, took the trouble
to provide the good people there with a sermon on Sundays. They alone
among the Catholic clergy, though they live poorly and have no
endowment, exert themselves to provide a tolerable education for the
middle and upper classes. The Marques undertook that if we called we
should be graciously received, and I was curious and interested. Their
college had been an enormous monastery. Wherever the Spaniards went they
took an army of monks with them of all the orders. The monks contrived
always to house themselves handsomely. While soldiers fought and
settlers planted, the monks' duty was to pray. In process of time it
came to be doubted whether the monks' prayers were worth what they cost,
or whether, in fact, they had ever had much effect of any kind. They
have been suppressed in Spain; they have been clipped short in all the
Spanish dominions, and in Havana there are now left only a handful of
Dominicans, a few nuns, and these Jesuits, who have taken possession of
the largest of the convents, much as a soldier-crab becomes the vigorous
tenant of the shell of some lazy sea-snail. They have a college there
where there are four hundred lads and young men who pay for their
education; some hundreds more are taken out of charity. The Jesuits
conduct the whole, and do it all unaided, on their own resources. And
this is far from all that they do. They keep on a level with the age;
they are men of learning; they are men of science; they are the Royal
Society of Cuba. They have an observatory in the college, and the Father
Vinez of whom I have spoken is in charge of it. Father Vinez was our
particular object. The porter's lodge opened into a courtyard like the
quadrangle of a college at Oxford. From the courtyard we turned into a
narrow staircase, up which we climbed till we reached the roof, on and
under which the Father had his lodgings and his observing machinery. We
entered a small room, plainly furnished with a table and a few
uncushioned chairs; tables and chairs, all save the Father's, littered
with books and papers. Cases stood round the wall, containing
self-registering instruments of the most advanced modern type, each with
its paper barrel unrolling slowly under clockwork, while a pencil noted
upon it the temperature of the air, the atmospheric pressure, the degree
of moisture, the ozone, the electricity. In the middle, surrounded by
his tools and his ticking clocks, sat the Father, middle-aged, lean and