ly
make their purchases in the after part of the day, stopping in their
volantes at the doors of the shops, from which the articles they desire
to examine are brought to them by the shopmen. No lady enters a shop to
make a purchase, any more than she would be found walking in the
streets.

There is no paper money known on the island, so that all transactions at
these stores must be consummated in specie. The coin generally in use is
the Spanish and Mexican dollar, half and quarter dollars, pesetas, or
twenty-cent pieces, and reals de plata, equal to our twelve-and-a-half
cent pieces, or York shillings. The gold coin is the doubloon and its
fractions. Silver is always scarce, and held at a premium in Havana,
say from two to five per cent. As Cuba has no regular bank, the merchant
draws on his foreign credit altogether, each mercantile house becoming
its own sub-treasury, supplied with the largest and best of iron safes.
The want of some legitimate banking system is severely felt here, and is
a prominent subject of complaint with all foreign merchants.

The Spanish government supports a large army on the island, which is
under the most rigid discipline, and in a state of considerable
efficiency. It is the policy of the home government to fill the ranks
with natives of old Spain, in order that no undue sympathy may be felt
for the Creoles, or islanders, in case of insurrection or attempted
revolution. An order has recently been issued by Pezuela, the present
governor-general, for the enrolment of free blacks and mulattoes in the
ranks of the army, and the devotion of these people to Spain is loudly
vaunted in the captain-general's proclamation. The enlistment of people
of color in the ranks is a deadly insult offered to the white population
of a slave-holding country,--a sort of shadowing forth of the menace,
more than once thrown out by Spain, to the effect that if the colonists
should ever attempt a revolution, she would free and arm the blacks,
and Cuba, made to repeat the tragic tale of St. Domingo, should be
useless to the Creoles if lost to Spain. But we think Spain
overestimates the loyalty of the free people of color whom she would
now enroll beneath her banner. They cannot forget the days of O'Donnell
(governor-general), when he avenged the opposition of certain Cubans to
the illicit and infamous slave-trade by which he was enriching himself,
by charging them with an abolition conspiracy in conjunction with the