A
Sailor
has just yawned.It is seven o'clock, of an April morning such as does not come anywhere in the world except at St. Augustine or on the Gulf Coast of Florida,—a morning woven out of some miraculous tissue, which shows two shimmering aspects, the one stillness, the other glory,—a morning which mingles infinite repose with infinite glittering, as if God should smile in his sleep.
On such a morning there is but one thing to do in St. Augustine : it is to lie thus on the sea-wall, with your legs dangling down over the green sea-water, lazaretto-fashion; your arms over your head, caryatid-fashion ; and your eyes gazing straight up into heaven, lover-fashion.
The sailor's yawn is going to be immortal : it is reappearing like the Hindoo god in ten thousand avatars of echoes. The sea-wall is now refashioning it into a seawall yawn ; the green island over across the water there yawns; now the brick pillars of the market-house are yawning; in turn something in the air over beyond the island yawns; now it is this side's time again. Listen ! in the long pier yonder, which runs out into the water as if it were a continuation of the hotel-piazza, every separate pile is giving his own various interpretation of the yawn: it runs down them like a forefinger down piano-keys, even to the farthest one, whose idea of this yawn seems to be that it was a mere whisper.
For the visitors—those of them who make a noise with dancing of nights and with trooping of mornings along the Plaza de la Constitucion—are gone; the brood of
pleasure-boats are all asleep in "the Basin"; practically the town belongs for twenty-three hours of each day to the sixteenth century. The twenty-fourth hour, during which the nineteenth claims its own, is when the little locomotive whistles out at the depot three-quarters of a mile off, the omnibus rolls into town with the mail — there are no passengers—the people gather at the postoffice, and everybody falls to reading the Northern papers.
>>To be continued.
