Orange Groves and an Ancient Village—The Oldest Town and Fort in the United States—Northern Speculations. From Jacksonville, we steamed down the coast to St. Augustine. “The oldest town in the United States,” managed, in the good old times, to secure handsome gratuities from the national authorities. A long granite wall, splendidly built, by Government contractors, lines the whole water face of the village, and gives wharfage for a place of twenty, instead of a paltry two thousand inhabitants. Toward the upper end of the harbor stands the quaint Spanish fort, the oldest fortification on our sea-coast, “bastioned on the square,” as the engineers describe it, with Spanish inscription by the old drawbridge,[22] and Spanish coat of arms over the gate, and rusty Spanish guns still standing on the parapets; Spanish dungeons beneath, with rings to which men were chained, and French inscriptions, penciled more than a century ago, in solitary despair, on the dungeon walls, and still telling their own story of the sufferings of the times. Climbing the old look-out tower of concrete shells, which stands nearly perfect yet on the sea face of the fort, one sees a collection of curious little antique houses, built so closely together that the streets between them can hardly be made out, a widening circle of orchard-like spots of green in the midst of seemingly waste expanse, a tumble-down collection of old grave stones, and beyond all, the dark-green line of the forests. This is St. Augustine, with its Spanish streets, and orange groves, and relics of three hundred years of growth and decay. Even to this quaint old Sleepy Hollow of the extreme South the war has penetrated with its changes. On the Plaza del Armas, where, of old, Spanish soldiers, in cumbrous accouterments, had trained their firelocks, and marched beneath the Red and Orange, with the arms of Spain, and where, later, Spanish monks, to the tolling of the bell, that still remains, had formed their long processions, and solemnly moved out in stately show, to pronounce the doom of God alike upon sacrilegious invaders and the pagan infidels, who inhabited the country; this very Plaza was surrounded by long rows of stalwart negroes, black as ebony, splendidly armed, and drawn up in handsome regimental lines for dress parade. There is an island, not far off the coast of Florida, where the Spanish colors still float, and where this spectacle of soldiers made from slaves might prove suggestive. * * * * *