they rarely visit the country, they still retain them, entrusting the management of their property to agents and overseers. Among these absentee landlords are the Aldamas, Fernandinas, dos Hermanos, Santovenios, and the Terres, whose palaces in the Cerro quarter of Havana have stood uninhabited for years, except, perhaps, for an occasional and rare winter visit. Still there are, or were, until quite lately, many wealthy Cuban planters who reside on their plantations, with their wives and families. A few years ago--I daresay it is so still, on such estates as have not been devastated by the Rebels or the Spaniards--the grown-up sons lived with their parents, each attending to a separate department of the plantation, until the father died. Then one of them--the eldest, as a rule--took over the whole estate, paying each of his brothers a proper proportion of his net yearly earnings, and if sufficient frugality was exercised, he was able to pay them a share of the original property into the bargain. But even when these events took place, they did not necessitate the separation of the family. The Cubans are naturally a domestic and affectionate people, exceedingly happy in their home relations. In many a Hacienda, from one to four or five families will live most peaceably, under the same roof. The men, as a rule, make excellent husbands, and are passionately fond of their children, whom they are apt to spoil, and often ruin, by allowing the coloured servants to over-indulge them. In these patriarchal homesteads, the children, being not a little isolated from other society, become exceedingly attached to each other. When the girls attain a marriageable age they are placed in seclusion, under the charge of a governess, or else sent to one or other of the great convents in the Capital managed by French and Spanish nuns of the Sacré Cœur, Assumption, and Ursuline orders. The results of this system are not always fortunate. Premature marriages abound. Many a Cuban is a father before he is eighteen years of age, by a wife a couple of years his junior--a fact which may account, even more, perhaps, than the much-blamed tropical climate, for the physical inferiority of the race. Then again, as is invariably the case in slave countries, a pernicious laxity in morals is tolerated, and Cuban life, in cities and plantations alike, will not, I have been assured on good authority, bear too close investigation. If the ancestors were devoted to their Voltaire and their Jean Jacques, the modern descendants are equally zealous readers of all the most suggestive French and Italian novels. The fine literature of the mother country has never found much favour in Cuba, and the educated islanders are far more intimately acquainted with Zola, Gaboriau, Gyp, and Huyssman than with Cervantes, Calderon, Lope, and Fernan Cabalero. They do not even patronise their own national drama, preferring modern French and Italian plays. It is a curious fact that even really excellent