with golden fruit. Now we come to acres upon acres of the
sugar-cane, looking at a distance like fields of overgrown broomcorn. It
grows to the height of eight or ten feet, and very thick. An army could
be hidden in it. This soil must be deeply and intensely fertile.

There, at the end of an avenue of palms, in a nest of shade-trees, is a
group of white buildings, with a sea of cane-fields about it, with one
high furnace-chimney, pouring out its volume of black smoke. This is a
sugar plantation--my first sight of an ingenio; and the chimney is for
the steam works of the sugar-house. It is the height of the sugar
season, and the untiring engine toils and smokes day and night. Ox
carts, loaded with cane, are moving slowly to the sugar-house from the
fields; and about the house, and in the fields, in various attitudes and
motions of labor, are the Negroes, men and women and children, some
cutting the cane, some loading the carts, and some tending the mill and
the furnace. It is a busy scene of distant industry, in the afternoon
sun of a languid Cuban day.

Now these groups of white one-story buildings become more frequent,
sometimes very near each other, all having the same character--the group
of white buildings, the mill, with its tall furnace-chimney, and the
look of a distillery, and all differing from each other only in the
number and extent of the buildings, or in the ornament and comfort of
shade-trees and avenues about them. Some are approached by broad alleys
of the palm, or mango, or orange, and have gardens around them, and
stand under clusters of shade-trees; while others glitter in the hot
sun, on the flat sea of cane-fields, with only a little oasis of
shade-trees and fruit-trees immediately about the houses.

I now begin to feel that I am in Cuba; in the tropical, rich,
sugar-growing, slave-tilled Cuba. Heretofore, I have seen only the
cities and their environs in which there are more things that are common
to the rest of the world. The country life tells the story of any people
that have a country life. The New England farm-house shows the heart of
New England. The mansion-house and cottage show the heart of Old
England. The plantation life that I am seeing and about to see, tells
the story of Cuba, the Cuba that has been and that is.

As we stop at one station, which seems to be in the middle of a
cane-field, the Negroes and coolies go to the cane, slash off a piece
with their knives, cut off the rind a