Monday, March 19th.

ONE by one, our guests have left the hotel. The swarthy Portuguese gentleman whose acquaintance we made on shipboard, and who told us so much of the interiors of Asia and Africa, where he has spent much time. I am meditating the purchase of a camel to take home with me, to ride for health and pleasure. Think of the panic of the unsophisticated people of E—— at seeing a genuine live dromedary, philosophically promenading their streets with the valley on his back populated by your rejoicing and philosophical humble servant. Soon after this departure went the handsome and villainous-looking Russian, whom we suspect to have been a serf, because he told B—— one evening a long story of his feats and difficulties on leaving Russia without a passport. He has travelled all over the world, but in intellect will perpetually live, and irremediably die, a serf. The young, honest-eyed Scotchman, too, who played operas for me all one morning with so much skill and amiability, who has had his throat ventilated by three bullets in three battles, and is travelling—not consequently—for health, is gone to New Orleans. The diamond-labelled widow from Boston, worth an undoubted million, is gone to Matanzas, accompanied by her much-smiling daughter, and the daughter’s blue-nosed governess. The latter should always be seen with the ears, for she talked well. The gentleman with consumption is gone from the adjoining room, so that my nights are no longer made hideous by his sepulchral cough. He goes to the south of France—so expect his wife and daughter—I expect to an ocean grave. Also is departed the dandy from New York, having, like the beast in Daniel’s vision, a mouth speaking great things, but differing from that other biblical beast, the Israelites’ calf, in that the ancient calf was made of ornaments, while this modern one only wears them. The aldermanic Englishman, with ruddy wife, are gone like a comfort from the other end of the table, leaving us to their roast beef and ale. The pretty school-girl and incipient belle from Baltimore, has relieved the parlor atmosphere of the perfumery of her beaux, and the piano of gymnastic or belligerent manipulations extraordinary, but not, alas! unheard of. Indeed, we are left almost alone, for mine hostess declares she is losing money at four dollars per day in gold. Cannot afford it; disinclines any longer to endure the imposition of servants and shopmen—retires to the United States in disgust. Meanwhile the chamber-maid, having taken a fancy to me, opens for my use the large parlor in front of my bedroom, where I receive friends and reign supreme in a room spacious and lofty enough for a church, and retaining all the odor of sanctity left in it by the Bishop.

This evening we are to pack our trunks, to put on travelling attire, to say good-by to our friends, to fee the servants who have served us, and to take a volante for the steamer to Matanzas; but to say we leave here to-night for Matanzas, would be a choice and especial piece of presumption. I will tell you why. Last Saturday evening, we rehearsed all the above-mentioned performance. Our Havanese friends came to say adieus. Mr. P—— so full of regrets and kind speeches. Mr. M—— sitting by the parlor table, so long writing letters of introduction, that we did not ask for, to his friends in Matanzas, and then hurrying down to see that the state-rooms we had secured in the morning were all right, and to introduce us to the captain. Mr. R—— accepted B——’s invitation to take a seat in my volante. These public volantes never hold more than two, and consequently, B—— paid for his amiability by walking. Nothing doubting, we arrived at the steaming steamer; luggage is unfastened in great haste; we quickly alight, when, forsooth, the steamer does not particularly go to-night, not indeed until Monday next. The wind, it is said, took it in its head this morning to blow a suggestion breath for an hour; a prophetic flash of lightning was supposed to have been seen about four o’clock. Every body takes it as a matter of course, and I am obliged to smother my vexation behind an appearance of amiability.

A few more novelties, before going, I must bequeathe to you and to my memory, putting them in the hands of paper and ink for my safe keeping—then we will have done for the present with Havana. Did you ever think of one curious result of being really a city of the sun, viz., it is a city without chimneys. All the box stoves, and air-tight stoves, and best parlor ditto, were cast, if at all, in the foundry of Jupiter; all the steam and hot-air furnaces, instead of being interred in the cellars, are placed in the topmost garret of all garrets; the great vanity of inventions and ornaments in the shape of fireplaces, grates with their artistic devices, their pretty screens and shades, and the glowing faces and toasting feet before them. All these are snugly built in an architectural niche not made with hands, while their fires are kindled and formed not by the lungs of bellowses, but by the early-rising wings of enterprising angels. Ever since making this discovery I feel quite philosophically inclined to regard the fact that every man, or at any rate every man and a half you meet, carries his household fire about with him, using a cigar for fuel, and his devoted nose for a chimney.

Last night, while passing some highly respectable shops, we saw a pail of water standing in the door of each. B—— said, “Can you guess what those are for?” Of course I could not. He replied, “The law commands them to be provided in every house at certain seasons, so that all dogs may drink when they wish, and thus diminish the danger of hydrophobia.”

It is not less curious that horses’ tails are braided by law, a fine following each omission. For aught I know, the law dictates the member of strands in the braid; that it must be done by a governmental barber, greased as if it were human, and always tied, as it is, to the left side of the saddle. This hen-hussy government also directs at what precise age children must cease to be models for statues and become the victims of tailors and dress-makers.

I wonder nobody seems to have observed how remarkably tall the larger number of these negroes are. The women particularly are not only tall and erect, but magnificent in outline, having an eye to which their dresses are exceedingly low in the neck and short in the sleeves. They are absolutely statuesque. The Spanish and Creole ladies look dumpish, I might say dwarfish, beside them.

But the drawback upon all goings forward, the voluminous reiteration of feminine folking, must be performed; and we must again test the frailty of tropical locomotive veracity and steamboat protestations.

Tuesday, 20th.—We simply didn’t go last night because the steamer didn’t; reason not yet transpired. I am becoming so used to these failures of plans and probabilities, that I think nothing would disappoint me now, but a want of disappointment. However, I was not sorry that this last detention gave me an opportunity to witness a very interesting spectacle. A torchlight procession of priests and friars and mourners and friends, to say mass over a dying person. We were first drawn to the balcony by the incessant singing of a peculiarly toned bell, and then we saw them slowly and solemnly marching far below us, down the dark and narrow street, heralded by the strange bell in the hands of one of the novices, and going with devout faith in its absolute efficacy to shrive a human soul—its last earthly help in its last earthly extremity. The effect was much like that of the Misericordia in the cities of Italy, except that you miss here the quaintness and impressiveness of the black or white dominos. I did not care for the superstition; I only felt a profound awe, a solemn sense of mystery and fitness; I only marvelled that people can ever scorn or ridicule any faith that is sincere in heart.

At half-past ten we retired, just as the watchman was commencing his round of duty. Few things are more novel to us than this. The curious whistle is a kind of prelude to the monotonous tone with which he, every half-hour, slowly pacing up and down, lantern and spear in hand, announces the hour of the night and the state of the weather. He keeps a sharp lookout on the weather as well as other vagrants, and clearly feels a responsibility in the matter. I have learned all the words he uses to tell us that the moon is shining, or clouds are obscuring it; if it is cold enough to encourage an extra blanket, or if a norther or sÉrocco is getting the upper hand of things; which hour is giving up the ghost, or which is like a soul “rolling from out the vast.” But I can never comprehend what he says, the words are so drawled and twisted to suit the tune, which my English ears understand to be musical and not unsuited to a lullaby, and at the same time so many other watchmen in neighboring streets are mingling their echoes and refrains.

Guiness, Wednesday, March 21st.—At last! With the earliest dawning of the dawn we found ourselves actually leaving Havana, and that not by the boat, which it had become our turn to disappoint. How tired the watchmen looked as we passed them! lantern lights burnt out, long ancient looking spears carried listlessly by their sides, the guardianship of the weather left in the hands of the coming Apollo. The busy markets are already open; shopmen unfastening shutters; life beginning to awake and throb through the great body of Havana. Its soul, whether great or small, is scarcely yet awakened into any circulation through the channels of art or literature. The bells are ringing, drums beating, and guns firing, for it is five o’clock. The day is up betimes. The morning and evening here are the first day, and every day. Noon is but a shorter panting, gilded, interluding night, when all sleep who can, and all long for sleep who cannot. But the carriage stops in the midst of an articulating human mass. How it hurries and bustles! how many faces it has, and every one a different variety of brown or a new invention in the shades of black.

Presently the gentlemen come with tickets, separate ones for baggage and passage, and obtained with much difficulty and circumlocution, as the rule is that baggage must be sent the night before—which ours was not. No sooner are we settled in the cool cane seats than—will you believe it?—a whistle, the modern screech of a steam-whistle, is heard, and we start precisely punctual to the minute. Therefore, I assert, and will maintain that it is conceivable, it is not contrary to all the laws of nature, it is possible for a promise to be kept this side the Tropic of Cancer. But how am I to become reconciled to all this comfort and speed, this steam-engine, this trail insinuating itself so complacently through these celestial plains, snorting and blowing and smoking through these orange-groves, past these waving royal palms, in the midst of sights and sounds such as lulled Eve into slumber upon the bridal night of her birth! O insatiate Yankeedom! with all the lurid sins you have to answer for, will not this alone secure you a life lease in Purgatory? But I have no time for unpatriotic indignation. Fields of belligerent looking pineapples; orchards of bananas twenty feet high, with immense leaves all torn into rags by the wind; groves of cocoa-nuts that look like sentimental palms in delicate health, with the green clustered fruit hanging round their necks like an affectionate necklace; cacti, the prickly pear growing fifteen feet high, and fences of the kinds I have cultivated in pots with so much care; vegetables, familiar and unfamiliar, for the Havana market; everywhere trees of gayest plumage, the blossoms so large and brilliant, that you grow incredulous and wonder if your eyes are not become telescopic. As you approach the interior, immense corn-fields greet you with their sweetened breath, looking like corn-fields of the Southern States grown delicate and pale from close confinement, a thickened growth that excludes the air.

At nine o’clock the train stops at a village named Bejucal. But for some reason it does not start again. B—— inquires to find we are to remain three hours—some failure in the engine. So we do what nobody else does, walk half a mile under our umbrellas to examine the town and get a breakfast. See if you do not think this a droll sight for American eyes. A village containing over a thousand inhabitants, every house in it, except the church, of one high story, roofed with large red earthen tiles, built of stone covered with clay or plaster, and painted in all possible colors that are bright. Not a pane of glass visible, all the immense windows being only grated and then filled with idle, staring women and naked children. Every house opens directly upon the sidewalk; and in the whole extent of streets, gardens, and courtyards, here in this land of miraculous vegetation, not a tree to be seen. But I have no eyes or curiosity left. I am one huge unreconciled appetite.

We stop at a house with larger rooms, larger windows, and larger basements than the rest; where rows of breakfast-tables, each with a caster in the centre and a tall black wine-bottle on either side, promise a drop, possibly a mouthful, of comfort to the perishing inner woman. But the tablecloths! Even my great hunger hasn’t stomach for them all, overlaid and underlaid as they are

Not so I. Consequently a private room is ordered with a breakfast in it, and while preparing to fill up the vaccuum, not of the within, we sally out for a reconnoitre. Just at the back door, we stumble upon—you do not guess?—a veritable theatre,—boxes, galleries, pit, stage with decorations for scenes, painted curtains, trap-door opening upon the prompter’s den, and niches properly placed for footlights. But the boxes are only stalls with rough board partitions, the seats are wooden benches, the galleries are an upper loft still retaining remnants of former hay, the floor is of mother earth unmodified by pavement or broom, and in fact we have every evidence that this temple is devoted to horses and oxen by day, and to the muse of the histrionic art by night. But this aching void which nature has the good sense to abhor! “Will breakfast never be ready? It is eleven o’clock! I wish I hadn’t seen the tablecloths.” Ah, here comes an agile quadroon announcing it in Spanish, which does not get itself translated. We go to a little bedroom from which a cot has been hastily ejected, and sit down to a table loaded with fresh fruits of great variety and abundance, in addition to the usual bountiful breakfast of the country, and, best of all, clean linen under them. You are right: we revel, we luxuriate, and to this hour I sit and think of that breakfast with a gastronomic satisfaction none the less because we paid five dollars for it. We are now ready for any adventure at the disposal of the remaining hour, and set out for the ruins of an old castle said to have been built by the Marquis de San Phillippi and honored by the presence of King Ferdinand VII. at a ball, while he was incognito in this country. Now the walls are crumbling to dust; one or two window-shutters flap disconsolately in the wind, parasitic plants grow over the mouldering arches where a dead past sleeps its sleeps and dreams its dreams.

The church, Moorish in architecture, is just across the Plaza, and invites, but the sun threatens, and we decide for a tempting grove near the railway station.

As we walk over the very clean pavement, stared at by wondering groups of villagers, a woman rushes up to us breathlessly explaining that she knows where the English person who lives here is to be found, and will be very willing to show us the way.

Mr. S—— thanks her, with the assurance that we are only waiting for the train; and we soon find ourselves reclining beatifically under deliciously breathing trees, whose shadows are thick as night with darkness.

I must not forget to mention a primitive kind of well we saw when again en route. It was like an ordinary well: an old white horse walking away from it when the bucket was full and backing to it after it was emptied into the cask on the cart, and must go down for more.

We came also for the first time upon a peculiar species of palm, distinguishable from the royal palm only by an enormous swelling half way up the trunk. I pronounced them dropsical. B—— was more brilliant, declaring they resembled a snake, that had fallen into the misfortune of swallowing a toad,—an idea which Mr. S—— developed in a drawing which I copied and am saving to show you. Very many of these singular trees grow crookedly—vegetable leaning towers suggesting the idea that a variation from the perpendicular may be peculiarly incident to trees as well as tropical towers and morality.

It is an interesting fact that instead of undressing with the indelicate precipitancy of our trees at home, the palm-tree drops only one leaf every lunar month,—a replenishing of its wardrobe which is dignified as well as rhythmical.

On the subject of palms I find authors in Cuba again inaccurate. It is asserted that they are of no use, when it is true that of all the several hundreds of varieties found on the island every one is useful. A gentleman who has lived here in the country many years says, “They are the most useful tree we have.” They give food to animals, thatches to roofs, brooms to housemaids, cords to tobacconists, hats to men, besides being used for numerous other purposes.

The young palm often reminds one of an overgrown aquatic weed; very many resemble a gigantic pencil-case, the trunk quite straight and equal until you approach the top, where it suddenly diminishes, looking loose as if it would shove up and down like the pencil point.

Arrived at Guiness, the volante does not come as we expected from the plantation where we are invited to spend a week or more. We go—not to a fonda, for they are usually only miserably dirty inns, but to a private boarding-house, with which Mr. S—— is already acquainted. Here we find what we have so much desired—a characteristic Cuban house with characteristic Creole customs, although our landlord is a fat, good-natured Frenchman, and his wife a tall, stately, imposing negress. Her history is a little interesting. A sister of hers had a daughter, whose father was a wealthy Spaniard, and who sent her to Paris to be educated. Soon after she died, leaving this aunt $10,000, with which she purchased her freedom, and, I conjecture, the French husband.

As we enter the door, large enough for a camel, she greeted us with a hospitable smile and graceful bow, at the same time motioning us to sit in the row of rocking-chairs standing accurately in front of the huge window. I am told that unlike ordinary parallel lines these have been known to absolutely meet. If I do not mistake, the occasion is apt to be when an appreciative seÑor finds a pretty Creole for a vis-À-vis.

The house is a fac-simile of nearly all these houses. Massive stone, directly upon the street. It is of one high story; tiles keep out the heat; the pointed roof and bare rafters inside giving a bare-like effect, which the brick-paved floor tries to counteract, and the enormous doorways to maintain.

A curtain with curious embroidery at the bottom conceals this door which separates this sala from my chamber. There I find plenty of finest linen and the clean odor which should always sanctify bedrooms. Canvas stretchers across the cot-like bedsteads make a delightfully cool and clean mattress. Carefully embroidered pillow-cases endeavor to excite our admiration, and brightly colored pictures of saints and martyrs on the wall, our devotion.

At three comes a Spanish jumble of sounds which mean, “Dinner is ready.” We walk out on a back piazza, overlooking the pretty courtyard with its shrubs and flowers, while we are sheltered from the sun by thickly-growing and blossoming vines.

Our chairs are a curious kind of wooden frame covered with some sort of hairy skin stretched tightly across the back and bottom; our floor is of clean cement; our soup is colored a bright yellow with saffron; our fish is fresh and white from the Carribean Sea; our rice is pearls set in sweet oil; our green peas have lost their identity by the same process; our water—unlike the quality of mercy—is strained, and through a filter; while our beef, like all the beef we have found in Cuba, is suspiciously dark and tough. Yet we have faith, remembering that the colored bipeds are much higher in the market than the quadrupeds. In addition to all this, our table is loaded with nondescript dishes of Creole names and ingenuity, and all are ranged in one stiff row down the middle of the table. Opposite me sits a Creole gentleman who has not only belonged to the army (it has been asserted that Creoles are not permitted to enter the army in any capacity), but has been an officer in Spain. We strike up a conversation in French, and imagine my admiration for the flexibility of his politeness, when he inquires how long I lived in Paris. Between dessert and coffee he leaves the table to smoke, apologizing to Mr. S—— by saying he is so much of a Spaniard that he must smoke before taking coffee, and he does not like to do it at the table in the presence of an American lady.

I confess it made me feel a little peculiar to see our French landlord sitting complacently at the head of the table with his bona-fide negro wife standing as complacently behind his chair to serve us.

After dinner I am attracted to the water-filter standing in one corner. It is a large moss-covered porous stone, with a cavity in the top where the water and charcoal are placed; the water creeping through the stone drop by drop, into the vessel below. I wish I could remember the name of the island where it is found, and, indeed, of which it is the foundation.