The pretty vessels of the yachting club, with white sails fluttering, are curtseying to their own shadows on its surface. On the other side, about three feet below the sea wall, is a wide, smooth, shell road, where you may enjoy a delightful drive or promenade _au cheval_; here and there are stone steps leading up to the wall, so that you are not obliged to march along its whole length, or leap down at the risk of breaking your neck. Fronting the water on the other side of the road is Bay Street, the principal business thoroughfare of the city, where there are some excellent shops, and queer old houses which take boarders all the year round, for the winter cold, or summer heat, is never excessive in St. Augustine; it is one of the few Floridian resorts which is pleasant at all seasons. The temperature, calculated by a study of the thermometer for the last ten years, is for summer about 80 Fahrenheit; autumn, 70 to 75; winter, 58 to 60--a most delightful temperature, especially as there is generally a soft balmy east wind blowing, though occasionally in the winter time a wild north-easter, in its fiercest mood, sweeps over the Atlantic, and wreaks its vengeance on St. Augustine and the surrounding coast. People are inclined to smash the thermometer which dares to register only sixty when this cruel wind is biting them through!
At the other end of the sea wall, opposite the fort, are the United States Barracks, jutting out at the water side; there is generally a regiment stationed here, when the band plays every day at five o’clock during the season. Although this quaint dreamy old city is but a small place, there is much of interest to be seen here.
There is the “Plaza de la Constitution,” where the good Christians burnt their brethren a century ago; it is a large square, laid out with grass plots, and flower beds, with paths cut through, leading from one side of the Plaza to the other. In the centre stands the curious old market-place, roofed in at the top, but open on all sides; this was the ancient slave mart, where “God’s image, carved in ebony,” was bought and sold in most ungodly fashion; there is the place where they stood, ranged in rows like cattle in a pen, so that their purchasers might walk to and fro examining them from all points to see that they had their money’s worth. They sit there now, these selfsame slaves of the old days, with bright kerchiefs round their heads, surrounded by fruits and flowers, buying and selling on their own account, laughing, chaffing, bargaining with one another with the easy air that freedom gives. Close by is the graceful monument erected by the ladies of St. Augustine to the Confederate dead, whose names are carved upon the shaft. No matter how impoverished the land may have been, how ruined the people, in every Southern city, small or great, they have found money enough to erect a monument,--some most costly, some poetic, and all more or less artistic, to those who--