To Americans, this old town seems to have a vast antiquity, claiming as it does the respectable age of three centuries. The Catholic church here is almost as old as Protestantism, and a brief of St. Pius V., in regard to some of the religious affairs of this colony, is still extant. There are remnants of an old wall in several places, and a large fortress built in Spanish times, and called the castle of St. Marco, where you may yet see the marks of the cannon-shot fired at the invasion of Oglethorpe from Georgia. This fort might serve as a scene for the plot of a new "Mysteries of Udolfo," it is so unlike any thing modern, and so thoroughly Spanish and mediæval. It is not, however, of a sort to make one regret the past. Its dark, damp casemates look like prisons, especially one frightful dungeon, which is a cell within a cell, without any embrasure, and admitting no light or air except that which comes through the door opening into the outer casemate. This was the cell of the greatest criminals. In one of these casemates, Wildcat, the celebrated Indian chief, was once confined with a companion. Although cruel and blood-thirsty, Wildcat was a great warrior, and a man gifted with a high order of genius, an orator, a poet, and a true cavalier of the forest. On pretence of illness, he and his companion reduced their bulk as much as possible by a low diet and purgative medicines, and by the aid of a knife, which he had secreted and used as a spike by thrusting it into the wall of soft concrete, with a rope dexterously made from strips of his bed-clothes, he clambered to the high and narrow embrasure, squeezed himself through, not without scraping the skin from his breast, and let himself down into the moat. His companion followed him, but fell to the ground, breaking his leg. Nevertheless, Wildcat carried him off, seized a stray mule, and escaped to his tribe in the forest. {162} After the conclusion of the war, he went to Mexico, where he became the alcalde of an Indian village, and did his new country essential service by leading a body of Indian warriors, armed with Mississippi rifles, against a band of filibusters from the United States. Osceola, the half-breed king of the Seminoles, who was not only a hero, but a just and humane man, was also captured near St. Augustine, by treachery and bad faith, and confined in this fortress for a time, but afterward removed to Charleston, where he died of a broken heart. The great mahogany treasure-chest of Don Juan Menendez is still remaining in the fortress, and in one of the casemates are remnants of a rude stone altar and holy-water stoups, marking the site of a chapel. The fortress is kept in good preservation by our Government, and a noble sea-wall extends from it to the barracks at the other end of the town, which are established in an ancient Franciscan monastery. A great part of the old city is in ruins. The old Spanish families left the country when it was ceded by Spain to