As a coaling station at the entrance of the Gulf, and the location of the United States civil officers for the Southern District of Florida, Key West had attained such importance before the war as to have attracted, according to the census of 1860, a population of two thousand eight hundred and thirty-two. Notwithstanding the departure of many rebels, the town has increased during the war to a population of about three thousand five hundred. It is neatly built, and better paved than most Southern places of like size. There is a street of good-looking frame business houses; a large hotel offers naval officers and others, who happen in port, a variation from ship fare; and a club house, sustained by the civil, military and naval services, supplies many of the comforts that would hardly be expected on this last desolate sand bank of Florida, and extreme Southern possession of the United States. Yet it took all the familiar sights and conveniences to enable one to realize that it was an American town. Bananas were for sale in the shops nearly four months earlier than we expect at the North the unripe, leathery fruit, which is all Northern people can get for the banana; limes, and sapadillos, and “sour sops,” were the common fruits of the season; the houses were here and there hedged in, not with arbor vitæ, or box, or even Cherokee rose, but with great, branching, luxuriant cactus, as high as a man’s head; for shade trees in the front yards, they had the palm-like cocoa. * * * * * The Spanish Consul sent down his carriage, and the supply of other vehicles in the little island was pretty well exhausted in providing conveyances for the party. Our drive took us around the whole island. Spots of dark green constantly dotted the water near the beach—the uninhabited “keys.” Some of them did not seem to be more than half an acre in extent; others would make nice little farms, but for snakes, and sharks, and storms, in which the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico would combine in washing over the crops. The stunted shrubbery (which, my fair companion in the ride told me she had learned, after a year’s residence, to call the “Forests of Key West”), was, apparently, no where more than ten or twelve feet high. Wild cocoas were abundant. Gigantic, and not attractive looking, cactus covered the rocks, and forbade strolls out of the beaten track. Tamarinds, hibiscus, sugar-apples, pawpaws, (totally different from the Northern tree of that name,) sapadillos, lime trees, buttonwoods, mastics, with lignum vitæ, gum elemi and sal soda plant, made up a vegetation as varied as it was novel to Northern eyes. Old salt vats, where, before the war, the slaves, in the rude, shiftless way which slavery perpetuated, made salt enough for the consumption of Key West, by letting in sea water and evaporating it, lined the coast for perhaps a mile.