Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/146

Rh that every one in company may take part in it, either singing or dancing, or applauding. Nobody is excluded, there is no need for any body to stand against the walls, for anybody to be dull or have ennui. Long live the African dance!

I have made an interesting excursion with the family to one of those remarkable grottoes which abound in the mountains of Cuba. This is called La Loma de Lorenzo de St. Domingo, and is distant some miles from Limonar. Mrs. C. and I drove thither in their volante, the young ones riding the small Cuban horses, the most good-tempered, willing, and prettiest of all creatures of the horse-kind, and which carry the rider so lightly that he feels no fatigue; these horses are small, their action is a short and very even trot. John C., a cheerful, spirited, and very agreeable young man, ordered a couple of negroes to carry a quantity of straw and brushwood into various parts of the grotto, which was set fire to. This produced a splendid scene. Millions of terrified bats swarmed in the lofty and dark arches of the cavern; and what strange and wonderful shapes were revealed by the flames! It was a world of dreams, in which every form fashioned by nature and of which the human heart has dreamed, or had pre-visions, seemed to present itself in gloomy, chaotic outline. There seemed to be the human form wrapped as if in swaddling bands, awaiting patiently light and life; there were pulpits and thrones; wings which seemed about to loosen themselves from the walls, thousands of fantastic shapes, some lonely, some grotesque, some hideous. Ah! within these caverns of nature seem to be contained the whole of that dark world which the cavern of the human heart incloses, but the shapes of which we do not see, excepting when, in dark moments, a gloomy fire lights up its shadowy recesses. Every form which I beheld here I had seen long beforehand in—my own breast. And I know that they all exist there still, although God has allowed