men, and destined to become more so as we proceeded, a phenomenon equally noticeable in Brazil as the traveler approaches the equator. The reason, of course, is plain, and similar in the two countries. In slavery days neither our most Southern State nor the region of the Amazon were far enough developed to draw many ship-loads of Africans,

twang of our middle West or the slurred "r" of New England are far more often heard on her streets and verandas than the leisurely drawl of what was once the Confederacy. Tasks that would fall only to the lot of the black man in Georgia or the Carolinas are here not beneath the dignity of muscular Caucasian youths. Above all she has a Span

ish tinge that marks her as the first connecting-link with the vast Iberian civilization beyond. The massive fortress fronting the sea, the main square that still clings to its ancient name of "Plaza de la Constitución," carry the thoughts as quickly back to the days of bucaneers and the dark shadows of the Inquisition as those where the Castilian tongue holds supreme sway. Here the very stones of protective walls and narrow back streets are similarly impregnated with the rousing tales of conscienceless governors from old Spain and revolts of the despised criollos against the exactions of the ruling "Goths."

and their more recent exploitation has brought an influx of fortune-seekers, chiefly white in color. The creamy shell roads about "Jax," as the tendency to short cuts and brevity has dubbed Florida's most Northern city, race smoothly away in all directions through endless vistas of straight yellow pines, interspersed with patches of lilac-hued water hyacinths, and strewn with spiderlike undergrowth that quenches its thirst from the humid air. To the casual glance, at least, the sandy soil does not hold great promise, but it is highly productive, for all that. As proof thereof it is sufficient to mention that the saw-mills that furnished lath at a dollar a thousand a few years ago command eight times that in these days of universally bloated prices.

St. Augustine is perhaps more attractive, in her own way, than even Savannah, at least to the mere seeker after residential delights. But she is scarcely a part of the American South, as we of the North picture it. The nasal

But St. Augustine is, of course, genuinely American at heart for all its origin, and even its scattering of negroes are proudly aware of their nationality.

"Look like dat some ovehseas equipment you has dah, sah," said the grinning, ink-complexioned youth who carried my musette to a chamber filled with inviting sea breezes.

"Yes, indeed, George. Why, were you over there, too?"

"Ya-as, sah. Ah sure help run dem orn'ry Germuns home. Dey hyeard a-plenty from d' shells we sent on fo' dem from Bohdeoh."

Occupation, to St. Augustine, seems to be synonymous with the unremitting pursuit of tourists. Her railway gates are the vortex of a seething whirlpool of hotel-runners and the clamoring Jehus of horse and gasolene conveyances. An undisturbed stroll through her streets is

out of the question, for every few yards the pedestrian is sure to hear the gentle rumble of wheels behind him and a sugary, "Carriage, sah? All de sights in town fo' two dollahs, sah, or a nice ride out to And so on for several minutes, until the wheedling voice has run through the gamut of sanguinity, persuasiveness, and shriveled hope, and died away in husky disappointment, only to be replaced a moment later by another driver's honeyed tones.

Ponce de Leon, seeking the fountain of youth, failed to recognize in St. Augustine the object of his quest. Could he return to-day, he would find that at least the immortality of fame has been vouchsafed him, for his name flourishes everywhere, on hotel façades, shop fronts, and cigar-boxes. Perhaps, too, he was near the goal of physical permanence without suspecting it. At least, if assertion be accepted as proof, St. Augustine is without a peer in longevity. "The oldest" is the title of nobility most widely prevalent in all the region. The oldest town, with the oldest house, flanked by the dwelling of the oldest woman, who attends the oldest church, linked to her residence by the oldest street, and visible to possessors of the oldest inducement to human endeavor, leaves the gaping traveler no choice but to accept the assertion of its inhabitants that here is to be found the oldest everything under the sun, or at least "in the United States." Even "old Ponce," dean of the six thousand saurians count them if you dare to doubt that sleep through the centuries out at St. Augustine's "Alligator Farm" confesses, through the mouth of his keeper from upstart Italy, to five hundred unbroken summers, and placidly accepts the honor of being "the oldest animal in captivity."

The trolley that carries "Ponce's" visitors across the wastes of brakish water and worthless land that separate St. Augustine from the open sea is virtually a private car to the rare tourist of October days. This comatose period of the year gives the bather the sense of having leased the whole expanse of the Atlantic as his own bath-tub, for the native Floridans, however widely they may extoll their endless stretch of coast

line, seem to make small use of it themselves.

For hundreds of miles southward the eyes of the traveler weary at the swamp and jungle sameness of the peninsular State. The Gulf Stream and the diligent coral have built extensively, but they have left the job unfinished, in the indifferent tropical way. Grape-fruit farms and orange-groves break forth upon the primeval wilderness here and there, yet only often enough to emphasize its unpeopled immensity. Even Palm Beach has nothing unusual to show him until the holidays of mid-winter bring its vast hostelries back to life. He loses little in fleeing all day onward at Southern-express speed. And, by the way, a warning. If he must hasten at the best the time-table offers, let him carry a two-day lunch-basket with him. I tremble to think what would befall the man who depended exclusively on the fare afforded him on the dining-cars between New York and Key West, even if his pocket-book survived the ordeal.

Miami, however, is well worth a halt, if only for a glimpse of the United States in full tropical setting. There the refugee from winter will find cocoanuts nodding everywhere above him; there he may pick his morning grape-fruit at the door; and he need be no plutocrat to have his table graced with those aristocratic fruits of the tropics, the papaya and the alligator-pear. He cannot but be amused, too, at the casual Southern manners of the street-cars, the motorman-conductors of which make change with one hand and govern their brakes with the other, or who retire to a seat within the car for a chat with a passenger or the retying of a shoelace, while the conveyance careens madly along the outskirt streets.

Thanks perhaps to its sea breezes, Miami seemed no hotter than Richmond, though it was a humid, tropical heat that forced its inhabitants to comproImise with Dame Fashion. As far north as Savannah a few eccentric beings ignored her dictates to the extent of fronting the July weather of October in white suits and straw hats, but they had a self-conscious, hunted manner which proved they were aware of their conspicuousness. In southern Florida,

however, it was rather those who persisted in dressing by the calendar who attracted attention.

Some thirty miles south of Miami the "Dixie Highway," capable and well-kept to the last, disappears for lack of ground to stand on. The soldierly yellow pines give way to scrub jungle, and swamps gain the ascendency over solid earth. Amphibious plants cover the landscape like armies of ungainly crabs or huge spiders. Compact masses of dwarf trees and bristling bushes cluster as tightly together as Italian hill-top villages, as if for mutual protection from the ever-increasing expanses of water. Wherever land wins the constant struggle against the other element, the gray "crabs" of vegetation stretch away in endless vistas on each hand. White herons rise from the everglades at the rumble of the train, and wing their leisurely way into the flat horizon. A constant sea breeze sweeps through the coaches. At rare intervals a little wooden shack or two, sometimes shaded by half a dozen magnificent royal palms, keeps a precarious foothold on the shrinking soil, but it is hard to imagine what means of livelihood man finds in these swampy wastes.

The mainland ends at Jewfish, a cluster of three or four yellow wooden cabins, and for more than a hundred miles the traveler experiences the uncouth sensation of making an ocean voyage by rail. Strangely enough, however, there is more dry land for a considerable distance after the continent has been left behind than during the last twenty miles of the continent. The swamps disappear, and the gray coral rock of the cluster of islands along which the train speeds steadily onward sustains a more generous vegetation than that of the watery wastes behind. Gradually, however, the grayish shallows on each hand turn to the ultramarine blue of the Caribbean, and the score of island stepping-stones along which the railroad skipз grow smaller and more widely. separated, with long miles of sea-washed trestles between them. Within an hour these have become so narrow that they are invisible from the car-windows, and the train seems to be racing along the surface of the sea itself, out-distancing

ocean-liners bound in the same direction. Brazil-like villages of sun-browned shacks surrounded by pulsating cocoanut palms cluster in the center of the larger keys, as the Anglo-Saxon form of the Spanish cayo designates these scattered islands of the Caribbean. The names of the almost-unpeopled stations grow more and more Castilian-"Key Largo," "Islamorada," "Matacumbe," "Bahia Honda," "Boca Chica." In places the water underneath us is shallow enough for wading, and shades away from light brown through several shades of pink to the deepest blue. The building of a railroad by boat must have been a task to try at times the stoutest hearts, and the cost thereof suggests that the undertaking was rather a labor of love than a hope of adequate financial return.

The Cuban tinge of the passengers had steadily increased from Jacksonville southward; now the "white" car showed many a complexion that was suspiciously like those in the coach ahead. As with the Mexican passengers of our Southwest, however, the "Jim Crow" rules are not too rigorously applied to travelers from the lands beyond. Indeed, the "color line" all but fades away during the long run through Florida, partly, perhaps, because of the increasing scarcity of negroes. By the time the traveler has passed Miami, African features become almost conspicuous by their rarity.

Toward the end of the three-hour railway journey by sea, land grows so scarce that platforms are built out upon trestles to sustain the stations. The islands became larger and more closely fitted together, and as the sun was quenching his tropical thirst in the incredibly blue sea to the westward, the long line of a city appeared in the offing, and the railroad confessed its inability to compete longer with its rivals in ocean transportation.

Key West, fifteen hundred miles south of New York, is a quaint mixture of American and Latin-American civilization, with about equal parts of each. Its wooden houses of two or three stories, with wide verandas supported by pillars, lend tropical features to our familiar architecture. The Spanish tongue, increasingly prevalent in the streets from

St. Augustine southward, is heard here fully as often as English. The frank staring that characterizes the Americas below the United States, the placid indifference to convenience typified in the failure of its trolley-cars to come anywhere near the railroad station, the tendency to consider loafing before a fruit-store or a hole-in-the-wall grocery a fitting occupation for grown men, mark it as deeply imbued with the Spanish influence. Small as the island is, the town swarms with automobiles, and the chief ambition of its youths seems to be to drowse all day in the front seat of a car and trust to luck and a few passengers at train- or boat-time to give them a livelihood. Doctors and dentists announcing "special lady attendant" show that the Latin-American insistence on chaperonage holds full sway. The names of candidates for municipal offices, from mayor to "sexton of the cemetery," are nearly all Spanish.

As

in the towns along our Mexican border, the official tongue is bilingual, and Americans from the North are frankly considered foreigners by the Cubanized rank and file of voters. Freight-cars marked "No sirve para azucar" ("Do not use for sugar") fill the railroad yards; the very motormen greet their passengers in Spanish.

The resident of the "Island City" does not look forward with dread to his winter

coal-bill. Not a house in town boasts a chimney. But this advantage is offset by his year-long contest with mosquitos and the absence of fresh water. The railroad brings long trains of the latter in gigantic casks; the majority of the smaller householders depend upon the rains and their eave-troughs for their supply. As in all tropical America, too, the scarcity of vegetables restricts the local diet. Fish, sponges, and and mammoth turtles are the chief native products, with the exception, of course, of an industry that has carried the name of Key West to every village of our land.

Of the two principal cigar factories we visited one was managed by a Cuban and the other by an American. The employees are some seventy per cent. natives of the greatest of the West Indies, and Spanish is the prevailing tongue in the workshops. There, as in the city itself, the "color line" shows no evidence of existence. Each long table presents the whole gamut of gradations in human complexions. Piece work is the all but invariable rule, and the notion of striking for shorter hours would find no adherents. The cigar-maker begins his daily task at the hour he chooses and leaves when he has wearied of the uninspiring toil. This does not mean that the tables are often unoccupied during the daylight hours, for the citizen of Key West, like those in every

other corner of this maltreated and warweary world, finds the ratio between his earnings, whatever his diligence, and the demands made upon them constantly balancing in the wrong direction, despite a long series of forced wage increases within the last year or two. Not only the pianist-fingered men who perform the most obvious operation of cigar

even three years, though it may already have been that long in curing before it reached Key West.

Though women predominate in several of the processes, the actual making is almost entirely in the hands of menand their tongues, I might add, for they do not hesitate to lend the assistance of those to the glue with which the con

sumer's end is bound together. The average workman rolls some two hundred average cigars a day. Men, too, sort the damp and bloated cigars into their respective shades of colors and arrange them in boxes, which are placed under a press. From these they are removed by women and girls, a dozen labels hanging fan-wise from their lower lips, and each cigar banded and returned to the box in the exact order in which they were taken from it. Stamped with the government revenuelabel precisely as one affixes the postage to a letter, the boxes are placed in an aging and drying room-theoretically at least, though the present insistency of demand often sends them on their way to the freight-cars the very day of their completion.

making, that of rolling the weeds together in their final form, but those who separate the leaves into their various grades and colors by spreading them around the cloth-bound edge of a halfbarrel, the women who strip them deftly of their central stem, those who box and label the finished product, all have the fatness of their pay envelop depend on the amount they accomplish.

Cigar-making came to Key West as the most obvious meeting-place of material, maker, and consumer thirtyfive years ago. To-day its factories, from large to small, are almost too numerous for counting. The largest of them are broad, low, modern structures facing the sea and ventilated by its constant breezes. The raw material still comes chiefly from Cuba, but that from our own country, as far away as Connecticut, has its place in even the best establishments. Like wine, tobacco mellows and improves with age, and the better factories keep it two and

The wrapper is of course the most delicate and costly of the materials used, being now commonly grown under cheese-cloth even in sun-drenched Cuba. The by-products from the maker's bench are shipped northward to cigarette factories. Imperfect cigars are culled out before the boxing process and consumed locally, being given out to the "general help" to the extent, in the larger factories, of five or six thousand a month. The workman, however and here we find the present-day tyranny of labor maintained even in this far-flung island of our Southern coast-is paid for every cigar he makes, though he may find himself invited to seek employment