Very brilliantly painted in fresco are the walls of the "Golden Lion" of Matanzas. Venus rises from the sea in your bedroom, or rather in that portion of an enormous dormitory which is allotted to you. Paris offers the golden apple to the three goddesses in the dining-room, and the whole court of Olympus, more or less successfully limned by an Italian artist, occupies the lofty walls of the general sitting-room on the first and only floor. The waiters are nearly all Coolies, and very clean and tidy they are. The landlady, in the days of my youth, was a French, coloured dame of enormous size, but also of almost preternatural activity. "Madame" was everywhere, upstairs and downstairs, and never seemed to go to sleep. It mattered little at what hour of the day or night you happened to come in, you were sure to find the old lady, with a huge turban on her head, ready to bid you welcome, with the very broadest of smiles. As my friend and myself had brought her a letter, which, by-the-way, she could not read, of introduction from one of her Havanese patrons, she made a prodigious fuss in our honour. She felt sure, she said, that, being Englishmen, we should like to have a bedroom all to ourselves, to which reasonable proposition we very naturally assented. Presently she took us upstairs to a very long and very lofty dormitory, furnished with about a dozen brass bedsteads, arranged against the walls in a double line, each duly protected by mosquito curtains, and supplemented by a table, a chair, an iron tripod, bearing a basin and jug, and a flat candlestick. Having paraded us once or twice up and down this apartment, she suddenly stopped in front of two neat little bedsteads standing side by side, and, pointing to them, informed us in Creole French (she came from Martinique) that she destined them for our accommodation. But what about the proffered privacy? Were we to dress and undress in the presence of the strange occupants of the other dozen beds, and were we to be soothed, or otherwise, throughout the dreary watches of the night, by their combined snores. We resolved, between ourselves, to make no comment, to leave fate and Madame to work out our destiny. We descended to our dinner without venturing the least observation. When we went upstairs again to unpack our travelling trunks, we were heartily amused to find that the worthy old soul had fenced us off from our future companions, with four long sheets, fastened by old-fashioned washing-pegs, to a rope stretched tightly across the room.