Ponce de Leon, seeking the fountain of youth, failed to recognize in St. Augustine the object of his quest. Could he return to-day, he would find that at least the immortality of fame has been vouchsafed him, for his name flourishes everywhere, on hotel façades, shop fronts, and cigar-boxes. Perhaps, too, he was near the goal of physical permanence without suspecting it. At least, if assertion be accepted as proof, St. Augustine is without a peer in longevity. “The oldest” is the title of nobility most widely prevalent in all the region. The oldest town, with the oldest house, flanked by the dwelling of the oldest woman, who attends the oldest church, linked to her residence by the oldest street, and visible to possessors of the oldest inducement to human endeavor, leaves the gaping traveler no choice but to accept the assertion of its inhabitants that here is to be found the oldest everything under the sun, or at least in the United States, which is the same thing, for surely no one would be so unpatriotic as to admit that other lands or planets could outdo us in anything we set out to accomplish. Even “old Ponce,” dean of the six thousand saurians—count them if you dare to doubt—that sleep through the centuries out at St. Augustine’s “Alligator Farm” confesses, through the mouth of his keeper from upstart Italy, to five hundred unbroken summers, and placidly accepts the honor of being “the oldest animal in captivity.” One stands enraged at the thought that if “Ponce” cared to open his capacious mouth and speak, he might tell an eager world just what Hernando de Soto wore when his boat glided over his everglade home, or what were the exact words with which his human namesake acknowledged his inability to prolong his butterfly existence by finding the waters of immortality. Small wonder, indeed, that he dares raise his scaly head and yawn in the face even of insurance agents.
The trolley that carries “Ponce’s” visitors across the wastes of brackish water and worthless land separating St. Augustine from the open sea is virtually a private car to the rare tourist of October days. This comatose period of the year gives the bather the sense of having leased the whole expanse of the Atlantic as his own bath-tub. For the native Floridians, however widely they may extoll their endless stretch of coast-line, seem to make small use of it themselves.
For hundreds of miles southward the eyes of the traveler weary at the swamp and jungle sameness of the peninsular state. The Gulf Stream and the diligent coral have built extensively, but they have left the job unfinished, in the indifferent tropical way. Grape-fruit farms and orange-groves break forth upon the primeval wilderness here and there, yet only often enough to emphasize its unpeopled immensity. Even Palm Beach has nothing unusual to show until the holidays of mid-winter bring its vast hostelries back to life. One loses little in fleeing all day onward at Southern express speed.
Miami, however, is worth a halt, if only for a glimpse of the United States in full tropical setting. There the refugee from winter will find cocoanuts nodding everywhere above him; there he may pick his morning grape-fruit at the door; and he need be no plutocrat to have his table graced with those aristocratic fruits of the tropics, the papaya and the alligator-pear. He cannot but be amused, too, at the casual Southern manners of the street-cars, the motorman-conductors of which make change with one hand and govern their brakes with the other, or who retire to a seat within the car for a chat with a passenger or the retying of a shoelace, while the conveyance careens madly along the outskirt streets.
Thanks, perhaps, to its sea breezes, Miami seemed no hotter than Richmond, though it was a humid, tropical heat that forced its inhabitants to compromise with Dame Fashion. As far north as Savannah a few eccentric beings ignored her dictates to the extent of fronting the July weather of October in white suits and straw hats, but they had a self-conscious, hunted manner which proved they were aware of their conspicuousness. In southern Florida, however, it was rather those who persisted in dressing by the calendar who attracted attention, and there were men of all occupations who dared to appear in public frankly devoid of the superfluous upper garment of male attire.
Some thirty miles south of Miami the “Dixie Highway,” capable and well-kept to the last, disappears for lack of ground to stand on. The soldierly yellow pines give way to scrub jungle, and swamps gain the ascendency over solid earth. Amphibious plants cover the landscape like armies of ungainly crabs or huge spiders. Compact masses of dwarf trees and bristling bushes cluster as tightly together as Italian hilltop villages, as if for mutual protection from the ever-increasing expanses of water. Wherever land wins the constant struggle against the other element, the gray “crabs” of vegetation stretch away in endless vistas on each hand. White herons rise from the everglades at the rumble of the train, and wing their leisurely way into the flat horizon. A constant sea breeze sweeps through the coaches. At rare intervals a little wooden shack or two, sometimes shaded by half a dozen magnificent royal palms, keeps a precarious foothold on the shrinking soil; but it is hard to imagine what means of livelihood man finds in these swampy wastes.
St. Augustine, Florida, from the old Spanish fortress
