We Reached San Antonio At Nine O'clock In The Morning, And Went To The Inn
Of La Punta, Where We Breakfasted On Rice And Fresh Eggs, And A Dish Of
Meat So Highly Flavored With Garlic, That It Was Impossible To Distinguish
To What Animal It Belonged.
Adjoining the inn was a cockpit, with cells
for the birds surrounding the inclosure, in which they were crowing
lustily.
Two or three persons seemed to have nothing to do but to tend
them; and one, in particular, with a gray beard, a grave aspect, and a
solid gait, went about the work with a deliberation and solemnity which to
me, who had lately seen the hurried burials at the Campo Santo, in Havana,
was highly edifying. A man was training a game-cock in the pit; he was
giving it lessons in the virtue of perseverance. He held another cock
before it, which he was teaching it to pursue, and striking it
occasionally over the head to provoke it, with the wing of the bird in his
hand, he made it run after him about the area for half an hour together.
I had heard much of the beauty of the coffee estates of Cuba, and in the
neighborhood of San Antonio are some which have been reputed very fine
ones. A young man, in a checked blue and white shirt, worn like a frock
over checked pantaloons, with a spur on one heel, offered to procure us a
_volante_, and we engaged him. He brought us one with two horses, a negro
postillion sitting on one, and the shafts of the vehicle borne by the
other. We set off, passing through fields guarded by stiff-leaved hedges
of the ratoon-pine, over ways so bad that if the motion of the volante
were not the easiest in the world, we should have taken an unpleasant
jolting. The lands of Cuba fit for cultivation, are divided into red and
black; we were in the midst of the red lands, consisting of a fine earth
of a deep brick color, resting on a bed of soft, porous, chalky limestone.
In the dry season the surface is easily dispersed into dust, and stains
your clothes of a dull red.
A drive of four miles, through a country full of palm and cocoanut trees,
brought us to the gate of a coffee plantation, which our friend in the
checked shirt, by whom we were accompanied, opened for us. We passed up to
the house through what had been an avenue of palms, but was now two rows
of trees at very unequal distances, with here and there a sickly
orange-tree. On each side grew the coffee shrubs, hung with flowers of
snowy white, but unpruned and full of dry and leafless twigs. In every
direction were ranks of trees, prized for ornament or for their fruit, and
shrubs, among which were magnificent oleanders loaded with flowers,
planted in such a manner as to break the force of the wind, and partially
to shelter the plants from the too fierce rays of the sun.
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