which were said to be his were removed from St. Domingo, and I wished to
pay my orisons at his tomb. I wished also to see the race of men who
have shared the New World with the Anglo-Saxons, and have given a
language and a religion to half the American continent, in the oldest
and most celebrated of their Transatlantic cities.

Cuba also had an immediate and present interest. Before the American
civil war it was on the point of being absorbed into the United States.
The Spanish Cubans had afterwards a civil war of their own, of which
only confused accounts had reached us at home. We knew that it had
lasted ten years, but who had been the parties and what their objects
had been was very much a mystery. No sooner was it over than, without
reservation or compensation, the slaves had been emancipated. How a
country was prospering which had undergone such a succession of shocks,
and how the Spaniards were dealing with the trials which were bearing so
hard on our own islands, were inquiries worth making. But beyond these
it was the land of romance. Columbus and Las Casas, Cortez and Pizarro,
are the demigods and heroes of the New World. Their names will be
familiar to the end of time as the founders of a new era, and although
the modern Spaniards sink to the level of the modern Greeks, their
illustrious men will hold their place for ever in imagination and
memory.

Our own Antilles had, as I have said, in their terror of small-pox,
placed Jamaica under an interdict. The Spaniards at Cuba were more
generous or more careless. Havana is on the north side of the island,
facing towards Florida; thus, in going to it from Port Royal, we had to
round the westernmost cape, and had four days of sea before us. We slid
along the coast of Jamaica in smooth water, the air, while day lasted,
intensely hot, but the breeze after nightfall blowing cool from off the
mountains. We had a polite captain, polite officers, and agreeable
fellow-passengers, two or three Cubans among them, swarthy, dark-eyed,
thick-set men--_Americanos_; Spaniards with a difference--with whom I
cultivated a kind of intimacy. In a cabin it was reported that there
were again Spanish ladies on their way to the demonic gaieties at
Darien, but they did not show.

Among the rest of the party was a Canadian gentleman, a Mr. ----,
exceptionally well-informed and intelligent. Their American treaty
having been disallowed, the West Indies had proposed to negotiate a
similar on