ble anecdotes, and the breakfast-table talk
of the ladies, they find no outward signs of violence or corruption,
they will probably, also, be credulous enough to suppose they have seen
the whole of slavery. They do not know that that large plantation, with
its smoking chimneys, about which they hear nothing, and which their
host does not visit, has passed to the creditors of the late owner, who
is a bankrupt, and is in charge of a manager, who is to get all he can
from it in the shortest time, and to sell off the slaves as he can,
having no interest, moral or pecuniary, in their future. They do not
know that that other plantation, belonging to the young man who spends
half his time in Havana, is an abode of licentiousness and cruelty.
Neither do they know that the tall hounds chained at the kennel of the
house they are visiting are Cuban bloodhounds, trained to track and to
seize. They do not know that the barking last night was a pursuit and
capture, in which all the white men on the place took part; and that,
for the week past, the men of the plantation have been a committee of
detective and protective police. They do not know that the ill-looking
man who was there yesterday, and whom the ladies did not like, and all
treated with ill-disguised aversion, is a professed hunter of slaves.
They have never seen or heard of the Sierra del Cristal, the
mountain-range at the eastern end of Cuba, inhabited by runaways, where
white men hardly dare to go. Nor do they know that those young ladies,
when little children, were taken to the city in the time of the
insurrection in the Vuelta de Arriba. They have not heard the story of
that downcast-looking girl, the now incorrigibly malignant Negro, and
the lying mayoral. In the cities, they are amused by the flashy dresses,
indolence and good-humor of the slaves, and pleased with the
respectfulness of their manners, and hear anecdotes of their attachment
to their masters, and how they so dote upon slavery that nothing but bad
advice can entice them into freedom; and are told, too, of the worse
condition of the free blacks. They have not visited the slave-jails, or
the whipping-posts in the house outside the walls, where low whites do
the flogging of the city house-servants, men and women, at so many reals
a head.

But the reflecting mind soon tires of the anecdotes of injustice,
cruelty and licentiousness on the one hand, and of justice, kindness and
mutual attachment, on the other.