In this geographical and climatic environment there has grown up on the island an interesting but rather sleepy and unprogressive city of twenty-two thousand inhabitants. The most important of the elements that go to make up its population are, first, whites from the United States, who are chiefly engaged in shipping or commerce; second, Cubans of mixed blood, employed, for the most part, in the cigar factories; third, immigrants from the Bahamas, known as "conchs," who devote themselves mainly to fishing, sponging, and wrecking; and, fourth, negroes from America and the West Indian Islands, who turn their hands to anything they can find to do, from shoveling coal to diving into the clear water of the bay after the pennies or nickels thrown by Northern tourists from the deck of the _Mascotte_ or the _Olivette_. Nothing in the shape of fruit, grain, or vegetables is raised on the island for export, and the greater part of the city's food-supply comes either from Florida or from the islands of the West Indies. The first thing that strikes a newcomer in Key West is the distinctly and unmistakably foreign aspect of the city. In spite of the English names on many of the sign-boards over the shops, the American faces on the streets, and the crowd of American officers and war correspondents smoking or talking on the spacious piazzas of the Key West Hotel, one cannot get rid of the impression that he has left the United States and has landed in some such town as San Juan de Guatemala or Punta Arenas, on the Pacific coast of Central America. Everything that meets the eye seems new, unfamiliar, and, in some subtle, indefinable way, un-American. The vivid but pale and delicate green of the ocean water; the slender, fern-headed cocoanut-palms which stand in clumps here and there along the streets; the feathery Australian pines and dark-green Indian laurels which shade the naval storehouse and the Marine Hospital; the masses of tamarind, almond, sapodilla, wild-fig, banana, and cork-tree foliage in the yards of the white, veranda-belted houses; the Spanish and Cuban types on the piers and in front of the hotels; the unfamiliar language which strikes the ear at almost every step--all suggest a tropical environment and Spanish, rather than American, influences and characteristics.