Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/168

Rh The planters of Cuba are extremely hospitable, and as the life of the ladies is very monotonous, and increasingly so of late, for the hand of the Spanish government has rested heavily on the Spanish Creole since the late disturbances, compelling him to pay a tax,—they are by no means unwilling to have the monotony of their everyday life diversified by the presence of an European stranger.

The character of the sugar-plantation and the life upon it seems to me very much the same everywhere. The most beautiful features of these plantations are the great avenues, especially of palms; I cannot walk through these guadarajahs without a sentiment of devotion, so beautiful and magnificent are they! The gardens are frequently quite small, and commonly but ill kept. The fields of sugar-cane encroach upon everything else. The life of the ladies is not cheerful and scarcely active at all. They seem to me to suffer from the condition of the plantation, which is never free from danger, and which does not allow them to develope at all their more beautiful activity, nay, which even checks their movements. They dare not go out alone; they are afraid of runaway slaves: besides, with all the beauty of trees and vegetation peculiar to the Cuban plantation, it still lacks that which constitutes one of the greatest delights of country life—when one looks at it merely from the pleasurable point of view—it lacks grass-sward—that soft, submissive, verdant sward, in which millions of small blades of grass and masses of little flowers are brought together, to prepare for human beings a fresh and soft couch on which to repose in the open air. It lacks those groves of shadowy trees and underwood, beneath and amid which, we repose so pleasantly; and I soon observed that this paradisiacal atmosphere, and these guadarajahs could not compensate to the inhabitants of the island for the absence of those unpretending rural pleasures.

Besides we behold no injustice around us in the country,