hese three places, I have never heard of them. You can drink of the
spring of the elixir of life in St. Augustine, and lose yourself in the
trenches of old Fort Barrancas at Pensacola, and wander at will in the
old French town of New Orleans. Each place was once a pawn in the
gambles of European statesmen. Each has heard the clang of armed
knights, the sword in one hand, the cross in the other. Each has seen
the pirate fleet with death's head on the flag at the masthead come
tacking up the bays, sometimes to be shattered and sunk by cannon shot
from the fort bastions. Sometimes the fort itself was scuttled by the
buccaneers; once, at least, at Fort Barrancas, it suffered loot at
terrible, riotous, drunken hands, when a Spanish officer's daughter who
was captured for ransom succeeded in plunging into the sea within sight
of her watching father.

But whether you enter the Egypt of America by rail overland, or by sea,
San Antonio is the gateway city from the south to the land of play and
mystery. It is to the Middle West what Quebec is to Canada, what Cairo
is to Egypt--the gateway, the meeting place of old and new, of Latin and
Saxon, of East and West, of North and South. Atmosphere? Physically, the
atmosphere is champagne: spiritually, you have not gone ten paces from
the station before you feel a flavor as of old wine. There are the open
Spanish plazas riotous with bloom flanked by Spanish-Moorish ruins flush
on the pavement, with skyscraper hotels that are the last word in
modernity. Live oaks heavy with Spanish moss hang over sleepy streams
that come from everywhere and meander nowhere. You see a squad of
soldiers from Fort Sam Houston wheeling in measured tread around a
square (only there isn't anything absolutely square in all San Antonio)
and they have hardly gone striding out of sight before you see a Mexican
burro trotting to market with a load of hay tied on its back. A motor
comes bumping over the roads--such roads as only the antique can
boast--and if it is fiesta time, or cowboy celebration, you are apt to
see cowboys cutting such figure eights in the air as a motor cannot
execute on antique pavement.

You enter a hotel and imagine you are in the Plaza, New York, or the
Ritz, London; but stay! The frieze above the marble walls isn't gilt;
and it isn't tapestry. The frieze is a long panel in bronze
_alto-relievo_. I think it is a testimonial to San Antonio's sense of
the fitness of things that that frieze is