mark upon it of the anger of
the Almighty. Of churches, indeed, there was no lack; churches thick as
public-houses in a Welsh town. Church beyond church, palace beyond
palace, the narrow streets where neighbours on either side might shake
hands out of the upper stories, the deep colonnades, the private houses
with the windows grated towards the street, with glimpses through the
street door into the court and garden within, with its cloisters, its
palm trees, and its fountains; the massiveness of the stonework, the
curious old-fashioned bookstalls, the dirt, the smell, the carriages,
the swearing drivers, the black-robed priest gliding along the
footway--it was Toledo or Valladolid again with the sign manual on it of
Spain herself in friendly and familiar form. Every face that I saw was
Spanish. In Kingston or Port of Spain you meet fifty blacks for one
European; all the manual work is done by them. In Havana the proportion
is reversed, you hardly see a coloured man at all. Boatmen, porters,
cab-drivers or cart-drivers, every one of whom are negroes in our
islands, are there Spaniards, either Cuban born or emigrants from home.
A few black beggars there were--permitted, as objects of charity to
pious Catholics and as a sign of their inferiority of race. Of poverty
among the whites, real poverty that could be felt, I saw no sign at all.

After driving for about a mile we emerged out of the old town into a
large square and thence into a wide Alameda or boulevard with double
avenues of trees, statues, fountains, theatres, clubhouses, and all the
various equipments of modern luxuriousness and so-called civilised life.
Beyond the Alameda was another still larger square, one side of which
was a railway station and terminus. In a colonnade at right angles was
the hotel to which I had been recommended; spacious, handsome, in style
half Parisian half Spanish, like the Fondas in the Puerto del Sol at
Madrid.

Spanish was the language generally spoken; but there were interpreters
and waiters more or less accomplished in other tongues, especially in
English, of which they heard enough, for I found Havana to be the winter
resort of our American cousins, who go, generally, to Cuba, as we go to
the Riviera, to escape the ice and winds of the eastern and middle
States. This particular hotel was a favourite resort, and was full to
overflowing with them. It was large, with an interior quadrangular
garden, into which looked tiers of windo