“Somebody has said,” went on the man, “that you need to lean over a bathtub to eat an orange this way, but it’s worth while.  You get a little smeared up doing it; but you can wash in the spring over there,” and he pointed to one amid a pile of stones.

Then with his keen knife he cut the orange in a peculiar spiral manner, with the skin left on so that eventually he had a long yellow strip, with the sections of orange clinging to the yellow rind.

“Now, all you’ve got to do is to run your mouth along that strip,” he directed, “and you get all the juice—­that is, all you don’t miss.  It takes a little practice; but I’ve got some black boys that can get every drop.  Watch!”

Rapidly he ate along the extended strip of skin, to which clung the cut sections of orange.  In a moment it was clean.

“It’s an awfully crude way of doing it—­but, as long as we’re in an orange grove, let’s do as the orange ‘grovers’ do,” laughed Alice.

“I’m game!” cried Paul.

“Same here!” put in Russ, and they cut their oranges as the man had done.  The latter then prepared one each for Ruth and Alice, and amid much laughter—­the girls and the young men leaning far over so as not to drip the juice on their clothes—­they finished the delicious fruit.

“Now bring on your bathtub!” cried Russ.

“There’s the spring,” the man said.  “There’s a basin near it, and it’s clean.”

Laughing over the new way of eating oranges, but voting that it was worth while, even if it was a bit “smeary,” the young folks washed their hands and faces, and kept on through the grove, growing more and more glad at every step that they had come to Florida.

“And now for the Fountain of Youth!” cried Paul.

“I don’t feel that I need it, after that delicious orange,” laughed Ruth.

“Indeed, if you get any younger, you’ll go back to kindergarten days,” remarked Paul.

“Thank you.  I don’t want to be quite as young as that.”

The Fountain of Youth, one of the curiosities of St. Augustine, is on Myrtle avenue, two blocks north of the orange grove, and the four laughing young people were soon there.

“Is this really the fountain Ponce de Leon thought would give eternal youth?” asked Ruth, half-seriously, as they stood near the little roofed-over spring.

“That is the legend,” declared Paul.  “Of course that’s not saying it’s so.  But the spring has one peculiar quality.”

“What’s that?” asked Russ.

“The waters rise and fall without any particular cause.  Sometimes they are higher than at others, and none of the other wells, or springs, in this vicinity do that.  So you see it may be miraculous after all.”

“Let’s try it,” suggested Alice, who was always ready for anything new.

“Oh, but perhaps it isn’t good water,” objected Ruth, more cautious.  “We may get typhoid, or something like that.”