s were here to enjoy a
taste of what will come to those who are truly good, in the hereafter,
when suddenly you are taken with a chill up the spinal column, and a
cold sweat comes out on the forehead, and the internal arrangements go
on a strike because of the cold, perspiring cucumber you had for lunch,
and you go to the doctor, who does not do a thing to you, but scare you
out of your boots by talking of cholera, and giving you the card of
his partner, the undertaker, telling you never to think of dying in a
tropical country without being embalmed, because you look so much better
when you are delivered at your home by the express company, and then he
gives you pills and a bill, and an alarm clock that goes off every hour
to take a pill by, and furnishes you an officer to go home to your hotel
with you to collect his bill, and you pawn your watch and sleeve buttons
for a steerage ticket to New York, where you arrive as soon as the Lord
will let you, and stay as long as He thinks is good for you.

Dad has not been much good in Havana, cause he wanted to see the whole
business in one day. He got a row boat and went out in the harbor to
where the back-bone of the "Maine" acts as a monument to the fellows who
yet sleep in the mud of the bottom, and after tying a little American
flag on the rigging that sticks up above the water, and damning the
villains who blew up the good ship, we went back to town and drove out
to the cemetery where several hundred of our boys are buried, where we
left flowers on the graves and a cuss in the balmy air for the guilty
wretches who fired the bomb, and then we went back to the city and
walked the beautiful streets, until dad began to have cramps, from
trying to eat all the fruit he could hold, and then it was all off, and
I was going to call a carriage to take him to the hotel, when dad saw a
negro astride a single ox, hitched to a cart, who had come in from the
country, and dad said he wanted to ride in that cart, if it was the last
act of his life, and as dad was beginning to swell up from the fruit he
had eaten, I thought he better ride in an open cart, cause in a carriage
he might swell up so we couldn't get him out of the door when we got to
the hotel, so I hired the negro, got dad in the cart, and we started,
but the ox walked so slow I was afraid we would never get dad there
alive, so I told the negro dad had the cholera, and that settled, for
he kicked the slats of the ox in with his