CITY SIGHTS. 39?
offices. There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one
can say of it as of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a
broom or a shovel has ever been used in it there is no circumstantial
evidence to back up the fact. It is curious that cabbages and hay
and things do not grow in the Academy of Music; but no doubt it is
on account of the interruption of the light by the benches, and the
impossibility of hoeing the crop except in the aisles. The fact that
the ushers grow their buttonhole-bouquets on the premises shows
what might be done if they had the right Mnd of an agricultural
head to the establishment.
We visited also the venerable Cathedral, and the pretty square in
front of it; the one dim with religious light, the other brilliant with
the worldly sort, and lovely with orange-trees and blossomy shrubs;
then we drove in the hot sun through the wilderness of houses and
out on to the wide dead level beyond, where the villas are, and the
water wheels to drain the town, and the commons populous with
cows and children; passing by an old cemetery where we were told
lie the ashes of an early pirate; but we took him on trust, and did
not visit him. He was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary
history 5 and as long as he preserved unspotted, in retirement, the
dignity of his name *tnd the grandeur of his ancient calling, homage
and reverence were his from high and low; but when at last he
descended into politics and became a paltry alderman, the public
* shook' him, and turned aside and wept. When he died, they set up
a monument over him ; and little by little he has come into respect
again ; but it is respect for the pirate, not the alderman. To-day the
loyal and generous remember only what he was, and charitably forget
what he became.
Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised
shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other ;
and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and
moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, dear cut against the sky, and
as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures—such iras
our course and the surroundings of it. There was an occasional
alligator swimming comfortably along in the canal, and an oocstsiQ&al
picturesque coloured person on the bank, flinging his statue-rigid
reflection upon the still water and watching for a bite.