There is little travel or communication on the island, so even if the guest be an entire stranger, his host will feel amply repaid for his hospitality by the news the traveler brings from the outside world. There is a good old custom among the Danes, that when the first toast is drunk, it is to the roof of the house which covers everyone in it, meaning thereby it is all one family. This same custom might appropri ately be kept up amongst the Cuban planters, for when one takes his seat at the table, he is immediately installed as one of the family circle.

Education and Religion.

Education is woefully backward on the island. In the absence of recent statistics it is estimated that not one-tenth of the children receive lettered education of any kind, and even among the higher classes of society, liberal education is very far from being universally diffused. A few literary and scientific men are to be found both in the higher and middle ranks, and previous to the revolution, the question of public instruction excited some interest among the creole population.

At Havana is the royal university with a rector and thirty professors, and medical and law schools, as well as an institution called the Royal College of Havana. There is a similar establishment at Puerto Principe, in the eastern interior, and both at Havana and Santiago de Cuba there is a college in which the branches of ecclesiastical education are taught, together with the humanities and philosophy. Besides this there are several private schools, but these are not accessible to the masses. The inhabitants can scarcely be said to have any literature, a few daily and weekly journals, under a rigid censorship, supply almost all the taste for letters in the island.

To show how little liberty of opinion the newspapers of Cuba enjoy, we quote a decree issued by General Weyler, formerly Captain-General of the island:

Don Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, Marquis of Tenerife, governor-general, captain-general of the Island of Cuba, and general-in-chief of this army. Under the authority of the law of public order, dated the 23rd of April, 1870.

I Order and Command,

1st. No newspaper shall publish any news concerning the war which is not authorized by the staff officers.

2nd. Neither shall be published any telegraphic communications of a political character without the authority given by the secretary of the gov ernor general in Havana, or by the civil officers in the other provinces.

3rd. It is hereby forbidden to publish any editorials, or other articles or illustrations, which may directly or indirectly tend to lessen the prestige of the mother-country, the army, or the authorities, or to exaggerate the forces and the importance of the insurrection, or in any way to favor the latter, or to cause unfounded alarm, or excite the feelings of the people.

4th. The infractions of this decree, not included in Articles first and sixth of the decree of February 16th last, will make the offenders liable to the penalties named in Article 36, of the law of the 23rd of April, 1870.

5th. All persons referred to in Article 14 of the Penal Code of the Peninsula, which is in force in this Island, will be held responsible for said infractions in the same order as established by the said Article.

6th. Whenever a newspaper has twice incurred the penalty of said offense, and shall give cause for a third penalty, it may be then suppressed. 7th. The civil governors are in charge of the fulfillment of this decree, and against their resolutions, which must be always well founded, the interested parties may appeal within twenty-four hours following their notification. VALERIANO WEYLER.

Havana, April 27, 1896.

Population of the Island.

Conflicting accounts render it impossible to arrive at anything like a certainty as to the number of inhabitants in Cuba at the time of its conquest, but it may be estimated at from 300,000 to 400,000. There is but little doubt, however, that before 1560 the whole of this popula tion had disappeared from the island. The first census was taken in 1774, when the population was 171,620. In 1791 it was 272,300.

Owing to the disturbed condition of the island, no census of the inhabitants has been taken since that of 1887, when the total population was 1,631,687. Of this number, 1,111,303 were whites, and 520,684 were of negro blood. These figures make questionable the claim that the war for liberty is simply an insurrection of the colored against the caucasian race.

CHAPTER IX.

HAVANA, THE METROPOLIS OF THE ISLAND.

Havana and Its Attractions for Tourists-How to Reach Cuba-Description of the Harbor of Havana-How the Proverbial Unhealthfulness of the City May Be Remedied-Characteristics of the Business QuarterResidences and How the People Live-Parks and Boulevards-Other Features of Life in the City.

In spite of the little encouragement which American tourists have had for visiting the city of Havana, for many years it has been a popular place of resort for the few who have tried it or have been recommended to it by their friends. With the attractions it has had during Spanish administration, when an air of constraint and suspicion marked the intercourse with every American, it will not be surprising if under changed auspices and in an atmosphere of genuine freedom, Americans will find it one of the most delightful and easily accessible places possible for them to visit. It is not all pleasant, but the unpleasant things are sometimes quite as interesting as the pleasant ones. If the traveler forms his judgments according to the actual comforts he may obtain, he will be pleased from beginning to end of his stay. If the measure of his good opinion is whether or not things are like those to which he is accustomed, he will be disappointed, because novelty reigns. But novelty does not necessarily mean discomfort.

Havana may be reached by a sea voyage of three or four days from New York, on any one of several excellent steamers under the American flag, and even in winter the latter portion of the voyage will be a pleas ant feature of the journey. Or the path of the American invading squadron may be followed, and the traveler, after passing through Florida by rail, may journey from Tampa by the mail steamers, and touching at Key West for a few hours, reach Havana after a voyage of two nights and a day.

The Florida straits, between Cuba and the Florida keys, which were the scene of the first hostilities of the war, are but ninety miles wide, and the voyage is made from Key West in a few hours. The current of

the gulf stream makes the channel a trifle reminiscent of the English channel, but once under the lee of the Cuban coast the water is still and the harbor of the old city offers shelter.

In the days before the war, Morro Castle had an added interest to the traveler from the fact that behind its frowning guns and under the rocks on which it was built, were the cells of scores of sad prisoners, some of them for years in the dungeons, whose walls could tell secrets like those of the inquisition in Spain if they could but speak. Between Morro Castle and its neighbor across the way, La Punta, the vessels steam into that bay, foul with four hundred years of Spanish misrule and filth, where three hundred years of the slave trade centered, and into which the sewers of a great city poured their filth. Once inside the harbor, Cabaña Castle frowns from the hills behind Morro, and on the opposite shore rise the buildings of the city itself.

The harbor always has been a busy one, for the commerce of the island and of the city has been large. In times of peace, scores of vessels lie at anchor in the murky waters. The American anchorage for mail steamers for years has been in the extremest part of the bay from the city of Havana itself, in order to avoid the contagion which was threatened by a nearer anchorage. Until the Maine was guided to her illfated station by the harbor master, it had been long since any American vessel had stopped in that part of the harbor.

Perfect Sanitary Condition Easily Created.

The shallow harbor of Havana has its entrance from the ocean through a channel hardly more than three hundred yards wide, and nearly half a mile long, after which it broadens and ramifies until its area becomes several square miles. No fresh water stream, large or small, flows into it to purify the waters. The harbor entrance is so narrow, and the tides along that coast have so little rise and fall, that the level of water in the harbor hardly shows perceptible change day after day.

The result of this is that the constant inflow of sewage from the great city pouring into the harbor is never diluted, and through the summer is simply a festering mass of corruption, fronting the whole sea wall and throwing a stench into the air which must be breathed by everyone on shipboard. There is one part of the harbor known as "dead man's hole," from which it is said no ship has ever sailed after an anchorage of more