a useless invention. When well smashed and trodden, it is packed
in boxes, and starts forth on its journeys; a very large proportion goes
to Spain. The two least pure portions are sent to Europe, to be there
refined. Such is a rough sketch of the sugar-making process, as I saw
it. All the machinery was English, and the proprietor had a corps of
English engineers, three in number, to superintend the work. In our
roadless trips to various parts of the plantation, we found the
advantage of the Volante, before described; and though three horses
were harnessed, they had in many places enough to do. We stayed a couple
of days with our kind and hospitable friends, and then returned to
Havana.

No pen can convey the least idea of the wonderful luxuriance of
vegetation which charms the eye at every step. There is a richness of
colour and a fatness of substance in the foliage of every tree and shrub
which I never met with before in any of my travels. The stately palm,
with its smooth white stem glittering in the sunbeams like a column of
burnished silver; the waving bamboo growing in little clumps, and
nodding in the gentle breeze with all the graceful appearance of a
gigantic ostrich plume; groves of the mango, with its deep and dark
foliage defying the sun's rays; the guava, growing at its feet, like an
infant of the same family; the mammee--or _abricot de St.
Domingue_--with its rich green fruit hanging in clusters, and a foliage
rivalling the mango; the dark and feathery tamarind; the light and
graceful indigo; the slow-growing arrowroot, with its palmy and feathery
leaves spreading like a tender rampart round its precious fruit;
boundless fields of the rich sugar-cane; acres of the luscious pine
apple; groves of banana and plantain; forests of cedar and mahogany;
flowers of every hue and shade; the very jungle netted over with the
creeping convolvulus,--these, and a thousand others, of which
fortunately for the reader I know not the names, are continually
bursting on the scene with equal profusion and variety, bearing lovely
testimony to the richness of the soil and the mildness of the climate.

Alas! that this fair isle should be at one and the same time the richest
gem in the crown of Spain, and the foulest blot on her escutcheon. Her
treaties are violated with worse than Punic faith, and here horrors have
been enacted which would make the blood of a Nero curdle in his veins.
Do you ask, how are treaties violated? When sl