jeer him as he passes, but he is unmoved, and the expression of
his copper-coloured countenance is ever grave and unchangeable. His
eyes--or more correctly speaking, his spectacles--never wander from the
mystic page, save when he trims his taper of brown wax, or exchanges it
for another and a longer. One cannot help remarking how on all
occasions the 'oppressed' negro preserves his natural gravity. Whether
it be his pleasure or his pain, he takes it stoically, without any
observable alteration in his sombre physiognomy.

How do you reconcile the singular anomaly of a nigger with his face
painted black? Here is one, whose face and bare arms are besmeared with
soot and ink. His thick lips start out in bright scarlet relief, his
eyebrows are painted white, and his spare garments (quite filthy enough
before) are bedaubed with tar and treacle. This piece of grimy humanity
is worthy of note as showing that the despised nigger is really not so
black as he is painted; if the truth were known, perhaps, the man
himself has adopted this disguise with a view to prove to the meditative
world that there may yet be another, and a blacker, population!

It is not wise to be too contemplative, and to stay at home, on a
carnival day in Cuba. All the world recognises you in the character of a
moralising recluse, and all the carnival world will surely make you its
victim. As I sit, despising these frivolities, as I call them, a great
'comparsa' of whites--the genuine article--comes rushing along in my
direction. Out of the carnival season, the dramatis personae of this
comparsa are respectable members of society, in white drill suits and
Spanish leather boots. To-day they are disreputable-looking and
unrecognisable. Their faces are painted black, red, and mulatto-colour.
Their disguise is of the simplest, and withal most conspicuous nature,
consisting of a man's hat and a woman's chemise--low-necked,
short-sleeved, and reaching to the ground. They dance, they sing, and
jingle rattles and other toys, and are followed by a band of music of
the legitimate kind. In it are violins, a double-bass, a clarionet, a
French horn, a bassoon, a brace of tambours, and the indispensable
nutmeg-grater, performed upon with a piece of wire exactly as the actual
grater is by the nutmeg. The musicians, who are all respectably dressed
blacks, hired for the occasion, play the everlasting 'Danza Cubana.'
This is Cuba's national dance, impossible to be described a