e fallen in with and come to know. They are frank, friendly,
open, and absolutely unaffected, and, like my friend at Miss Roy's in
Jamaica, they take cheerful views of life, which is the highest of all
recommendations. The distinctness and sharpness of utterance is
tolerable and even agreeable in conversation with a single person. When
a large number of them are together, all talking in a high tone, it
tries the nerves and sets the teeth on edge. Nor could I escape from
them in any part of the building. The gentlemen were talking politics in
the hall, or lounging under the colonnade. One of them, an absolute
stranger, who perhaps knew who I was, asked me abruptly for my opinion
of Cardinal Newman. The ladies filled the sitting rooms; their pianos
and their duets pierced the walls of my bedroom, and only ceased an hour
after midnight. At five in the morning the engines began to scream at
the adjoining railway station. The church bells woke at the same hour
with their superfluous summons to matins which no one attended. Sleep
was next to an impossibility under these hard conditions, and I wanted
more and not less of it when I had the duties upon me of sightseeing.
Sleep or no sleep, however, I determined that I would see what I could
as long as I could keep going.

A few hundred yards off was one of the most famous of the Havana cigar
manufactories. A courteous message from the manager, Senor Bances, had
informed me that he would be happy to show me over it on any morning
before the sun was above the roofs of the houses. I found the senor a
handsome elderly gentleman, tall and lean, with Castilian dignity of
manner, free and frank in all his communications, with no reserve,
concealments, or insincerities. I told him that in my experience cigars
were not what they had been, that the last good one which I had smoked I
had bought twenty years ago from a _contrabandista_ at Madrid. I had
come to Havana to see whether I could find another equally good at the
fountain head. He said that he was not at all surprised. It was the same
story as at Jamaica; the consumption of cigars had increased with
extreme rapidity; the area on which the finest tobacco had been grown
was limited, and the expense of growing it was very great. Only a small
quantity of the best cigars was now made for the market. In general the
plants were heavily manured, and the flavour suffered. Leaf of coarse
fibre was used for the core of the cigars, with only a