Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/206

Rh my little travelling fairy is with me, and keeps me in capital humour, and has enabled me to fall in with a little Spanish Don on the railway, who could speak a little French, and who was delighted to be of service to me. With his help and my Spanish phrase-book and dictionary I manage very well. And besides, I have sent off a letter of introduction, which I had with me, to Don Ildephonso Miranda, who lives not far from here, “in su Caffatal en Alguizar” and I expect to see him in the course of the day, and with his assistance I shall be able to get out of my fonda, for he speaks French like a native, I am told, and is, besides, a caballero perfetto.

I am now writing to you in a little room with bare, white-washed walls and earthen floor. The only furniture of which is one wooden chair and a wooden table, and with the wind blowing with all its might in through the window. But here it is the warm wind of Cuba, and one cannot be angry with it.

My journey this morning by the railway was glorious, like another morning journey which I made some weeks since, and the palms and splendid flowers of the caffatals, shone out the whole length of the way. The whole of this side of the island is celebrated for the beauty of its coffee-plantations; the most splendid days of which are now over, as they are not able to produce coffee in the same quantity and of the same excellent quality as the more southern plantations of the island, and are in consequence somewhat on the decline. San Antonio de los Bagnos is a small city, or town, celebrated for its baths, and for the beautiful mountain scenery of its neighbourhood. Plantations he scattered among these hills, where the heat is never extreme, where the sea-breezes continually blow, and the grass is green the year round; airy habitations are these with splendid views over the vast sea. San Antonio is further celebrated for a subterranean river, which I shall go out and endeavour to discover for