A Trip to Cuba

ically supposed to be the perquisite of travellers. You count over your letters as so many treasures; you regard th

and livery astonish the quiet street in which you lodge, and whose good taste and good manners should, one thinks, prove contagious, at once soothing and shaming the fretful Yankee conceit. But your Cuban letters, like fa

, he offers you a seat, offers you a cigar, and mumbles in an indistinct tone that he will be happy to serve you in any way. You call again and again, keeping yourself before his favorable remembrance,-always the same seat, the same cigar, the same desire to serve you, carefully repressed, and prevented from breaking out into any overt demonstration of good-will. At last, emboldened by the brilliant accounts of former tourists and the successes of your friends, you suggest that you would like to see a plantation,-you only ask for one,-would he give you a letter, etc., etc.? He assumes an abstracted air, wonders if he knows anybod

ral, that the traveller who can find, in any part of the world, an American Consul not disabled from all service by ill-health, want of means, ignorance of foreign languages, or unpleasant relations with the repre

upon his own horse, or in his own volante, pouring oil and wine upon your wounded feelings? Ah! the breed

their carriage, and we step in with a little familiar flounce, intended to show that we are used to such things; finally, they invite us to a friendly

genial and prolonged the talk, how reluctant the separation,-imagine it, ye who sing the songs of home in a strange land. And ye who cannot imagine, forgo the pleasure, for I shall tell you no more about it. I will not, I, give names, to make good-natured people regret the hospitality

ere, the avenues of palm and cocoa are magnificent, and the flowers new to us, and very brilliant. But pruning and weeding out are hard tasks for Creole natures, with only negroes to help them. There is for the most part a great overgrowth and overrunning of the least desirable elements, a general air of slovenliness and unthrift. In all artificial arrangements decay seems imminent, and the want of idea in the laying out of grounds is a striking feature. In Italian villas, the feeling of the Beautiful, which has produced a race of artists, is everywhere manifest,-everywhere are beauti

things enough to rebuke this savage mood of criticism. The palm-trees are unapproachable in beauty,-they stand in rows like Ionic columns, straight, strong, and regular, with their plumed capitals. They talk solemnly of the Pyramids and the Desert, whose legends have been whispered to them by the winds that cross the ocean, freighted with the thoughts of God. Then, these huge white lilies, deep as goblets, from which one drinks fragrance, and never exhausts,-these thousand unknown jewels of the tropics. Here is a large tank, whose waters are covered with the