The Fountain of Youth, sought for in vain by Ponce de Leon three hundred and seventy years ago, is in Florida. Time has not dried up the source of its health-giving, its life-giving, waters. They flow as of yore, and every one who thirsteth can partake of them freely. Invalids and pleasure-seekers find it in our glorious climate, in our invigorating breezes, which blow as soft and balmy as those from Ceylon's isle; in our beautiful flowers and almost perpetual verdure, and in the total absence of the chilling winds and frosts of the North and West, which render life almost unendurable. De Soto and his followers sought our shores in quest of _El Dorado_. That also is in Florida. You see it in our productive soil, in our vast orange groves, in our bananas, pineapples, guavas, and pomegranates, which no other State of the Union can produce. Who then shall say that both the "Fountain of Youth" and "_El Dorado_" are not within the boundaries of Florida? Our climate is a perpetual summer; the husbandman tickles the soil with the plow and hoe, and it laughs with an abundant harvest; the stately magnolias and graceful palms lock hands in our hammocks and wave their evergreen foliage as a token of welcome to immigrants, and wild flowers gladden the eye and perfume the air with their fragrance. CHAPTER III. MANATEE BAY--ITS TROPICAL SCENERY--EGMONT KEY--SNEAD'S ISLAND--DATE, PALM AND OLIVE TREES--CLIMATE--INSECTS--BRAIDENTOWN AND ITS SURROUNDINGS--MANATEE, THE OLDEST TOWN ON THE BAY--ITS EARLY HISTORY--BRAIDEN CASTLE--FAIR OAKS--ORANGE GROVES--WILLEMSENBURG AND FOGARTYVILLE. The Manatee River, or, more properly speaking, bay, is one of the most picturesque sheets of water in Florida. It is fourteen miles in length, with an average width of one and a half miles. One of its tributaries--the Manatee River proper--extends still further eastward, some twenty miles; and another northward, half that distance. Its course is nearly due west to Egmont Key, where it mingles its waters with those of Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It lies between the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth parallels of north latitude, and in longitude 5-1/2° west from Washington. A person passing up the bay on the mail steamer for the first time, will be charmed with the tropical and semi-tropical scenery that meets his view on either side of the bay, from its mouth to Braidentown, the present terminus of steamboat navigation. Egmont Key, with its forest of cabbage palmettos nodding their evergreen plumes in the morning sun; the stately date-palms and olive trees on Snead's Island, on the north side of the bay, and the pretty villas surrounded by young orange and banana groves on the south side, between Palmasola city and Manatee, form a landscape of rare tropical beauty, unexceled in the land of flowers, and unrivaled by the fairest scenes in Italia's famed land.