You May Imagine, Therefore, That I Was Somewhat Disappointed
Not To Find The Air, As It Is At This Season In The South Of Italy,
Fragrant With The Odor Of Orange And Lemon Blossoms.
Oranges are scarce,
and not so fine, at this moment, in Havana and Matanzas, as in the
fruit-shops of New York.
I hear, however, that there are portions of the
island which were spared by these hurricanes, and that there are others
where the ravages of the insect in the orange groves have nearly ceased,
as I have been told is also the case in Florida.
I have mentioned my excursion to San Antonio. I went thither by railway,
in a car built at Newark, drawn by an engine made in New York, and worked
by an American engineer. For some distance we passed through fields of the
sweet-potato, which here never requires a second planting, and propagates
itself perpetually in the soil, patches of maize, low groves of bananas
with their dark stems, and of plantains with their green ones, and large
tracts producing the pineapple growing in rows like carrots. Then came
plantations of the sugar-cane, with its sedge-like blades of pale-green,
then extensive tracts of pasturage with scattered shrubs and tall dead
weeds, the growth of the last summer, and a thin herbage bitten close to
the soil. Here and there was an abandoned coffee-plantation, where cattle
were browzing among the half-perished shrubs and broken rows of trees; and
the neglected hedges of the wild pine, _pina raton_, as the Cubans call
it, were interrupted with broad gaps.
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