spend are spent among the lasses. I will go farther and say
the most profitable hours. And some sweet and profitable hours 'twas
mine to spend among the fawn-orbed lasses of Puerto, with their
childlike gaiety, their desire to please, and their fetching freedom
from affectation. Would that the wines exported from the district were
half as unsophisticated! These lasses were not learned in the "ologies"
or the "isms," but they were sincere; and their locks flowed long and
free, and when they laughed the coral sluices flying open gave scope to
a full silvery music cascading between pales of gleaming pearl. An
admixture of this strain with the fair-skinned men of the North should
produce a magnificent race; and, indeed, if we paid half the attention
to the improvement of the human animal which we do to that of the equine
or the porcine, the experiment would not have been left untried so long.
In-and-in breeding is a mistake, and can only commend itself, and that
for selfish reasons, to the Aztec in physique and the imbecile in mind.
The families which take most pride in their purity are the most
degenerate; the stock which is the most robust and handsome is that
which has in it a liberal infusion of foreign bloods. In my opinion, the
coming man, the highest form of well-balanced qualities--moral,
intellectual, and masculine--the nearest approach to perfection, must
ultimately be developed in the United States.

Puerto has a wide-spread reputation as the nursery-ground for
bull-fighters. To the arena it is what Newmarket is to the British turf.
Everybody there walks about armed, but murder is not more rife in
proportion than in London. As it happened, a fellow was shot while I was
there, but that would not justify one in coming to the conclusion that
homicide was a flourishing indigenous product. Still, the natives did
not escape the contagion of unrest of their countrymen. For example, the
last news I heard before leaving my English friends was that the men in
the vineyards had struck work. These lazy scoundrels had the impudence
to demand that they should have half an hour after arrival on the
ground, and before beginning work, to smoke cigarettes, the same grace
after the breakfast hour, two hours for a siesta in the middle of the
day, another interval for a bout of smoking in the afternoon, and
finally that each should be entitled to an arroba (more than three and a
half gallons English) of wine per acre at the end of the