“Yes, Miss Martha, I am going,” replied the old gentleman, decidedly. “I have been very much disappointed in St. Augustine—nothing to do, no cemeteries to speak of.”
“Stay longer? No, indeed,” said a lady who had made three toilets a day, and found nobody to admire them. “What you find to like in this old place is beyond me!”
“She is not far wrong there,” commented Sara, sotto voce; “it is beyond her; that is the very point of the thing.”
But, on the other hand, all those in search of health, all endowed with romance and imagination, all who could appreciate the rare charming haze of antiquity which hangs over the ancient little city, grew into love for St. Augustine, and lingered there far beyond their appointed time. Crowds of old ladies and gentlemen sunned themselves on the south piazzas, and troops of young people sailed and walked every where, waking up the sleeping woods and the dreaming water with song and laughter. The enterprising tourists came and went with their accustomed energy; they bought palmetto hats and twined gray moss around them; they carried orange-wood canes and cigar boxes containing young alligators. (Why young alligators must always travel North in cigar boxes in preference to any other kind of box is a mystery; but in cigar boxes they always go!) Once a hand-organ man appeared, and ground out the same tune for two whole days on the Plaza.
“And what may be the name of that melody, Miss Iris—the one he is playing now?” asked the Professor, endeavoring to assume a musical air.
“He can only play one tune, and he has been playing that steadily for two days,” replied Iris. “As far as I can make out from the discords it is intended to be Strauss’s Tausend und Eine Nacht.”
But the Professor, an expert in Hebrew, Greek, and Sanskrit, had never condescended to a modern tongue.
“Pray translate it for me,” he said, playfully, with the air of an affable Sphinx.
“It is a subject to which I have given profound thought, Sir,” said Iris, gravely. “It is not ‘A thousand and one nights,’ because the last night only is intended, and therefore the best way to translate it is, I think, ‘The thousand and oneth.’ I will give you some verses on the melody, if you like.”
