The services were closed by a plain and sensible discourse in English, from the priest, Mr. Rampon, a worthy and useful French ecclesiastic, on the obligation of temperance; for the temperance reform has penetrated even hither, and cold water is all the rage.  I went again, the other evening, into the same church, and heard a person declaiming, in a language which, at first, I took to be Minorcan, for I could make nothing else of it.  After listening for a few minutes, I found that it was a Frenchman preaching in Spanish, with a French mode of pronunciation which was odd enough.  I asked one of the old Spanish inhabitants how he was edified by this discourse, and he acknowledged that he understood about an eighth part of it.

I have much more to write about this place, but must reserve it for another letter.

Letter XIV.

St. Augustine.

St. Augustine, April 24, 1843

You can not be in St. Augustine a day without hearing some of its inhabitants speak of its agreeable climate.  During the sixteen days of my residence here, the weather has certainly been as delightful as I could imagine.  We have the temperature of early June, as June is known in New York.  The mornings are sometimes a little sultry, but after two or three hours, a fresh breeze comes in from the sea, sweeping through the broad piazzas and breathing in at the windows.  At this season it comes laden with the fragrance of the flowers of the Pride of India, and sometimes of the orange-tree, and sometimes brings the scent of roses, now in full bloom.  The nights are gratefully cool, and I have been told, by a person who has lived here many years, that there are very few nights in the summer when you can sleep without a blanket.

An acquaintance of mine, an invalid, who has tried various climates and has kept up a kind of running fight with Death for many years, retreating from country to country as he pursued, declares to me that the winter climate of St. Augustine is to be preferred to that of any part of Europe, even that of Sicily, and that it is better than the climate of the West Indies.  He finds it genial and equable, at the same time that it is not enfeebling.  The summer heats are prevented from being intense by the sea-breeze, of which I have spoken.  I have looked over the work of Dr. Forry on the climate of the United States, and have been surprised to see the uniformity of climate which he ascribes to Key West.  As appears by the observations he has collected, the seasons at that place glide into each other by the softest gradations, and the heat never, even in midsummer, reaches that extreme which is felt in higher latitudes of the American continent.  The climate of Florida is in fact an insular climate; the Atlantic on the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the west, temper the airs that blow over it, making them cooler in summer and warmer in winter.  I