Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/29

 masses of laurel, cypress, and graceful palms; but within it is a thicket of intertwisted cactus, thorns, and creepers, through which a way must be opened with the machete, a formidable half knife, half cleaver, carried by the peasants for general uses on the plantations, and which served also as their weapon in the strife.

There was an International Exhibition in progress at Matanzas, easily rivalled by almost any American county fair. The railway ride of three hours and a half by a ram-shackle train, run by a Chinese engineer, was hot and dusty, but how well repaid by the first deep draughts of satisfaction in understanding at last the heart of a tropical country! There was the thatched cabin, shaded by the broad-leafed banana. It was like "Paul and Virginia." Where was the faithful negro Domingo? The hedges were of cactus and dwarf pine-apple. There were groves of cocoa-nuts like apple-orchards with us, and unknown fruits too numerous to mention. It was as if each peasant proprietor had cultivated a gigantic conservatory, and were indulging himself in the luxuries of life in consideration of foregoing its necessities.

Matanzas was dull, even with its Exposition, a pretty plaza, and the memory of a locally immortal poet, Milanes, of whom a tablet in a wall testified that he was born and died in a certain house. I looked into his works at a book-stall. He wrote on "Tears," "The Sea," "Spring and Love," "The Fall of the Leaves," "To Lola," and "A Coquette." "Your mother little thought, when she held you an infant in her arms," he says, in substance, to the coquette, "of what wiles and perfidies you would be capable. Your beauteous aspect will in time fade away, and what remorseful memories will you not then have to look back upon!"

With this dip into the poetic inspiration of the heart