A Confession of St. Augustine

by William Dean Howells

With the wind in the right quarter, and the sun in a forenoon sky either entirely blue, or a soft blend of white clouds melting in spaces of azure, the play of light through the palmetto and cedar tops on the facade of the cathedral across the street or on the curves of the triune belfry beside it, left nothing to be asked of the climate or weather. But both are subject to strange vicissitudes, and especially from melting warmth to cold of the ice-brook’s temper. You should especially beware of the wind that blows with soft insistence from the southeast till the first thing you know it has got round you, as if

morally, and holds you in the clutch of a cold snap, incredibly prophesied from the northwest. The Floridian winter, which is not a season, but merely an incident of the year-long summer of the latitude, seldom comes from New York or Boston, but arrives from Chicago by way of Chattanooga, and its affiliations are with the Middle West, as most of its visitors are. Sometimes it comes like a thief in the night, and twice it has happened with me to be resting on one of the home-towners’ benches in the Plaza, and with head thrown back to be admiring the mildest of full moons, and then before morning to hear the rush and trample of a sudden shower on my roof and to wake in the morning eager for the fire of live-oak logs on my hearth.

This was so in the gentle January of one of my sojourns, and in either of the two Marches I have known for the maddest months of the St. Augustine winter. They say that December is commonly mild, as with the resignation of the declining year, and that February is not so very bad, but I search my lexicon in vain for a good word to say of March, though by then the mocking-birds have long been in full chorus and are making believe that all the songsters of the northing spring are lingering with us. I am sorry to say that our noisy, big, vulgar robin was never among these, but in compensation there was now and then audibly a blue-jay, whether in its authentic note, or the mocking-bird’s thin reproduction, and welcomer still was the simulated fluting of the red-bird, sweet as if it came from the Middle-Western woods of my boyhood. With these sylvan voices the hymning of the nuns joined from their school-garden across the way, and the far-floating call of the crows from the upper blue. Their call was never the harsh cawing of our Northern crows, but something more like the colloquies of the English rooks among their “immemorial elms.” As the January and February days follow one another in an almost unbroken succession of sunny days one is apt to see turkey-buzzards that spread their wider wings among the crows. A trio of them, I remember, liked to perch on the cupola of a neighboring house, where they seemed in the early morning to be discussing the business of the coming day, and consulting upon matters of grave importance, but were probably settling some question of recently discovered carrion. I liked best to have them far aloof, and I particular fancy for the way their pinions bent thinly upward at the edge.

If the reader is still, as I hope, in the Plaza with me, I would have him leave our places on the Mid-Western benching, and come and lean over the rail which keeps the dogs and boys from throwing themselves to the alligator in his pool there, where he lies stiller than the stone of his bath. In some moment when the water is coldest he rises to the sun and basks motionless and soundless on the stone curbing, but no one ever saw him unlid those loathly eyes of his, or stir those antediluvian limbs. Ever, do I say? This is wrong. I myself have seen the monster raise himself on his hideous arms and legs and, “being wrought upon in the extreme” by his intolerable prescience of a change in the weather, lift his head and roar—roar as the jungled lion roars, or as the bull that sees his rival cross the meadow where he ranges in challenge to mortal combat. Nothing in nature has more surprised me, and the effect with my fellow home-towners was the same; they came running from, the benches—men, women, and children—and hung upon the alligator’s fence and wondered and worshiped like so many idolaters of some serpent of Old Nile, till his bellow subsided into a hoarse bleat, and then a long sigh that shook the disgusting folds of his throat into silence.

Several times already in this study of the Plaza I have tried to mention the ivied Gothic of the Episcopal church which faces the southwestern corner, and then the galleried upper stories of the line of shops stretching eastward forming a picturesque recall of the St. Augustine which was once so much more all galleries than the ancient city now is. But I could not somehow leave the intersecting paths and the flower-beds beside them, or that gentle little Canovan figure with ankles crossed and wrists on hips which discreetly invites from its pedestal the home-towner unfolding his paper as he advances to place himself with his back to the sun on a favorite bench. Still less could I leave the somewhat plain, not to say severe, obelisk near the fountain which celebrates in stately inscriprional Spanish the promulgation of the constitution of 1812. Which king of the several constitution-giving sovereigns of Spain it was who gave that charter of the national liberties I do not know or much care to know. The charm, the provincial-patriotic charm of the obelisk remains, as it remains with every crumbling ruin of the city which the Spanish colonists builded and as you feel it at many points on the swerving, rather than curving, narrow ways between St. George Street and the bay-front. I here the wooden balconies droop from the drooping wall of time-stained coquina; the doors and windows open flush upon the sidewalks; the little gardens cherish a few onions and heads of lettuce; the dooryard trees support themselves in the friendly angles and ripen, slowly ripen their plums, their peaches, their guavas, their figs, and such other fruits as love a sunny exposure in literature.

These little sympathetic lanes continue to King Street, but seldom cross it. There at the end of the Plaza, where the old Spanish market-house consents to the modern legend of having been a slave-mart, other kind avenues take up the tale and tell it, mostly in the terms of the gentle Charlotte Street, till they bring you almost suddenly upon the great fortress of San Marco set impregnable across your path. There, if it could have spoken, San Marco might well have forbidden the ravage of the flames which have consumed large spaces of the Spanish houses on the bay-front, and left only the crumbling coquina walls and arches and the scorched palmettoes to attest the tragedy of their destruction; but it is not till you pass San Marco that you come upon the means of enforcing such a mandate—not till you come in fact to the city water-works where the splendid up-gush from the deeply subterranean springs diffuses their odor through the air. Many people—perhaps most—do not like this odor, and few if any like the taste of the water, unless they have been inured to the offensive virtues of the ferruginous and sulphurous springs of Germany. It is not healing like these, but physicians say you may safely drink it if you can stand it; and to the right, before you reach the water-works, you may visit the Fountain of Youth which it seems an error to suppose Ponce de Leon did not discover when he came to Florida in 1513, for he left the fountain behind him there with the date in a pattern of stone near the source. In fact he left two Fountains of Youth at St. Augustine, but the one which was to the westward of the actual fountain was closed by the Board of Health as unhygienic. For a reasonable sum, however, you may drink of the remaining spring, and if it does not rejuvenate you it will scarcely disappoint you, unless you have expected the impossible of it, or even the credible. This remaining Fountain of Youth may well be left behind in the realm of fancy, and the atmosphere of fable which so richly invests it, for a return to the great fortress which holds down more history than any other such edifice on our continent. Not even the citadel at Quebec outrivals it for the events which have elapsed in its time, for it has stood invulnerable during the two hundred and fifty years since its foundations were powerfully laid beside the wave that washes its base.

[TO BE CONCLUDED.]