“Why is it called so—who was this Maria?” I asked. But Victoria Linkum did not know. Africa was a long straggling suburb, situated on a peninsula in shape not unlike the real Africa, between the Maria Sanchez Creek and the Sebastian River; it was dotted with cabins and an easy-going idle population of freedmen, who had their own little church there, and a minister whose large silver-rimmed spectacles gave dignity to his ebony countenance. “They do not quite know how to take their freedom yet,” said a lady, a fellow-boarder, that evening. “The colored people of St. Augustine were an isolated race; they had been family servants for generations, as there were few plantations about here, and, generally speaking, they were well cared for, and led easy lives. They held a great celebration over their freedom; but the truth is they don’t know what to do with it yet, and their ideas take the oddest shapes. The Sabre, for instance, always insists upon going and coming through the front-door; he calmly brings in all his provisions that way—quarters of venison, butter, fish, whatever it may be, no matter who is present.”
“Did you enjoy the afternoon, Sara?” I asked that evening.
“I can not tell you how much. If you could only have seen it—the blue inlet, the island, and the two light-houses, the surf breaking over the bar, and in front the broad ocean, thousands of miles of heaving water, with no land between us and Africa.”
“You absurd child! as though that made any difference.”
“But it does make a difference, Martha. If I thought there was so much as one Canary Island, the sense of vastness would be lost. I stood on that beach and drew in a long breath that came straight from the Nile.”
“And Aunt Diana?”
“Oh, she was happy.”
“Iris smiled upon Mokes, then?”
“Conspicuously.”
“Naughty little flirt! And Miss Sharp?”