are set to work under government inspection for a limited number of
years, on a footing something like that of the apprentices in Jamaica,
in the interregnum between slavery and emancipation. In Cuba it is
remarked that the mortality among the emancipados is frightful. They
seldom outlive their years of probation. The explanation of this piece
of statistics is curious. The fact is that every now and then, when an
old man dies, they bury him as one of the emancipados, whose register
is sent in to the Government as dead; while the negro himself goes to
work as a slave in some out-of-the-way plantation where no tales are
told.

We left the marble-quarries, and rode for miles over a wide savannah.
The soil was loose and sandy and full of flakes of mica, and in the
watercourses were fragments of granite, brought down from the hills.
Here flourished palm trees and palmettos, acacias, mimosas, and
cactuses, while the mangoe and the guava tree preferred the damper
patches nearer to the coast. The hills were covered with the pine-trees
from which the island has its name; and on the rising ground at their
base we saw the strange spectacle of palms and fir trees growing side
by side.

Where we came upon a stream, the change in the vegetation was
astonishing. It was a sudden transition from an English, plantation of
fir trees into the jungle of the tropics, full of Indian figs, palms,
lancewood, and great mahagua[1] trees, all knotted together by endless
creepers and parasites; while the parrots kept up a continual
chattering and screaming in the tree-tops. The moment we left the
narrow strip of tropical forest that lined the stream we were in the
pine wood. Here the first two or three feet of the trunks of the pine
trees were scorched and blackened by the flames of the tall dry