It Was A Bright Moonlight Evening,
And We Rambled Two Or Three Hours About The Town And The Island.
The hull
of a dismasted vessel lay close by our landing-place; it had no name on
bow or stern, and had just been found abandoned at sea, and brought in by
the wreckers; its cargo, consisting of logwood, had been taken out and lay
in piles on the wharf.
This town has principally grown up since the
Florida war. The habitations have a comfortable appearance; some of them
are quite neat, but the sterility of the place is attested by the want of
gardens. In some of the inclosures before the houses, however, there were
tropical shrubs in flower, and here the cocoanut-tree was growing, and
other trees of the palm kind, which rustled with a sharp dry sound in the
fresh wind from the sea. They were the first palms I had seen growing in
the open air, and they gave a tropical aspect to the place.
We fell in with a man who had lived thirteen years at Key West. He told us
that its three thousand inhabitants had four places of worship - an
Episcopal, a Catholic, a Methodist, and a Baptist church; and the
drinking-houses which we saw open, with such an elaborate display of
bottles and decanters, were not resorted to by the people of the place,
but were the haunt of English and American sailors, whom the disasters, or
the regular voyages of their vessels had brought hither.
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