I have called the streets narrow.  In few places are they wide enough to allow two carriages to pass abreast.  I was told that they were not originally intended for carriages, and that in the time when the town belonged to Spain, many of them were floored with an artificial stone, composed of shells and mortar, which in this climate takes and keeps the hardness of rock, and that no other vehicle than a hand-barrow was allowed to pass over them.  In some places you see remnants of this ancient pavement, but for the most part it has been ground into dust under the wheels of the carts and carriages, introduced by the new inhabitants.  The old houses, built of a kind of stone which is seemingly a pure concretion of small shells, overhang the streets with their wooden balconies, and the gardens between the houses are fenced on the side of the street with high walls of stone.  Peeping over these walls you see branches of the pomegranate and of the orange-tree, now fragrant with flowers, and, rising yet higher, the leaning boughs of the fig, with its broad luxuriant leaves.  Occasionally you pass the ruins of houses—­walls of stone, with arches and staircases of the same material, which once belonged to stately dwellings.  You meet in the streets with men of swarthy complexions and foreign physiognomy, and you hear them speaking to each other in a strange language.  You are told that these are the remains of those who inhabited the country under the Spanish dominion, and that the dialect you have heard is that of the island of Minorca.

“Twelve years ago,” said an acquaintance of mine, “when I first visited St. Augustine, it was a fine old Spanish town.  A large proportion of the houses, which you now see roofed like barns, were then flat-roofed, they were all of shell-rock, and these modern wooden buildings were not yet erected.  That old fort, which they are now repairing, to fit it for receiving a garrison, was a sort of ruin, for the outworks had partly fallen, and it stood unoccupied by the military, a venerable monument of the Spanish dominion.  But the orange-groves were the ornament and wealth of St. Augustine, and their produce maintained the inhabitants in comfort.  Orange-trees, of the size and height of the pear-tree, often rising higher than the roofs of the houses, embowered the town in perpetual verdure.  They stood so close in the groves that they excluded the sun and the atmosphere was at all times aromatic with their leaves and fruit, and in spring the fragrance of the flowers was almost oppressive.”

These groves have now lost their beauty.  A few years since, a severe frost killed the trees to the ground, and when they sprouted again from the roots, a new enemy made its appearance—­an insect of the coccus family, with a kind of shell on its back, which enables it to withstand all the common applications for destroying insects, and the ravages of which are shown by the leaves becoming black and sere, and the twigs perishing.  In October last, a gale drove in the spray from the ocean, stripping the trees, except in sheltered situations, of their leaves, and destroying the upper branches.  The trunks are now putting out new sprouts and new leaves, but there is no hope of fruit for this year at least.