Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/25

 a cluster of coaling-sheds. Some harbor boats took us ashore. We landed at broad stone steps pervaded by smells, passed into the Custom-house (which had been an old convent), and out of it into paved lanes full of donkeys, negroes, soldiers, sellers of fruits and lottery-tickets, engaged in transactions in a debased fractional currency. The money of the debt-ridden island is that of our "shin-plaster" war period, of unhappy memory. A couple of boiled eggs in a common restaurant cost forty cents; a ride in a horse-car, thirty-five. The wages of a minor clerk at the same time were but $30 or $40 a month. How does he make ends meet and provide for his future? He buys regularly a certain amount of hope in the Government lottery. "A demoralizing system indeed!" I said, as I frowned over the wares of a dealer who had lost a leg in the insurrection. I think it was No. 11,014 I bought, however, in a grand extra drawing, the first prize of which was to be a million, in paper. I trust the gentle reader will feel that I repented when I heard the result, some months after, in Mexico, and that I should have tried just as hard to repent had I won.

The Havanese were exercised just then over the discovery of great frauds in their Marine Department. Forty million dollars had been stolen, by collusion between contractors and the commissariat, since the outbreak of the rebellion in 1868. The Morro Castle was full of prisoners of distinction—officers, marquises, and counts, of the sugar aristocracy of the island, and Old Spain—awaiting their trial by court-martial. The principal operator, one Antonio Gassol, had already been sentenced to two years' confinement and the restitution of a million of his ill-gotten gains.

The talk of not a few intelligent persons was, that the