_The high palme-trees, with braunches faire,_ _Out of the lowly vallies did arise,_ _And high shoote up their heads into the skyes._ —Spenser. [Illustration] Heathen who worship the sun are not such bad philosophers, after all. For the second time we learned that the bright sun changes the circumstances; so we resolved to make our pluck last from sunrise to sunrise, instead of from sunrise to sunset. We were sanguine travelers who set out from Benavides to Matanzas, over a fairly good yellow clay road which lasted only about one-third of the nine miles to Cuba’s show town at the head of the Yumuri Valley. We gayly bid good morning to the familiar rocks. Crossing them was not as hard work as it had been the first day. Places which had puzzled and almost stumped us, we crossed with Icarian abandon. Waldon, at the steering wheel, had learned new tricks of acrobatic motoring and all of us had developed unexpected ingenuity in makeshift road engineering. We did not waste any time in rolling away the wrong rock or any other rock than the one whose removal was absolutely necessary to make progress possible. We had developed a system of team work and were able to go over these patches of rock at four or five miles an hour where, previously, we had been able to make only two or three. Coming to a place where there was a new road under construction, but not far enough under to be used for motoring, we encountered the contractor in charge of the grading. He was an English-speaking Cuban, who had served time in the United States, and was greatly amazed at our approach. The only way we could convince him that we had driven from Havana was by pointing out that we could not have come from any other place. He seemed to like us and so gave us all the information he had concerning the impossibility of going any farther than Matanzas. Every first-class city in Cuba has a road. It does not straggle out of town. It darts straight into the country as though it intended to cross the island. After a couple of miles it stops, as if the money had run out, the mayor had died, or some other calamity had occasioned its sudden ending. About six inches past the edge of the macadam there is likely to be a deep morass, a bed of rocks that look as though they had been thrown there from a volcano, or a great confusion of bottomless ruts. There is no such thing as a compromise between the good and the bad. It is either one or the other. We struck the good about the time we came within sight of the cathedral towers of Matanzas.