Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/85

 roses on her cheeks, such as only the daughters of Europe can show. The whole house is full of beauty, love, and gladness, with the newly married, newly betrothed, lovetokens, and glances in every corner. The family has besides a cheerful circle of acquaintance, where gentlemen from Europe, Germans, Englishmen, Scotch, or French, come with unstinted music and merriment. Good Mrs. F. drove me last evening in her volante to the villa of her daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. S., at a village two miles distant from Havanna. There we found a company of handsome people assembled, not invited, but because it was the reception evening of the family. They amused themselves with tableaux vivans, music and dancing. Those remarkably handsome ladies (regularly enchanting in the costumes of the tableaux), those well-bred, cheerful gentlemen, that excellent music —the young sisters F. sing extremely well— that Cuban contre-danse and its music so peculiar, so delineative of the Creole temperament, inasmuch as it expresses an effeminate, playful, pleasure-loving, and yet half melancholy life, in which the breezes seem to waft, and the palm branches to rustle; that cheerful, free tone of social intercourse, the many languages which are spoken, the beautiful evenings, the soft winds and stars of night which glance in at open doors and windows—all these made this evening one of the most beautiful, the most perfectly festal occasions that I ever witnessed. Nothing was tiresome, nothing contracted; one rested and enjoyed and amused oneself at the same time.

I have seen mass performed twice in the early morning at the cathedral church here; I have seen there such great priestly show and priestly magnificence in full bloom, that one might fancy oneself removed two or three centuries backward in time; I scarcely saw any praying in the church, and the priests marched hither and thither, and swung smoking censers, and lighted candles, and busied