Whilst we were staying with this amiable family we were initiated into the mysteries of guava jelly-making by a tall mulatress, who acted as cook to the establishment, and who was evidently held in great respect by every member of the community, especially by the darksome urchins, who, although they haunted her kitchen in the hope of purloining titbits, constantly received sharp raps on their woolly pates, from a prodigiously long iron spoon. There was no very great mystery about the guava jelly,--the process is exactly like that of compounding any other fruit-jelly; and as to the paste or cheese, I think that between the making of it and damson cheese there is only the difference which exists between Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee. However, I frankly admit my devotion to guava paste. And as to the jelly,--the Easterns say we may hope to enjoy in the next world those things which we like best to eat in this,--therefore pray I, that when I shuffle off this mortal coil, I need not relinquish all hope of an occasional treat of guava jelly! A sketch of Cuba which contained no mention of tobacco would be very much like "Hamlet" without the Prince of Denmark. The name of the dusky chief whom Christopher Columbus found inhaling the fragrant leaf of the _tabaco_, as he called it, should have lived even to our days. But, like that of many another unknown hero, his title is unrecorded, and probably neither Columbus nor his savage friend ever imagined the prodigious results that were to grow out of the conversation, in the course of which the Indian instructed the discoverer of the New World as to the value and properties of the strange weed, the soothing properties of which he seemed so greatly to enjoy. Little did they foresee that within a hundred years a Mahommedan Kaliph and a Christian Pope were both to fulminate excommunication against such of their followers as ventured to indulge a taste they deemed unworthy and unclean. The aboriginal Indians did not smoke tobacco after our present fashion. They inhaled the fumes through a forked cane, the two prongs of which they applied to their nostrils, whilst the longer end was plunged among the burning leaves. Such implements are still used, I am assured, by the negroes in Cuba, and elsewhere, when they desire to forget their sorrows in the dreamy sleep thus artificially produced.