Many things, when related about it far away, sound tame, but have an awe-inspiring effect if surrounded by its grim walls, listening to the grating of rusty bolts, or the clanking of iron chains, and looking through the uncertain glare of the old sergeant's candles as he finishes his well-learned tale of horrors, in subdued tones, with the final paragraph, "_It may be so, or it may not; I cannot tell_." That human bones have been discovered in the ruins of old churches and structures of various other kinds, placed there for sepulture, is a well-authenticated fact. While constructing the wall around the light-house at St. Mark's, Florida, in tearing down the old Spanish fort, a tomb was found beneath a tablet, containing a single body of much greater size than any living in the country at the present day. In the walls of the State-house, at Nashville, Tennessee, a niche was planned by the architect to contain his body, where his bones are now sealed in. The iron cages about which so much has been said and written have come before the public with the enormous cruelties of the Inquisition and the mysteries of an almost-forgotten past. Many statements have been made and published in regard to them, without the shadow of truth for a basis. There are old citizens now living in St. Augustine, between eighty and ninety years of age, who saw those cages when discovered, and heard their parents state where they first saw them. The following is, no doubt, the true version of the man-cages, direct from a most authentic source: About sixty years since, while some workmen were engaged outside the city gates in making post-holes for a butcher-pen, when in the act of digging, they struck a hard substance resembling iron, which excited their curiosity. They continued working until they uncovered two cages, made of wrought iron, welded together in a manner somewhat resembling the human form, and containing a few decomposed human bones. None of the New Smyrna refugees were then living, but there are those alive now who remember having heard their parents say that "two cages containing the remains of some pirates were hanging outside the city gates when they came to St. Augustine from Smyrna, after the English left it, and buried them just in the manner they were found by the butchers."