“Oh, aunt, you stopped me right on the top note,” said Iris, glancing down the street after the uniform. Arrived at the hotel, Aunt Diana began inspecting rooms. Sara wished to go to one of the boarding-houses, and John Hoffman, who met us on the piazza, proposed his. “I have staid there several times,” he said. “The Sabre-boy waits on the table, and a wild crane lives in the back-yard.” “The crane, by all means,” said Sara, gathering together her possessions. I preferred to be with Sara; so the three of us left the hotel for Hospital Street, passing on our way Artillery Lane, both names belonging to the British occupancy of the venerable little city. “This is the Plaza,” said John, as we crossed the little square; “the monument was erected in 1812, in honor of the adoption of a Spanish constitution. The Spanish constitution, as might have been expected, died young; but St. Augustine, unwilling to lose its only ornament for any such small matter as a revolution away over in Spain, compromised by taking out the inscribed tablets and keeping the monument. They have since been restored as curiosities. Castelar ought to come over and see them.” The house on Hospital Street was a large white mansion, built of coquina, with a peaked roof and overhanging balcony. We knocked, and a tall colored youth opened the door. “The ‘Sabre,’” said John, gravely introducing him. “Why ‘Sabre?’” I said, as we waited for our hostess in the pleasant parlor, adorned with gray moss and tufted grasses; “to what language does the word belong?” “Child language,” replied John. “There was a little girl here last year, who, out of the inscrutable mysteries of a child’s mind, evolved the fancy for calling him ‘the Sabre-boy.’ Why, nobody knew. His real name is Willfrid, but gradually we all fell into the child’s fancy, until every body called him the Sabre-boy, and he himself gravely accepted the title.” [Illustration: THE SABRE-BOY.] A tap at the window startled us. “The crane,” said John, throwing open the blind. “He too has come to have a look at you.” An immense gray bird, standing nearly five feet high on his stilt-like legs, peered solemnly at us for some moments, and then stalked away with what seemed very like a sniff of disdain. “He does not like our looks,” said Sara. “He takes his time; not for him any of the light friendships of an hour,” replied John. “Cranie is a bird of unlimited aspirations, and both literary and æsthetic tastes; he has been discovered turning over with his bill the leaves of Tennyson’s poems left lying on the window-sill; he invariably plucks the finest roses in the garden; and he has been seen walking on the sea-wall alone in the moonlight, meditating, no doubt, on the vanities of mankind, with whom he is compelled reluctantly to associate.”