling coquina walls and arches and the scorched palmettoes to attest the tragedy of their destruction; but it is not till you pass San Marco that you come upon the means of enforcing such a mandate--not till you come in fact to the city water-works where the splendid up-gush from the deeply subterranean springs diffuses their odor through the air. Many people--perhaps most--do not like this odor, and few if any like the taste of the water, unless they have been inured to the offensive virtues of the ferruginous and sulphurous springs of Germany. It is not healing like these, but physicians say you may safely drink it if you can stand it; and to the right, before you reach the water-works, you may visit the Fountain of Youth which it seems an error to suppose Ponce de Leon did not discover when he came to Florida in 1513, for he left the fountain behind him there with the date in a pattern of stone near the source. In fact he left two Fountains of Youth at St. Augustine, but the one which was to the westward of the actual fountain was closed by the Board of Health as unhygienic. For a reasonable sum, however, you may drink of the remaining spring, and if it does not rejuvenate you it will scarcely disappoint you, unless you have expected the impossible of it, or even the credible. This remaining Fountain of Youth may well be left behind in the realm of fancy, and the atmosphere of fable which so richly invests it, for a return to the great fortress which holds down more history than any other such edifice on our continent. Not even the citadel at Quebec outrivals it for the events which have elapsed in its time, for it has stood invulnerable during the two hundred and fifty years since its foundations were powerfully laid beside the wave that washes its base. [TO BE CONCLUDED.] * * * * * A Confession of St. Augustine BY W. D. HOWELLS PART II