do not wonder, therefore, that it is so much the resort of invalids; it would be more so if the softness of its atmosphere and the beauty and serenity of its seasons were generally known.  Nor should it be supposed that accommodations for persons in delicate health are wanting; they are in fact becoming better with every year, as the demand for them increases.  Among the acquaintances whom I have made here, I remember many who, having come hither for the benefit of their health, are detained for life by the amenity of the climate.  “It seems to me,” said an intelligent gentleman of this class, the other day, “as if I could not exist out of Florida.  When I go to the north, I feel most sensibly the severe extremes of the weather; the climate of Charleston itself, appears harsh to me.”

Here at St. Augustine we have occasional frosts in the winter, but at Tampa Bay, on the western shore of the peninsula, no further from this place than from New York to Albany, the dew is never congealed on the grass, nor is a snow-flake ever seen floating in the air.  Those who have passed the winter in that place, speak with a kind of rapture of the benignity of the climate.  In that country grow the cocoa and the banana, and other productions of the West Indies.  Persons who have explored Florida to the south of this, during the past winter, speak of having refreshed themselves with melons in January, growing where they had been self-sown, and of having seen the sugar-cane where it had been planted by the Indians, towering uncropped, almost to the height of the forest trees.

I must tell you, however, what was said to me by a person who had passed a considerable time in Florida, and had journeyed, as he told me, in the southern as well as the northern part of the peninsula, “That the climate is mild and agreeable,” said he, “I admit, but the annoyance to which you are exposed from insects, counterbalances all the enjoyment of the climate.  You are bitten by mosquitoes and gallinippers, driven mad by clouds of sand-flies, and stung by scorpions and centipedes.  It is not safe to go to bed in southern Florida without looking between the sheets, to see if there be not a scorpion waiting to be your bed-fellow, nor to put on a garment that has been hanging up in your room, without turning it wrong side out, to see if a scorpion has not found a lodging in it.”  I have not, however, been incommoded at St. Augustine with these “varmint,” as they call them at the south.  Only the sand-flies, a small black midge, I have sometimes found a little importunate, when walking out in a very calm evening.