prefer the dreadful tom-tom, and their own barbaric sounds, imported, doubtless, from Africa, they will crowd the galleries of the Tacon Theatre to listen to Italian operas. When I was last in Havana, nearly every darkie you met was whistling the Toreador song from "Carmen," the favourite opera then being performed, to the accompaniment of an orchestra largely composed of coloured people,--a peculiarity which would never be tolerated in the States, where no white conductor would lead a mixed band, and where half the audience would leave the house on beholding woolly heads bending over instruments played by sable hands. Many members of the Tacon orchestra, one of the best in existence, are full-blooded negroes, and, with their co-operation, not only Italian, but Wagnerian opera, is successfully performed. Slavery has unfortunately been replaced, in Cuba, by coolie labour, a form of the same cruel institution, which, for some occult reason, has never excited the same amount of horror in Europe, possibly because it does not bear the actual name of slavery, and because most people imagine the wretched coolie sells himself, instead of being sold. In 1877 there were 43,000 Chinese workmen on the island, all that remained out of 100,000, originally imported, of whom not less than 16,000 had died on their way out from China. At the present moment the coolies number something like 40,000. These poor wretches do not bring their female belongings with them, and are consequently reduced to a condition of enforced celibacy; for so great is the contempt in which these voluntary slaves are held, not even the lowest negress will have anything to do with them. Despised by the whites, and detested by the blacks, they lead a miserable life, and die like flies, in the scorching climate. The very partial success of the coolie immigration scheme led, some years ago, to the importation of Mayas from Yucatan, but this has not been followed by happy results; and what with the depreciation of tropical produce, the number of estates which have gone out of cultivation, and the revolutionary movement, the present condition of the coloured class, and of the coolies, is exceedingly deplorable. They have swollen the ranks of the malcontents, and form a portion of that starving multitude of which we have heard so much of late. In a word, they are workmen out of employment, starving plantation hands, and their condition seems irremediable, unless, indeed, some wealthy Power should eventually take the island in hand, and spend countless millions in the endeavour to lift it, once more, to its former condition of prosperity. CHAPTER III. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ISLAND.