“The San Sebastian,” replied Miss Sharp, reading slowly from her guide-book in the fading light. “ ‘After three hours and one-half of this torture the exhausted tourist finds himself at the San Sebastian River, where a miserable ferry conveys him, more dead than alive, to the city of St. Augustine.’ ”
“But here is no ferry,” I said.
“The ‘exhausted tourist,’ however, is here,” observed Sara, wearily.
“The guide-book is at least so far correct that we may reasonably conclude this to be the St. Sebastian—so called, I presume, from the mythical saint of that name,” remarked the Professor, peering out over his spectacles.
“Allow me,” said Miss Sharp, eagerly producing a second small volume from her basket. “This saint was, I believe, thrown into a well—no, that isn’t it. He was cast into a dungeon, and rescued by—by flying dragons—”
PLAZA AND MONUMENT.
“Oh no, Miss Sharp,” said Iris, as the baffled governess wrestled with the fine print. “Sebastian was the one noted for his arrows; don’t you remember the picture in my hand-book?”
Leaving the causeway, the omnibus entered the town through a gate of foliage, great pride-of-India-trees mingling their branches over the street for some distance, forming a green arched way whose vista made beautiful the entrance to the Ancient City, like the shaded pathway that led to the lovely land of Beulah in the old pictures of Pilgrim’s Progress. On each side we could see a residence back among the trees—one of stone, large and massive, with an orange grove behind, the golden fruit gleaming through the glossy foliage, and protected by a picturesque hedge of Spanish-bayonets; the other a wide house surrounded by piazzas overhung with ivy and honeysuckle, a garden filled with roses and every variety of flower, gray moss drooping from the trees at the gate, and a roof painted in broad stripes which conveyed a charming suggestion of coolness, as though it were no roof at all, but only a fresh linen awning over the whole, suited to the tropical climate. Sara said this, and added that she was sure there were hammocks there too, hanging somewhere in shady places.
“Really, very meritorious,” remarked Aunt Diana, inspecting the houses through her glasses, and bestowing upon them, as it were, her metropolitan benediction.