s on subjects now so interesting to me. These
conversations, and what I had learned from other persons, open to me new
causes for interest and sympathy with my younger host. Born in South
Carolina, he secured his rights of birth, and is a citizen of the United
States, though all his pecuniary interests and family affections are in
Cuba. He went to Paris at the age of nine, and remained there until he
was nineteen, devoting the ten years to thorough courses of study in the
best schools. He has spent much time in Boston, and has been at sea, to
China, India, and the Pacific and California--was wrecked in the Boston
ship "Mary Ellen," on a coral reef in the India seas, taken captive,
restored, and brought back to Boston in another ship, whence he sailed
for California. There he had a long and checkered experience, was
wounded in the battle with the Indians who killed Lieut. Dale and
defeated his party, was engaged in scientific surveys, topographical and
geological, took the fever of the south coast at a remote place, was
reported dead, and came to his mother's door, at the spot where we are
talking this evening, so weak and sunken that his brothers did not know
him, thinking it happiness enough if he could reach his home, to die in
his mother's arms. But home and its cherishings, and revived moral
force, restored him, and now, active and strong again, when in
consequence of the marriage of his brothers and sisters, and the
departure of neighbors, the family leave their home of thirty-five years
for the city, he becomes the acting master, the administrador of the
estate, and makes the old house his bachelor's hall.

An education in Europe or the United States must tend to free the youth
of Cuba from the besetting fault of untravelled plantation-masters. They
are in no danger of thinking their plantations and Cuba the world, or
any great part of it. In such cases, I should think the danger might be
rather the other way--rather that of disgust and discouragement at the
narrowness of the field, the entire want of a career set before them--a
career of any kind, literary, scientific, political, or military. The
choice is between expatriation and contentment in the position of a
secluded cultivator of sugar by slave labor, with occasional
opportunities of intercourse with the world and of foreign travel, with
no other field than the limits of the plantation afford, for the
exercise of the scientific knowledge, so laboriously acqu