n the hands of an upper class, which does no manual labor,
and which has enough of wealth and leisure to secure the advantages of
continued intercourse with city and foreign society, and of occasional
foreign travel, tends to preserve throughout the remote agricultural
districts, habits and tone and etiquette, which otherwise would die out,
in the entire absence of large towns and of high local influences.

Whoever has met with a book called "Evenings in Boston," and read the
story of the old Negro, Saturday, and seen the frontispiece of the Negro
fleeing through the woods of Santo Domingo, with two little white boys,
one in each hand, will know as much of Mr. Chartrand, the elder, as I
did the day before seeing him. He is the living hero, or rather subject,
for Saturday was the hero, of that tale. His father was a wealthy
planter of Santo Domingo, a Frenchman, of large estates, with wife,
children, friends and neighbors. These were gathered about him in a
social circle in his house, when the dreadful insurrection overtook
them, and father, mother, sons, and daughters were murdered in one
night, and only two of the children, boys of eight and ten, were saved
by the fidelity of Saturday, an old and devoted house servant. Saturday
concealed the boys, got them off the island, took them to Charleston,
South Carolina, where they found friends among the Huguenot families,
and the refugees from Santo Domingo. There Mr. Chartrand grew up; and
after a checkered and adventurous early life, a large part of it on the
sea, he married a lady of worth and culture, in South Carolina, and
settled himself as a planter, on this spot, nearly forty years ago. His
plantation he named "El Laberinto," (The Labyrinth,) after a favorite
vessel he had commanded, and for thirty years it was a prosperous
cafetal, the home of a happy family, and much visited by strangers from.
America and Europe. The causes which broke up the coffee estates of Cuba
carried this with the others; and it was converted into a sugar
plantation, under the new name of La Ariadne, from the fancy of Ariadne
having shown the way out of the Labyrinth. Like most of the sugar
estates, it is no longer the regular home of its proprietors.

The change from coffee plantations to sugar plantations--from the
cafetal to the ingenio, has seriously affected the social, as it has
the economic condition of Cuba.

Coffee must grow under shade. Consequently the coffee estate was, in the
fi