no other floor than the hard red
soil. The house would be furnished in the scantiest way, a rude wooden
table, a few chairs, and perhaps a rough bench or two. Often there would
be no beds other than hammocks, no stoves, and sometimes not even a
fireplace of any description. The meals, such as they were, would be
cooked in the open front of the shack over a fire usually built on the
ground. Occasionally the enclosed room which formed the rear of the
shack would have an uneven board floor, but there were never any carpets
or rugs, or even a matting of any sort. Of course there was no paint or
varnish, and very little color about the place save the brown of the dry
thatch on the roof and the brick-red grime from the soil which colored,
or discolored, everything it came in contact with like a pigment. This
red stain was astonishingly in evidence everywhere. It was to be seen
upon the poles which supported the hut, on all of the furniture, upon
the clothing of the inmates, and even upon their persons. It looked like
red paint, and evidently was about as hard to get off. The huge wheels
of the bullock carts seemed to be painted with it, and the mahogany and
cedar logs hauled out of the forest took on the color. In a walking trip
to the city of Puerto Principe I passed through a region about twenty
miles from La Gloria where nearly all the trees along the road were
colored as evenly for about two feet from the ground as if their trunks
had been carefully painted red. My companions and I pondered over this
matter for some time and finally arrived at the opinion that wild hogs,
or possibly a large drove of domesticated swine, had rolled in the red
dust of the highway and then rubbed up against the neighboring trees.
They were colored to about the height of a hog's back. This seemed to be
the only reasonable explanation, and is undoubtedly the true one. This
region was close to the Cubitas mountains, where the Cuban insurgents
long had their capital and kept their cattle to supply the army in the
field; it may be that they had also large droves of hogs which roamed
through the near-by country.

The Cuban homes as I found them in the rural districts around La Gloria
were not ornamented with books and pictures. Sometimes, to be sure,
there would be a few lithographs tacked up, and I had reason to believe
that the houses were not wholly destitute of books, but they were never
in evidence. The things that were always in evidence were