Why these longings for lands in which we shall never be?--why this desire for that azure into which we cannot soar?--whence our mysterious love for that tumultuous deep into whose emerald secrets we may never peer?--Can it be that through countless epochs of the immemorial phylogenesis of man,--through all those myriad changes suggested by the prenatal evolution of the human heart,--through all the slow marvelous transition from fish to mammal,--there have actually persisted impulses, desires, sensations, whereof the enigma may be fully interpreted by some new science only,--a future science of psychical dysteleology?... So musing, I found my way to the Plaza. Has it not often seemed to you that the more antiquated and the more unfamiliar an object or a place is, the more it appears at first sight to live,--to possess a sort of inner being, a fetish-spirit, a soul? I thought that morning the ancient Plaza had such a soul, and that it spoke to me in its mysterious dumb way, as if saying: 'Come look at me, because I am very, very old;--but do not look at the sulphur fountain which the Americans have made, nor at the monument they have built; for those are not of the centuries to which I belong.' So I entered, and idled awhile among the palms that threw spidery shadows under the noon-light; and I deciphered the old inscription upon the coquina pillar:--'PLAZA DE LA CONSTITUCION...;'--paying little heed to the song of the artesian spring, and scarcely vouchsafing a furtive glance to the newer monument, which I saw was not artistic, not imposing, but naïve and almost cumbrous. Suddenly my indifferent eye noted a graven word which revealed that the newer structure had been erected by Love, and for Love's sake only. And then, all unexpectedly, the very artlessness of the monument touched me as with a voiceless reproach,--touched me like the artlessness of a face in tears: so much of tender pain revealed itself through the simplicity of the chiseled words, OUR DEAD,--through the commonplaceness of the inscription, '_Erected by the Ladies' Memorial Association_.' Then I walked around the monument, perusing on each of its white faces the roll-call of the dead,--sons, brothers, lovers,--the names of your darlings, gentle women of Saint Augustine! I read them every one; carefully spelling out many a Spanish name of Andalusian origin: sonorous appellations holding in their syllables etymological suggestions of Arabian ancestry--names swarthy and beautiful as an Oriental face might be. And all the while, --dominating the perfume of blossoms, and the keen sweet scent of aromatic grasses,--the sulphureous smell of the Volcanic spring came to me grimly through the warm aureate air,--like an odor of battles! There was a name upon that white stone which affected me in a singular way,--a name that by contrast with those dark Spanish ones seemed fair, blonde as gold! In someplace--at some time, I had known that name.--But where?--but when?