Morning inundates the streets with its fluid gold; the trees drink in the brightness; the plate-glass of store-fronts flames like immense jewel-facets;--and what singular stores these are!--mostly curiosity shops! Here are dealers in strange flowers, flowers formed of iridescent fish-scales,--in jointed walking canes of shark's vertebræ,--in tropical shells, bearing paintings of sabals and cypresses upon their nacreous inner surface,--in splendid screens made of the spoils of white herons and sea-eagles,--in sea-beans and sea-porcupines and seaweed fans and polished shells of the sea-turtle, --in alligator-eggs and stuffed alligators, and live alligators in boxes,--in alligators' teeth, burnished and gold-mounted as brooches, as cuff-buttons, as necklace ornaments, as earrings. Atavism in the evolution of the lapidary's art,--an unconscious return of fashion to the savage bijou try of fossil races! After perhaps not less than half-a-million of years our boasted civilization finds æsthetic joy in the art of the Tertiary Epoch; and in the bud-smooth lobule of her dainty ear, the modern beauty does not hesitate to hang even such a decoration as that worn many thousand centuries ago by some primitive beauty,--tall daughters of mammoth-hunters and lion-slayers. The breath of the sea quivers in the emerald of the trees, and, sea-like, the broad St. Johns washes the feet of the white town. In the shadow of the wharves the water is deeply green and glossy as the surface of a magnolia leaf; further out it brightens and changes to sky-color, and cools off into steel-tint near the opposite shore. Violet bands moving over the immense breadth of the flood betray the course of mysterious currents. A long promontory, piercing the miles of unruffled water, mirrors the golden-greens, and sap-greens, and sombre greens of its unbroken woods; but much further away, across the enormous curve, the forest lines, steeped in the infinite bath of azure light, turn blue. As through high gates of green, the eye looks up the vast turn into a cerulean world; and it is through these rich portals that you may sail into the region of legend and romance,--that you may reach those subterranean rivers, those marvelous volcanic springs haunted by dim traditions of the Fountain of Youth, and by the memory of the good gray knight who sought its waters in vain.