We found tool-sheds, arbours, bowers, stables, chicken-houses, dog-kennels and cottages, but not a sign of life except a portly hen and a brood of chickens, who fled to their coop at sight of our soft snowflake of an escort, whose emerald eyes dilated, and affectionate purring ceased at sight of them. Having explored the more domestic portion of the grounds, and still finding nobody to show us through the orange plantation, we proceeded to show ourselves through it. Is there a tree, I wonder, more beautiful than the orange, with its shining foliage of dark and glossy green, its scented snow of blossoms, its red-gold globes of fruit! Here in St. Augustine, although too late in the season for the fullest beauty of the groves--the gathering being almost over--we still found here and there the flower and the fruit growing amicably together on sister boughs. We came upon one glorious tree, its graceful branches bending under the rich burthen of its fruit of fiery gold, glowing in that southern sunshine. We reached down a laden bough, and trespassed on the taken-for-granted hospitality of our unknown and unknowing host to the extent of an orange apiece. Long had we yearned to taste an orange plucked fresh from the tree! Often had we anticipated the unrivalled freshness of the gushing juice of the fruit yet warm to the heart with sunshine, and exhaling still the fragrance of the dews of morning! Now we had got our oranges, “fresh from the tree--dew, sunshine, &c., &c.,” at last. We tasted the long-anticipated delicacy. Ugh! our dainty morsel turned out to be the bitter rind, the biting acrid juice, of that species known as the “sour orange”! What an excellent moral might have been deduced from this Dead Sea fruit of our desires! It was a sermon in a bite! But, unfortunately, there was nobody to whom to preach it, except the cat. We threw our oranges far, far away, sadder and wiser women. But the daughters of Eve are incorrigible, and, anon, we built our dreams again around a “fresh mango,” and were again disillusioned. Yet unconvinced by many disenchantments, we still go on through life seeking our mango or our orange, “fresh from the tree.” But that afternoon’s peregrination is still one of our pleasantest memories of St. Augustine. There are plenty of amusements and resorts in and around this quaint, mediæval-looking old place to entertain the tourist, when he has sufficiently taken into himself the aspect of this bit of the middle ages dropped down in the modern day of the bright New World.