AMONG THE PALMETTOS ON THE BANKS OF HALIFAX RIVER, FLORIDA.—This is a typical Southern scene, and one of the most delightful to human senses that could be imagined. It is so perfectly in accord with nature that in imagination we can hear the bursting of the buds as they grow beneath the fructifying influences of the Southern sun, and feel the soft, hazy atmosphere as it gently rolls in from the cooling waters of the sea, and floods the intervening spaces of the moss-covered trees. In the Garden of Eden there must have been many bowers such as this, where Adam and Eve whispered the first vows of devotion and human love. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: THE HEAD OF HALIFAX RIVER, ABOVE ORMOND.] Through Georgia and into the land of orange groves we sped, stopping a day at Jacksonville, and then hurried on to San Augustine, the oldest town in America (founded by the Spanish in 1565), and possibly the most interesting. It is a link which connects the present with the earliest events of discovery in our country—a link rusty with the blood of conquest and martyrdom. Here it was that Spanish cruelty and French retaliation were carried to the most barbaric extreme, and the enslavement of native Indians began. Passing through the first ordeals of settlement, a century later it was bitterly afflicted by raids of Indians and the plundering of pirates, so that its growth was prevented, and not until the British surrendered possession to the United States in 1821, did the place show any indications of permanency, or that it would attain to any importance beyond what it had before reached as a very small village.