“I can find my way about as well as you can, Dick,” went on Mrs. Bobbsey. “You stay here and I’ll get our little fat fireman.”
“Maybe he has gone to see a fire engine,” suggested Nan.
“I don’t believe so,” answered her father. “I didn’t hear any alarm, but perhaps they don’t sound one here as we do back in Lakeport.”
“I guess he’s just gone out to look at the things in the streets here,” said Bert. “They’re a lot different from at home.”
“Indeed they are!” exclaimed Mr. Bobbsey. “Well, I’ll stay here,” he said to his wife, “and you go and look for Freddie. But if you don’t soon find him come back and I’ll go out.”
“I’ll find him,” she said, and one of the porters from the hotel offered to go with her to show Mrs. Bobbsey her way about the strange streets of St. Augustine—the little, narrow streets that had not been changed much in three hundred years.
“Oh, what a lovely place this is,” said Nan to Bert, while their father was talking with the hotel clerk. “It’s like a palace.”
“It looks like some of the places you see in a moving picture,” said Bert.
And indeed the beautiful hotel, with the palms and flowers set all about, did look like some moving picture play. Only it was real, and the Bobbsey twins were to stay there until they had seen Cousin Jasper, and found out what his strange story was about.
Soon after Mr. Bobbsey had finished signing his name and those of the members of his family in the hotel register book, Mrs. Bobbsey came back, leading Freddie by the hand.