nues of live-oaks that stretch from one side of
the road to the other, like great covered arbors, and from every limb of
every tree hang great streamers of gray moss, four and five feet long.
It was just wonderful to look at. The whole place seemed dripping with
waving fringe. Rectus said it looked to him as if this was a graveyard
for old men, and that every old fellow had had to hang his beard on a
tree before he went down into his grave.

This was a curious idea for Rectus to have, and the colored man who was
driving us--we went out in style, in a barouche, but I wouldn't do that
kind of thing again without making a bargain beforehand--turned around
to look at him as if he thought he was a little crazy. Rectus was
certainly in high spirits. There was a sort of change coming over him.
His eyes had a sparkle in them that I never saw before. No one could
say that he didn't take interest in things now. I think the warm weather
had something to do with it.

"I tell you what it is, Gordon," said he,--he still called me Gordon,
and I didn't insist on "Mr.," because I thought that, on the whole,
perhaps it wouldn't do,--"I'm waking up. I feel as if I had been asleep
all my life, and was just beginning to open my eyes."

A graveyard seemed a queer place to start out fresh in this way, but it
wasn't long before I found that, if Rectus hadn't really wakened up, he
could kick pretty hard in his sleep.

Nothing much happened on the trip down to St. Augustine, for we
travelled nearly all the way by night. Early the next morning we were
lying off that old half Spanish town, wishing the tide would rise so
that we could go in. There is a bar between two islands that lie in
front of the town, and you have to go over that to get into the harbor.
We were on the "Tigris," the Bahama steamer that touched at St.
Augustine on her way to Nassau, and she couldn't get over that bar until
high tide. We were dreadfully impatient, for we could see the old town,
with its trees, all green and bright, and its low, wide houses, and a
great light-house, marked like a barber's pole or a stick of
old-fashioned mint-candy, and, what was best of all, a splendid old
castle, or fort, built by the Spaniards three hundred years ago! We
declared we would go there the moment we set foot on shore. In fact, we
soon had about a dozen plans for seeing the town.

If we had been the pilots, we would have bumped that old steamer over
the bar, somehow or other, lo