or fellow! Give him a medio (a
threepenny-piece) somebody. Does nobody hear him, el pobrecito? Come,
make haste! Don't keep the poor fellow waiting. Poor Carrapatam Bunga!
He is stone blind, poor fellow, and his feet are blistered and sore.
Misericordia, senores. Barajo! why don't somebody answer? Which is mi
s'nora Mercedes' house? Will somebody lead me to it? Mi s'nora
Mercedes!'

Bunga knows most of his patrons by name. Dona Mercedes appears at her
iron-grated window, through the bars of which the benevolent lady offers
a silver coin and a small loaf.

'Gracias, mi s'nora; Dios se la pague su merced! (May Heaven reward your
worship.) Who's got a light for the poor ciego?'

Somebody favours the ciego with a light, and Carrapatam Bunga goes on
his way smoking and humming a tune, and presently harangues in another
street.

Will it be believed that this wanderer has a farm in the country, with
slaves in his employ, and hundreds of dollars in his exchequer? When not
on beggar-beat, Bunga retires to his possessions, where he lives
luxuriously.

Like some of his begging fraternity, the negro occasionally varies his
mendicant trade by offering for sale lottery tickets bearing what he
calls 'lucky numbers.' The Havana lottery is a great institution in
Cuba, and has an extraordinary fascination for rich as well as poor.
Each ticket costs seventeen dollars, and is printed in such a form as to
be susceptible of division into seventeen parts, so as to suit all
pockets. The prizes vary from 100 to 100,000 dollars, and there are two
'sorteos,' or draws, monthly. On each occasion 35,000 tickets are
offered for sale, and out of this number 600 are prizes. He whose number
happens to approach within ten paces of the 100,000 dollar, or 50,000
dollar prize, receives a gratuity of 200 dollars as a reward for being
'near the mark.'

This lottery is a source of revenue to the Spanish state in Cuba, which
claims a fourth share of the products yielded by the sale of tickets. As
an instance of the enormous capital sometimes derived from this source,
it is said that in a certain prosperous year, 546,000 tickets brought to
the Havana treasury no less than 8,736,000 dollars!

Our friend Carrapatam Bunga often invests in fragments of unsold
tickets, and on one occasion he drew a prize to the value of 700
dollars, which good luck, together with his beggar savings, enabled him
to purchase a farm and to hire a few labourers to work it with.