y afterward, several murders and robberies on the road.

At length we emerged upon a shrubby plain, and finally came in sight of
this oldest city of the United States, seated among its trees on a sandy
swell of land where it has stood for three hundred years. I was struck
with its ancient and homely aspect, even at a distance, and could not help
likening it to pictures which I had seen of Dutch towns, though it wanted
a windmill or two, to make the resemblance perfect. We drove into a green
square, in the midst of which was a monument erected to commemorate the
Spanish constitution of 1812, and thence through the narrow streets of the
city to our hotel.

I have called the streets narrow. In few places are they wide enough to
allow two carriages to pass abreast. I was told that they were not
originally intended for carriages, and that in the time when the town
belonged to Spain, many of them were floored with an artificial stone,
composed of shells and mortar, which in this climate takes and keeps the
hardness of rock, and that no other vehicle than a hand-barrow was allowed
to pass over them. In some places you see remnants of this ancient
pavement, but for the most part it has been ground into dust under the
wheels of the carts and carriages, introduced by the new inhabitants. The
old houses, built of a kind of stone which is seemingly a pure concretion
of small shells, overhang the streets with their wooden balconies, and the
gardens between the houses are fenced on the side of the street with high
walls of stone. Peeping over these walls you see branches of the
pomegranate and of the orange-tree, now fragrant with flowers, and, rising
yet higher, the leaning boughs of the fig, with its broad luxuriant
leaves. Occasionally you pass the ruins of houses--walls of stone, with
arches and staircases of the same material, which once belonged to stately
dwellings. You meet in the streets with men of swarthy complexions and
foreign physiognomy, and you hear them speaking to each other in a strange
language. You are told that these are the remains of those who inhabited
the country under the Spanish dominion, and that the dialect you have
heard is that of the island of Minorca.

"Twelve years ago," said an acquaintance of mine, "when I first visited
St. Augustine, it was a fine old Spanish town. A large proportion of the
houses, which you now see roofed like barns, were then flat-roofed, they
were all of shell-rock, and these