s are needed for work, but because they neglect
their offspring so much that the children have more chance of
living--and therefore of paying--if brought up by hand. So each
estate has, or had, its creche, as the French would call it--a great
nursery, in which the little black things are reared, kindly enough,
by the elder ladies of the estate. To one old lady, who wearied
herself all day long in washing, doctoring, and cramming the babies,
my friend expressed pity for all the trouble she took about her
human brood. 'Oh dear no,' answered she; 'they are a great deal
easier to rear than chickens.' The system, however, is nearly at an
end. Already the Cuban Revolution has produced measures of half-
emancipation; and in seven years' time probably there will not be a
slave in Cuba.

We waded stream after stream under the bamboo clumps, and in one of
them we saw swimming a green rigoise, or whip-snake, which must have
been nearly ten feet long. It swam with its head and the first two
feet of its body curved aloft like a swan, while the rest of the
body lay along the surface of the water in many curves--a most
graceful object as it glided away into dark shadow along an oily
pool. At last we reached an outlying camp, belonging to one of our
party who was superintending the making of new roads in that
quarter, and there rested our weary limbs, some in hammock, some on
the tables, some, again, on the clay floor. Here I saw, as I saw
every ten minutes, something new--that quaint vegetable plaything
described by Humboldt and others; namely, the spathe of the Timit
palm. It encloses, as in most palms, a branched spadix covered with
innumerable round buds, most like a head of millet, two feet and a
half long: but the spathe, instead of splitting and forming a hood
over the flowers, as in the Cocorite and most palms, remains entire,
and slips off like the finger of a glove. When slipped off, it is
found to be made of two transverse layers of fibre--a bit of
veritable natural lace, similar to, though far less delicate than,
the famous lace-bark of the Lagetta-tree, peculiar, I believe, to
one district in the Jamaica mountains. And as it is elastic and
easily stretched, what hinders the brown child from pulling it out
till it makes an admirable fool's cap, some two feet high, and
exactly the colour of his own skin, and dancing about therein, the
fat oily little Cupidon, without a particle