The important question with most visitors wherever they go is, What do we have to eat? as though the sole object of their lives was gormandizing. The market in St. Augustine is well supplied with eatables. Vessels from New York arrive weekly with groceries consigned to one or more of the various firms of Messrs. Hamlin & Co., Genovar & Brother, Lyon & Co., large wholesale and retail dealers, which are furnished to their customers on more reasonable terms than purchasers would think possible. During most of the winter months fresh strawberries, cabbage, and lettuce, sparkling with the morning dew, are sold on the streets, besides celery, turnips, sweet and Irish potatoes, wild turkeys and ducks, together with plenty of venison and beef. It is a treat to visit the fish-market at early dawn, and see the boats come in with their live fish of various kinds—drum, mullet, flounder, sheep-head, red bass, crabs, etc.
Fine Matanzar oysters are kept for sale in or out of the shell, as the purchaser may choose. If any appearance of starvation has ever faced visitors here, no one has perished here from hunger. It is true, there have been times when the demand for certain articles has exceeded the supply a day or two only, but now good, palatable, life-sustaining food can be obtained; also fresh milk, as some of the citizens are making dairies a specialty. Very sweet oranges are sold from Dr. Anderson’s grove by the cart-load, while some others have almost every variety produced, including the Lisbon, Chinese, Maltese, Tangerine, Seville, and Mandarin, or Clove orange.
Hotels here, with high-sounding names and inviting appearance, are well kept. The St. Augustine, Magnolia, and Florida Houses, have the most rooms, while the Sunnyside has taken a front seat for first-class accommodations with all its patrons. Nearly every house rents rooms or takes boarders, and many of them feed well—among whom we find the names of Mr. George Greeno, Mr. Medicis, and Miss Lucy Abbott, as extremely popular.
Some who visit Florida expect gratuitous offerings from the residents for the great favor shown them in coming, and when they find every thing is cash on delivery, a general fault-finding is commenced on extortion—this exercise being the only escape-valve for their bottled wrath. The far-famed hospitality of the Southern people is a record of the past, from the force of surrounding circumstances, now obsolete, as Webster says with regard to some of his Dictionary words: with most of them it is a question of bread, and whatever produce or fruit of any kind is raised—from a ground-pea to a ripe sweet orange—the question is asked, How can I turn it into something by which my family may be supported? The South has now neither wealth nor much leisure to spend without value received. The inhospitality in not giving fruits is only one of the many sources of complaint—the boarding-houses and hotels being the most prolific cause for disagreeable remarks. The most eligible houses of entertainment, with scarcely an exception, are kept by Northern people, who have charged two dollars for a dinner with the most unblushing effrontery, while the Floridian is satisfied with fifty cents for a square meal. There are also those reared here who ask whatever they think visitors will stand, regardless of principle, but they always bear brow-beating, when they come down to prices within range of any ordinary purse.
Many speak of this favorably as a summer-resort, but when the season advances into May, the winter-visitors all leave. Then a painful silence pervades every thing, unbroken only by an occasional yawn from the residents, who are tired doing nothing. These demonstrations sound sad, as if from the tomb, and where the echoes cease to reverberate we have never been able to determine. The climate, from its insular exposure, is said to be lovely even in August.
We are now enjoying moonlight nights, about which so many have so much rhapsodized. There is no doubt that the nocturnal appearance of the heavens in this latitude contrasts with a Northern one in the same manner that two paintings differ—the warmth, richness, and brilliancy of the one being in opposition to the poverty and indistinctness of the other. On account of the latitude, there is no twilight—the “fairy web of day is never hung out”—but from blazing sunshine into darkness we are at once precipitated—no witchery or poetry to be found between the magic hours intervening.
Every season finds a large number of nice people at this place, who require a change of climate, from the severity of cold, piercing winds, to the blandness of an Indian summer. The care-worn come to rest, writers to find inspiration; for here, fanned by the sea-breeze, does not “light-winged fancy” travel at a swifter pace in the daylight? and when night comes, lulled by the surf, we can listen to the “great sea calling from its secret depths.”