ghing woman, and disappeared up the street. Just as the
boat whistled to pull in the gang planks, dad and I stood on deck and
saw the team disappear, and dad said, "Buncoed again, by gosh, and it is
all your condemned fault. Why didn't you hang on to that off dog." Well,
we lost our dog team, but we got the worth of our money, for we saw a
people who do not eat much beside cabbage and milk, and they are the
strongest in the world, and there never was a case of dyspepsia in their
country. We saw a people with stone bruises on their heels and corns on
their toes, smiling and laughing all the time. We met a people that work
all the time, and never take any recreation except churning and rocking
babies, and yet never have to call a doctor, because there are no
doctors except veterinary surgeons, who care for dogs and cattle.

The people we met in Holland wear wooden shoes to teach them patience
and humility. With wooden shoes no frenzied financier of Holland will
ever travel the fast road of speculation, slip on a bucket-shop banana
peel, and fall on the innocent bystander who has coughed up his savings
and given them to the honest financier to safely invest.

The bank of Holland is an old woolen stock ing, and money never comes
out of the stocking unless there is a string to it, and the string is
the heart string of an honest people, that will stand no trifling. If a
dishonest financier came to Holland from any other country, and did any
of his dirty work, the women of Holland, who handle the funds, would
give him such a hazing that he would never open his three-card monte
lay-out in any other country.

It is a country where you get the right change back, and the cows give
eighteen carat milk, and the hens have not learned to lay small, cold
storage eggs. It is the country for me, if the women would wear corsets,
and not be the same size all the way down, so that if you hugged a girl
you wouldn't make a dent in her, that would not come out until she got
her breath.

And we left such a country and such a people, to come here to Cuba,
where the population now comprises the meanest features of the desperate
and wicked Spaniards, beaten at their own game of loot, the trickiness
of the native Cuban, flushed with pride because his big American brother
helped him to drive away the Spaniard that he could never have gotten
rid of alone, and with no respect for the American who helped, and only
meets him respectfully because he i