ntleman orders his mayoral to let the culprit off. Smarting salt and
aguardiente are then rubbed in for healing purposes, and the wretched
girl is conducted to a dark chamber, where her baby, five months old, is
shortly afterwards brought her for solace and aliment. I venture to
inquire the nature of her crime, and am assured that it is ungovernable
temper and general insubordination of more than a month's standing.

Our horses are halting on one of the four secaderos, or
'barbacues'--smooth platforms on which the ripe coffee-berry is laid and
raked out to be blackened and baked by the sun. Near the secaderos is a
circle of ground, hedged in like a bull-ring and containing a horizontal
fluted roller, turned by a crank. This roller, or pulping-mill, is made
to gyrate by a mule, crushing in its perpetual journey the already baked
coffee-berry, until the crisp husk peels off and exposes a couple of
whity-brown, hard, oval seeds, upon which are inscribed two straight
furrows. There are winnowing-machines, for separating the chaff from the
already milled grain. In that outhouse a group of dark divinities are
engaged in the difficult process of sieving and sorting. See with what
exceeding dexterity Alicia, Ernestina, and Constancia--the black workers
have the whitest of Christian names--handle their big sieves. Alicia,
cigar in mouth, takes an armful of the winnowed seed from the sack at
her side, and transfers it to her sieve, which she shakes until the dust
and remaining particles of husk fall like floating feathers to the
ground. Then, by an expert turn of the wrist, she separates the smaller
and better quality of seed from the larger and coarser; and by another
remarkable sleight of hand, tilts the former into its corresponding heap
on the ground, and pours the latter into a sack. Constancia is scarcely
as expert as Alicia though. The sieve's perforations are wide enough to
admit the small seed of the 'caracol,' and she separates the two
qualities by the ordinary process of sieving the small and retaining the
great.

Well seated on his chesnut charger, Don Severiano conducts us by a
circuitous path up an exceedingly steep hill. The trees are tall and
ponderous; the leaves are, for the most part, gigantic and easy to
count; the fruits are of the biggest; the mountain tops are
inaccessible; and the rivers contain fish for Titans. Surely giants must
have peopled Cuba, long before Columbus found out the colony! Don
Severiano