Seated that evening on a balcony that jutted out under the star-light, above the crests of palmettos, I pondered upon the legend of the Fountain. It was among the Bahamas that Juan Ponce de Leon first sought for the waters of youth,--striving to discover some island vapory and vague as Hesperus, and questioning curiously the Indians of the Archipelago. Then it was he heard of the mainland where 'the wished-for waters flowed as a river upon whose banks lived the rejuvenated races in serene idleness and untold luxuriance.' Was this a rumor of the spring with a silver name, whose waters indeed 'flow as a river'?--or was it an Indian tale of some other one of those many and wondrous Floridian sources whose unfathomed transparencies own the iridescent magnificence of jewel-fire? Or might not the valiant Spaniard have heard in his boyhood some Moorish story of that mystic fountain which the Prophet Khader alone of all God's creatures was permitted to find? And that Moslem tradition itself, had it not been brought to Islam by Arabian travelers to the further East,--as a bud from the marvelous garden of Hindoo myth,--a fairy-flower created by the poet-wizards of India,--a blossom of parable, perchance, called into being by the lips of Buddha? 'Not wholly thus,' deep scholars answer; 'for the legend of Gautama is only a poem evolved from ancient myths of the Sun-god; and the fable of the Fountain doubtless first sprang from the primitive belief that the Day-star, whose glory waned with evening, nightly renewed the strength of his splendor by bathing in the fountains of Ocean,--in the enchanted waters of the West.' Perhaps, perhaps!--But can we boldly aver that the beautiful myth is not more ancient still,--old as love,--old as the mourning for the dead,--old as the heart of man, and its dreams of the eternal, and its desires of the impossible? _May_ 5, 188-