filled with the aromatic odors of pine or sweet bay; the long gray moss
hung from the live-oak branches; birds and butterflies of wonderful hues
fluttered around them; and strange lizards crossed their paths, or looked
with dull and blinking eyes from the branches. They came, at last, to one
spring which widened into a natural basin, and which was so deliciously
aromatic that Luis Ponce said, on emerging: "It is enough. I have bathed
in the Fountain of Youth, and henceforth I am young." His companions tried
it, and said the same: "The Fountain of Youth is found."

No time must now be lost in proclaiming the great discovery. They
obtained a boat from the natives, who wept at parting with the white
strangers whom they had so loved. In this boat they proposed to reach the
mouth of the St. John, meet Juan Ponce de Leon, and carry back the news to
Spain. But one native, whose wife and children they had cured, and who had
grown angry at their refusal to stay longer, went down to the water's edge
and, sending an arrow from his bow, transfixed Don Luis, so that even his
foretaste of the Fountain could not save him, and he died ere reaching the
mouth of the river. If Don Luis ever reached what he sought, it was in
another world. But those who have ever bathed in Green Cove Spring, near
Magnolia, on the St. John's River, will be ready to testify that, had he
but stayed there longer, he would have found something to recall his
visions of the Fountain of Youth.




NOTES