or purposes, impaired the dream of youth and rapture which prevailed everywhere in the hearts of the people. Gay assemblages were ever to be found among the villages in the forests; singing their own delights and imploring the stranger to be happy also. They had a thousand songs and sports of youth and pleasure, which made life a perpetual round of ever freshening felicity. Innocent as wild, no eye of the ascetic could rebuke enjoyments which violated no cherished laws of experience and thought, and their glad and sprightly dances, in the deep shadows of the wood, to the lively clatter of Indian gourds and tambourines, were quite as significant of harmless fancies as of thoughtless lives. Happy was the lonely voyager, speeding along the coast, in his frail canoe, when, suddenly darting out from the forests of Iracana, a slight but lovely creature, with flowing tunic of white cotton, stood upon the head land, waving her branch of palm or myrtle, entreating his approach, and imploring him to delay his journey, while he shared in the sweet festivities of love and youth, for a season, upon the shore,--crying with a sweet chant,-- "Love you me not, oh, lonely voyager--love you me not? Lo! am I not lovely; I who serve the beautiful queen of Iracana? will you not come to me, for a while!--come, hide the canoe among the reeds, along the shore, and make merry with the damsels of Iracana. I give to thee the palm and the myrtle, in token of a welcome of peace and love. Come hither, oh! lonely voyager, and be happy for a season!" And seldom were these persuasions unavailing. The lonely voyager was commonly won, as was he who, sailing by Scylla and Charybdis, refused to seal his ears with wax against the song of the Syren. But our charmers, along the banks of the Satilla, entreated to no evil, laid no snares for the unwary, meditating their destruction. They sought only to share the pleasures which they themselves enjoyed. The benevolence of that love which holds its treasure as of little value, unless its delights may be bestowed on others, was the distinguishing moral in the Indian Eden of Iracana; and he who came with love, never departed without a sorrow, such as made him linger as he went, and soon return, when this were possible, to a region, which, among our Floridians, realized that period of the Classic Fable, which has always been designated, par excellence, as the "age of gold."