Doubtless on such phenomena of the Season as these the ashes with which the priest sprinkles the heads of the penitents while he murmurs Memento, homo, quod pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris, falls like the Vesuvian dust upon Pompeiian revels, and they are buried beyond sight and hearing, for a time at least. But we all know that ashes are a fertilizer, and by and by there blossoms above the ruins a later season which is to the earlier one what the spirit is to the body. Everywhere outdoors, then, it is spring: the damp and windy weather has blown away, the sky is as blue as the violets and hyacinths starting untended in the sod that the soft showers have clad in a vivid verdure, and sunbeams are pouring over dome and obelisk and pillared lines of marble till they shine with dazzling lustre through the light screens of greenery. Then come the "kettle-drums," with sunset looking in for company; then the receptions are held in rooms full of sunshine, with open windows letting in the outside fragrance and bird-song and glimpses of charming landscape, or they are turned into fêtes-champêtres in the surrounding gardens; then come the riding-parties to the Falls, where last night's sylph may be to-day's Amazon in the midst of exceedingly grand scenery. Then, too, is the time for the moonlit boating where the Potomac narrows between steep and romantic banks of a sylvan wildness, and where the long oars of the swift rowers bear you as if on wings; for picnics to Rock Creek, a region of rude beauty, where the woods abound in lupines and pink azaleas, and the great white dogwood boughs stretch away into the darkness of the forest like a press of moonbeams, and where at dark your horses ford the stream and climb the hill, and bring you over the Georgetown Heights, past villas half-guessed by starlight among their gardens and fountains, and in by a market picturesque with a hundred torches flaring over the heads of mules and negroes and venders and higglers—piles of game, crisp vegetables and scarlet berries. And with this comes the excursion down river, sheet after sheet of the shining stream opening on woody loveliness remote in azure hazes, to Mount Vernon among its blossoming magnolias and rosy Judas trees, where the great tomb stands open with its sarcophagi, and where Eleanor Custis's harpsichord keeps strange company with the grim key of the Bastile that has never been moved since Washington hung it on the nail—where the quaint old rooms and verandahs and conservatories invite the guests, and the garden with its breast-high hedges of spicy box invites the lovers. Now the few ancestral mansions embower themselves in an aristocratic seclusion of trees and vines that shut them in with their birds and flowers and sunshine, and the Van Ness Place, where Washington came to lay out the city, adorns all its ancient and mossy magnificence with fresh drapery of leaves and flowers. The halls of Congress, too, are still open all day, the drama growing livelier as the adjournment draws nearer; and at evening the drives are thronged with fine equipages winding down the Fourteenth street way, out by the Soldiers' Home, through Harewood, or up by the Anacostia branch and the wild Maryland hill-roads, where wide-stretching pictures are revealed between the forest trees, while sometimes one sees, with its two rivers—one shining like silver, one red and turbid—the city lying far away, much of its outline veiled and the color of its baked brick and stone and marble mellowed in the distance, till through the quivering air and among all its towering trees it looks like a vision of antique temples in the midst of gardens of flowers. And now the numberless squares and triangles and grass-plots of the city are green as Dante's newly-broken emeralds, are a miracle of spotless deutzia and golden laburnum, honeysuckle and jasmine: half the houses are covered with ivies and grapevines; the Smithsonian grounds surround their dark and castellated group of buildings in a wilderness of bloom; and the rose has come—such roses as Sappho and Hafiz sung; deep-red roses that burn in the sun, roses that are almost black, so purple is their crimson, roses that are stainless white, long-stemmed, in generous clusters, making the air about them an intoxication in itself—roses fit to crown Anacreon. Twice a week during all this sweet season the Marine Band has been blowing out its music in the President's Grounds and in the Capitol Park late in the warm afternoon, and every one promenades in gala attire beneath the trees and over the shady slopes till the tunes die with the twilight, and many a long-delaying love-affair culminates as the stars come out and the perfumed wind casts down great shadows from the swinging branches overhead, while indulgent duennas gossip on, oblivious of dew; and at midnight the mocking-birds begin to bubble and warble a wild sweet melody everywhere throughout the dark and listening city. For one brief month, you see, it is politics and power set down in Paradise—let only the envious say as strangely out of place as the serpent there. And finally the festivities of this almost ideal spring season, where the world of Fashion and the world of Nature meet at their best, come to an end with Decoration Day—the last day ere the spring brightens into the blaze of summer—a day that robs death of its terrors, and seems to carry one back to that primeval period when the old death-defying Egyptians made their festivals with flowers, as we stand in that desolation of the dead on the heights of Arlington, and see the billows of graves stretching away to the horizon, wave after wave, crested with the line of white headstones, and every mound heaped with flowers that have been scattered to the tune of singing children's voices, while below the peaceful river floats out broadly; and far across its stream, over all the turfy terraces and above the plumy treetops that hide the arched and columned bases of its snowy splendor, the dome of the country's Capitol rises—a shining guardian of the slumbers of the dead.
A DAY'S SPORT IN EAST FLORIDA
Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed,
He roamed, content alike with man and beast.
Where darkness found him, he lay glad at night:
There the red morning touched him with its light.
On the 18th of February we arrived in the yacht off Mosquito Inlet about sunrise, and as the tide served our pilot took us in over the bar, which happened to be smooth at the time, and we anchored just above the junction of the Halifax and Hillsboro Rivers. Rivers they are called by the Floridians, but are long stretches of salt water lying parallel with the coast, and separated from the sea by a sandy beach of a mile in width, which is covered with a growth of pitch-pine and palmetto scrub. In New York and New Jersey such waters are called bays, and on the coast of Carolina they are sounds. They furnish a convenient boat-navigation for the people, who in consequence do most of their traveling by water.
Here we found lying at anchor a couple of large Eastern schooners: they were waiting for cargoes of live-oak, which was being cut by a large force of men in the employ of the Swifts, a firm that supplies all this timber for the American navy. A lighthouse is much needed here, the entrance being narrow, with only eight or ten feet of water at high tide. The Victoria followed us in, and we had not been long at anchor when a canoe came down the river under sail, and rounding to alongside, a tall young man in white duck jacket and trousers stepped on board, and accosted our pilot: "How are you, Pecetti? So you are taking up my trade?"
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