king as her over-lord. Her interests did not conflict with those of our
people, nor touch them in any way, and she has had little to do with our
national history, and nothing whatever to do with the history of the
west.

In the peninsula of East Florida, in the land of the cypress, palmetto,
and live oak, of open savannas, of sandy pine forests, and impenetrable,
interminable morasses, a European civilization more ancient than any in
the English colonies was mouldering in slow decay. Its capital city was
quaint St. Augustine, the old walled town that was founded by the
Spaniards long years before the keel of the _Half-Moon_ furrowed
the broad Hudson, or the ships of the Puritans sighted the New England
coast. In times past St. Augustine had once and again seen her harbor
filled with the huge, cumbrous hulls, and whitened by the bellying
sails, of the Spanish war vessels, when the fleets of the Catholic king
gathered there, before setting out against the seaboard towns of Georgia
and the Carolinas; and she had to suffer from and repulse the
retaliatory inroads of the English colonists. Once her priests and
soldiers had brought the Indian tribes, far and near, under subjection,
and had dotted the wilderness with fort and church and plantation, the
outposts of her dominion; but that was long ago, and the tide of Spanish
success had turned and begun to ebb many years before the English took
possession of Florida. The Seminoles, fierce and warlike, whose warriors
fought on foot and on horseback, had avenged in countless bloody forays
their fellow-Indian tribes, whose very names had perished under Spanish
rule. The churches and forts had crumbled into nothing; only the cannon
and the brazen bells, half buried in the rotting mould, remained to mark
the place where once stood spire and citadel. The deserted plantations,
the untravelled causeways, no longer marred the face of the tree-clad
land, for even their sites had ceased to be distinguishable; the great