I return to
New York.

of love.

DICK.

CARDENAS--North Coast of Cuba.

January 16th, 1897.

DEAR MOTHER:

It is very funny not knowing what sort of a place you are to sleep in
next and taking things out of a grab bag, as it were-- In Europe you
can always guess what the well known towns will give you for you have a
guide book, but here it is all luck. Matanzas was a pretty city but
the people were awful, the hotel was Spanish and the proprietor
insolent, though I was spending more of Willie Hearst's money than all
of the officers spend in a week, the Consul could not talk English or
Spanish, he said he hadn't come there "to go to school to no Spaniard"
and he gloried in the fact he had been there three years without
knowing a word of the language. His vice-Consul was worse and
everything went wrong generally. Every one I met was an Alarmist and
that is polite for liar. They asked Remington if he was the man who
manufactured the rifles and gave us the Iowa Democrat to read. To
night I reached here after a six hours ride through blazing fields of
sugar cane and stopped on my way to the hotel to ask the Consul when
the next boat went to Saqua la Grande-- I had no letter of introduction
to him as I had to the Matanzas consul, but as soon as he saw my card
he got out of his chair and shook hands again and was as hearty and
well bred and delightful as Charley himself and unlike Chas he did not
ask me 14 francs for looking on him. He is out now chasing around to
get me a train for to-morrow. But I won't go to-morrow. My hotel
looks on the plaza and the proprietor and the whole suite of attendants
are my slaves. It is just as different as can be. My interpreter does
it, he calls himself MY VALET, although I point out to him that two
shirts and twelve collars do not constitute a wardrobe even with a
rubber coat thrown in. But he likes to play at my being a
distinguished stranger and I can't say I object. Only when you
remember the way I was invited to see Cuba and expected to see it, and
now the way I am seeing it from car windows with A VALET. What would
the new school of yellow kid journalists say if they knew that. For
the first time on this trip I have wished you were both with me, that
was to night. I never see anything really beautiful but that it
instantly makes me feel selfish and wish you could see it too. It has
happened again and again and to night I wish you could be here with me
on this