94 WILD SPORTS IN THE SOUTH. 



warmed with his theme, spoke in the following most romantic and 

 poetical style : — 



" Three times, since the Spaniard came to this country, has a 

 century rolled over the Floridas, each time burying a generation 

 of oaks, that mature and fall once in a hundred years, each time 

 obliterating three generations of man — more transient than the 

 trees of the hummocks. 



"Now, the land is a common everyday reality. The planter 

 eats his corn-bread in his cabin ; the negro toils at his daily task ; 

 the Indian hunts in the pine-land, at peace with the settler ; and 

 if there is anything of the romance of life in the land, it is to be 

 found in the tropical vegetation, and the life of the everglade, and 

 not in the noble daring of man. 



" Then, in the Floridas, there was romance in thought and 

 action — romance in history and in fiction, in dress, in races, and 

 the love of man and woman, and all the world was tame when 

 compared with this El Dorado. Here was the warrior's field ; here 

 the adventurer's goal, and hither came the poet to sing of Eden. 

 Here landed the courtly cavaliers of the most chivalrous nation of 

 the earth. In an age of discovery, when all the world was intoxi- 

 cated by those vistas of wealth and novelty that the Genoese 

 opened to the ardent, no one Arcadian land loomed from the 

 waters of the Occident, so clad in purple, so vocal with music, so 

 voluptuous with beauty, as this so-called " Island of Florida." 



 Its discovery was wrought by, and illustrates the romance of 

 the age. Ponce de Leon was a hidalgo of Spain — noble, accom- 

 plished, and renowned. With grey hairs had come honours and 

 high command in the Indian Islands, when the tales of his 

 mistress, a Carib girl, told him of a spring whose waters would 

 bring back the fire of youth, and renew his wasted years. This 

 fountain was situated on the coast of the great Mexican Gulf, 

 where the oak, when dropping into the sea, is transformed into 

 coral groves, its pendent moss waves beneath the waters changed 

 into sea-fans, while, mirrored in the sea, the scarlet flamingoes 

 reflect the colours of Paradise. 



"The old knight sailed with his cavaliers in search of this 

 fountain, and landed among the mangroves of the western coast, 



