in these late days of licence, might be
put again in the way of regeneration. The process would be slow--your
seedlings in a plantation hang stationary year after year, but they do
move at last. We cannot disown our responsibility for these poor adopted
brothers of ours. We send missionaries into Africa to convert them to a
better form of religion; why should the attempt seem chimerical to
convert them practically to a higher purpose in our own colonies?

The reader will be weary of a sermon the points of which have been
reiterated so often. I might say that he requires to have the lesson
impressed upon him--that it is for his good that I insist upon it, and
not for my own. But this is the common language of all preachers, and it
is not found to make the hearers more attentive. I will not promise to
say no more upon the subject, for it was forced upon me at every moment
and point of my journey. I am arriving near the end, however, and if he
has followed so far, he will perhaps go on with me to the conclusion. I
had three weeks to give to Havana; they were fast running out, and it
was time for me to be going. Strange stories, too, came from England,
which made me uneasy till I knew how they were set in circulation. One
day Mr. Gladstone was said to have gone mad, and the Queen the next.
The Russians were about to annex Afghanistan. Our troops had been cut to
pieces in Burmah. Something was going wrong with us every day in one
corner of the world or another. I found at last that the telegraphic
intelligence was supplied to the Cuban newspapers from New York, that
the telegraph clerks there were generally Irish, and their facts were
the creation of their wishes. I was to return to Jamaica in the same
vessel which had brought me from it. She had been down to the isthmus,
and was to call at Havana on her way back. The captain's most English
face was a welcome sight to me when he appeared one evening at dinner.
He had come to tell me that he was to sail early on the following
morning, and I arranged to go on board with him the same night. The
Captain-General had not forgotten to instruct the Gobierno Civil to
grant me an _exeat regno_. I do not know that I gained much by his
intercession, for without it I should hardly have been detained
indefinitely, and as it was I had to pay more dollars than I liked to
part with. The necessary documents, however, had been sent through the
British consul, and I was free to leave when I ple