The temperature of Florida in winter is rarely lower than 64 degrees, and ranges from that to 75; but the climate is moist and enervating, the country a vast marsh, and so flat that, by standing on a chair, one could see to the extremities of it with the aid of a good field glass. Some enterprising American should throw up a hill down there: he would make his fortune. Everyone would go to see it.
It is not everybody who can afford the luxury of the Ponce de Leon Hotel, but it is everybody who likes to be seen there in the season.
You must be able to say, when you return to the north, that you have been at the Ponce de Leon. This is how it can be managed. You go to some other hotel near the Ponce. In the evening, dressed in all your diamonds, you glide into the courtyard of the great caravansery. Another step takes you to the immense rotunda where the concert is going on. You stroll through the saloons and corridors, and, taking a seat where you can be seen of the multitude, you listen to the music. About ten or eleven o'clock, you beat a retreat and return to your own hotel.
Wishing to set my mind at rest on this matter, I went one evening about half-past nine to the Casa Monica and Florida House. There, in the rooms where the musicians engaged by the proprietors play every evening, were, at the most, a score of people.
Heard at the St. Augustine station as I was leaving:
"Hello! you are off too?" said a young man to a friend who had just installed his wife in the train for Jacksonville.
"My dear fellow, I have been here a fortnight; the Ponce de Leon is magnificent, but the bill is ruinous."
"Never mind, old man; take it off your wife's next dress-money."