lies, in the hot sun, carrying
stones to build a house, under the eye of a taskmaster who sits in the
shade. The stones have been dropped in a pile, from carts, and the
coolies, carry them, in files, to the cellar of the house. They are
naked to the waist, with short-legged cotton trousers coming to the
knees. Some of these men were strongly, one or two of them powerfully
built, but many seemed very thin and frail. While looking on, I saw an
evident American face near me, and getting into conversation with the
man, found him an intelligent shipmaster from New York, who had lived in
Matanzas for a year or two, engaged in business. He told me, as I had
heard in Havana, that the importer of the coolies gets $400 a head for
them from the purchaser, and that the coolies are entitled from the
purchaser to four dollars a month, which they may demand monthly if they
choose, and are bound to eight years' service, during which time they
may be held to all the service that a slave is subject to. They are more
intelligent, and are put to higher labor than the Negro. He said, too,
it would not do to flog a coolie. Idolaters as they are, they have a
notion of the dignity of the human body, at least as against strangers,
which does not allow them to submit to the indignity of corporal
chastisement. If a coolie is flogged, somebody must die; either the
coolie himself, for they are fearfully given to suicide, or the
perpetrator of the indignity, or some one else, according to their
strange principles of vicarious punishment. Yet such is the value of
labor in Cuba, that a citizen will give $400, in cash, for the chance of
enforcing eight years' labor, at $4 per month, from a man speaking a
strange language, worshipping strange gods or none, thinking suicide a
virtue, and governed by no moral laws in common with his master--his
value being yet further diminished by the chances of natural death, of
sickness, accident, escape, and of forfeiting his services to the
government, for any crime he may commit against laws he does not
understand.

The Plaza is in the usual style--an enclosed garden, with walks; and in
front is the Government House. In this spot, so fair and so still in the
noonday sun, some fourteen years ago, under the fire of the platoons of
Spanish soldiers, fell the patriot and poet, one of the few popular
poets of Cuba, Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdez. Charged with being the
head of that concerted movement of the slaves for t