ritas, in low-necked muslin dresses, with a wealth of genuine hair,
and with their inevitable fans, form a pleasing frame of fair humanity
around the picture of dark coats and white drill trousers in the pit.
Their hands are gloveless, and their diminutive fingers are loaded with
rings of great value: for Cuban ladies are fond of jewellery, and make a
great display of it upon all public occasions. Some of the senoras have
brought slave attendants, who crouch in waiting on the ground behind
them. Tunicu points me out the doctor's box, and when that eminent
gentleman appears late in the evening, I recognise him as the man who
saved me from the yellow fever. The doctor, I learn, is strong on that
disorder, but weak on the subject of earthquake, against which, no West
Indian physician has succeeded in finding a remedy. His box is nearest
the principal entrance door, for he is nervous about earthquake, and is
ever on the alert when he visits a theatre. Tunicu informs me that an
earthquake in a theatre is worse than a fire, and gives me the
interesting particulars of such a catastrophe as it happened in the
doctor's own experience. It was a slight affair, he says, a mere
'temblorcito', as he calls it; one wall was seen to crack from top to
bottom, some plaster from an opposite wall peeled off, a globe from one
of the gas lamps fell among the audience, and that was all; but the
panic was terrible for all that, and many were crushed to death in their
attempt to escape.

The stout gentleman who occupies that big box all to himself in the
centre of the theatre, is his excellency the president. No Spanish
entertainment is complete without its president. The curtain may not
rise till his excellency has taken his seat; the actors may not respond
to a call or an encore if the president is not agreeable, and does not
flutter the big play-bill before him, in token of his acquiescence. The
box to the right is the lawful property of the censor, who, like most
Spanish authorities in Cuba, rarely pays for his pleasure. He is
extremely affable and condescending with everybody before the curtain,
though so stern and unyielding behind the scenes. His daughters,
charming young ladies, are with him, and flirt freely with the numerous
Pollos, who come to pay their homage. That stall in the centre of the
pit is occupied by the editor of the _Diario_, a Cuban daily paper,
whose politics and local information are strongly diluted by censorial
ink,