It put me in mind of the question of a Western gentleman
whom I met at St. Augustine. He had come to Florida against his will,
the weather and the doctor having combined against him, and was looking
at everything through very blue spectacles. "Have you seen any of those
fine old country mansions," he asked, "about which we read so often in
descriptions of Southern, life?" He had been on the lookout for them, he
averred, ever since he left home, and had yet to find the first one; and
from his tone it was evident that he thought the Southern idea of a
"fine old mansion" must be different from his.
The Murat house, certainly, was never a palace, except as love may have
made it so. But it was old; people had lived in it, and died in it;
those who once owned it, whose name and memory still clung to it, were
now in narrower houses; and it was easy for the visitor--for one
visitor, at least--to fall into pensive meditation. I strolled about the
grounds; stood between the last year's cotton-rows, while a Carolina
wren poured out his soul from an oleander bush near by; admired the
confidence of a pair of shrikes, who had made a nest in a honeysuckle
vine in the front yard; listened to the sweet music of mocking-birds,
cardinals, and orchard orioles; watched the martins circling above the
trees; thought of the Princess, and smiled at the black children who
thrust their heads out of the windows of her "big house;" and then, with
a sprig of honeysuckle for a keepsake, I started slowly homeward.
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