Sunday, but he did not mind risking a dollar on the game.

Came in sight late that night, or, rather early the next morning, the fair island of Cuba. I dressed myself and went out. It was a magnificent moonlight night and the sea was smooth as glass. There was a soft tropical haze in the atmosphere, and as, on our approach, the mountains of the interior assumed form, and the green hills, and white beach, and coral reefs -almost buried in foliage--the waving palms of the hill-tops and the orange groves nestling in quiet valleys were more plainly distinguished, the view presented was ravishing in the extreme. Arrived off Habana an hour before daylight, we came to a stop and lay too under the guns of the Moro Castle, where we were obliged to wait until sunrise before entering the harbor, such being the rule. Then, just as the sun lifted its warm tints above the horizon, scattering the sky-painted imagery that forecast the dawn, we turned round the dark bluff, under the frowning battlements of the fortress, gun answering gun in courteous salute, while far over the sea swept the morning music from the fort, like blasts of the archangel sounding the opening of a new world. As we slowly steamed up the channel, on the right of which lay the city, with its terraced houses of many colors, blue, yellow, and red, its quaint cathedral piles and glittering spires, our course was arrested by pompous health and customs officers, who, after performing their duties to their dignified satisfaction, allowed us to proceed. We soon came to anchor before the city, and the passengers were permitted to land.

Pygmalion's statue was no more lost in wonderment than was I. To my inexperienced gaze all was as marvelous as if I had been lifted from another world and put down upon this spot. There was the voluptuous morning sun rolling in an aerial sea of crimson flanked by silver-burnished clouds; the wanton air playing with the feathered palms, and breathing

the perfumed incense of orange groves; and here a wonderful city glittering beside a glassy sea, a city famous for its cigars, its fountains, its magnificent opera house and mosaic mirrored counting house, its narrow streets and broad shaded carriage-way and Isabel Segunde promenade, its grand plaza, cafés and brilliant gas lights, its moonlight music, and gay military officers, and dark-eyed señoritas, and its twowheeled volantes-the hansom cab of London and the gondola of Venice-drawn by a small, scrawny horse, harnessed to the ends of two long poles ten feet and over from the vehicle. The tail of the animal is braided so as to leave it at the mercy of tormenting flies, and besides drawing the gig with its freight of fat Cubans or fair señoritas, the poor beast must carry a driver with large jingling spurs and heavy club. If more than one beast is attached to a volante, the horses are usually driven tandem.

To the the bishop's garden, the popular drive, most of our passengers went for the day-past villas and chateaus buried in blooming foliage, through avenues bordered by hedges of roses, and shaded by orange-trees bending beneath their golden fruit. At night we listened to the band playing in the plaza, and watched the half-veiled señoritas, and sombre looking men and smoking women and naked boys, moving noisily about beneath the shrubbery and under the glowing moon which, mirrored on the glassy water of the harbor, made it shine like a sea of silver. Siempre fiel isla de Cuba; la loya mas brilliante en la carona d' España-heaven be with thee, as thou in my youthful fancy appeared almost like heaven.

The passengers, baggage, mails, and freight of the George Law were here transferred to the steamer Georgia, and day and evening were consumed in the operation. At length, worn out by unaccustomed fatigue, tired even of a tropical paradise, we shouldered a quantity of cigars which we had purchased

and went on board-settling the export duties, under direction of the seller, by giving a half dollar to the official stationed on board, who pocketed it amidst vehemently gesticulated protestations, which I took to be a sort of mock battle between conscience and duty; or it may be he deemed the bribe insufficient to satisfy virtue so august. Leaving him to reconcile matters as best he might I hurried to bed, and when I awoke in the morning the lovely isle had vanished like a dream, and we were far on our way toward Jamaica, that is to say, the Land of Wood and Water.

Kingston, where we touched for coals, should be the black man's paradise. A negro pilot pretended to guide our vessel into the harbor, a negro portmaster pompousiy manipulated the mails, black shopkeepers importuned passers by, black hackmen clamored for a fare, black prostitutes smiled for customers, black fruit-venders and parrot-sellers crowded the avenues leading from the wharf, dashing black dandies flourished their white-headed canes, squads of olack soldiers swelled in the Britisher's red coat, the regimental band which played in the park was composed of some fifty fine performers-black; black women, about fifty in number, some of them young girls, did the coaling, carrying on their heads a tub or half barrel holding sixty pounds of coals, marching up and down the gang-plank with ease and alacrity, accompanying their apparently laborious duty with loud laughter, song, and dancing, while the men sat by and smoked and smiled approval. Swarms of polished ebony bipeds, male and female, perambulated the streets, smoking their long cigars, and familiarly cracking their rude jokes with the passengers. Race distinction, if there be any but such as is merely physical, seems to be here reversed, the white man, as a class, occupying about the position of the black man in other parts. Literally, a white man here is as

good as a black one so long as he behaves himself. Colored freeholders received the elective franchise as early as 1830; after 1838 they could sit in the local legislature, by which qualification 1853 saw one black man in the council and fifteen in the assembly. Judging from the muscle on arm and leg, and the loads the women carry on their heads, this West India climate agrees with the African.

Putting to sea, in three days thereafter we anchored before the ruins of the old fort of San Lorenzo commanding the entrance to Chagres river.

CHAPTER VII.

THE VOYAGE TO CALIFORNIA,-ISTHMUS OF PANAMÁ.

What deem'd they of the future or the past?
The present, like a tyrant, held them fast.

-Byron.

THE isthmus of Panamá, or, as it was anciently called, Darien, must ever command the interest of the civilized world. Aside from the charm which history throws over this region, as the bar which baffled the last attempt of the great admiral to find a passage to India, as the point where were planted the first permanent Spanish settlements on the North American continent, as the window of the bi-continental cordilleras which, opened by the hand of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, let in from the great South Sea a flood of light illuminating well nigh to blindness all Europe, as the initial point to many a marauding expedition, as the scene of divers piratical attacks, and local revolutions,-I say aside from historic associations, this narrow strip of earth must ever be regarded with attention by all the nations of the world, presenting, as it does, the smallest impediment to inter-oceanic communication and an uninterrupted pathway from Europe to Asia, sailing to the westward. Said Walter Raleigh to Elizabeth, "Seize the isthmus of Darien, and you will wrest the keys of the world from Spain." Here the continent was first spanned by iron, and here is being dug the first inter-oceanic canal.

At the beginning of the new traffic arising from the discovery of gold in California, the natives of the Isthmus were civil, inoffensive, and obliging. This