or, and its keepers are attentive and deserving
people.

XIV.

REFLECTIONS VIA RAILROAD

Although the distance to Havana, as the bird flies, is only sixty miles,
the railroad, winding into the interior, to draw out the sugar freights,
makes a line of nearly one hundred miles. This adds to the length of our
journey, but also greatly to its interest.

In the cars are two Americans, who have also been visiting plantations.
They give me the following statistics of a sugar plantation, which they
think may be relied upon. Lands, machinery, 320 slaves, and 20 coolies,
worth $500,000. Produce this year, 4,000 boxes of sugar and 800 casks of
molasses, worth $104,000. Expenses, $35,000. Net, $69,000, or about 14
per cent. This is not a large interest on an investment so much of which
is perishable and subject to deterioration.

The day, as has been every day of mine in Cuba, is fair and beautiful.
The heat is great, perhaps even dangerous to a Northerner, should he be
exposed to it in active exercise, at noon--but, with the shade and
motion of the cars, not disagreeable, for the air is pure and elastic,
and it is only the direct heat of the sun that is oppressive. I think
one notices the results of this pure air, in the throats and nasal
organs of the people. One seldom meets a person that seems to have a
cold in the head or the throat; and pocket handkerchiefs are used
chiefly for ornament.

I cannot weary of gazing upon these new and strange scenes; the
stations, with the groups of peasants and Negroes and fruit-sellers that
gather about them, and the stores of sugar and molasses collected there;
the ingenios, glimmering in the heat of the sun, with their tall furnace
chimneys; the cane-fields, acres upon acres; the slow ox-carts carrying
the cane to the mill; then the intervals of unused country, the jungles,
adorned with little wild flowers, the groves of the weeping, drooping,
sad, homesick cocoa; the royal palm, which is to trees what the camel or
dromedary is among animals seeming to have strayed from Nubia or
Mesopotamia; the stiff, close orange tree, with its golden balls of
fruit; and then the remains of a cafetal, the coffee plant growing
untrimmed and wild under the reprieved groves of plantain and banana.

It is certainly true that there is such a thing as industry in the
tropics. The labor of the tropics goes on. Notwithstanding all we hear
and know of the enervating influence of the climate, the whi