Going back from the sugar mill, in the early morning, to the farmhouse where we had left El Toro, we noticed two chances of crossing the muggy river where automobiling in Cuba had ceased the night before. One place was wide, low, and flat. It meant long hours of tedious filling in with brush. The other was a narrow cut between two precipitous walls. We chose the cut, for it required only a few minutes to fill the narrow bottom with enough brush to allow the car to be driven down one hillside and up the other as fast as all its power could take it. Our underbrush pontoons were engineering triumphs. We knew exactly how much brush it required to support the car when driven rapidly over one of them. It would have been a mere waste of labor to have piled on enough brush to allow slow driving, stopping, or recrossing. The whole country was a wide morass. We were in the lowland, between two ranges of mountains. The only difference between what we called mud holes and the rest of the country, was that the mud holes had no bottom, whereas the hard ground or stone underneath the remaining miles of our travel allowed us to plow slowly through the surface mire. Near the mill we halted before a strange and fascinating scene. A dozen heavy carts, loaded with sugar cane, that had been left outside the mill yard the night before, clogged the only available passageway to the country beyond. We sat in the car and watched a hundred men and fifty straining, tugging bulls try to get the heavy carts through the mud, in which they settled to their axles. Musical, yet vicious, pleading, yet commanding, using goad as well as voice, the violent drivers yelled at each struggling bull by name: “Tamarindo! Canario!” Often a dozen yelled in chorus. Failing to budge the foremost cart, all ceased their efforts and, wildly gesticulating, argued and wrangled while more bulls were brought from a rear cart and hitched to the one stuck in the mud ahead. It took a dozen of the wide-shouldered, powerful bulls, pulling all together, with all their might, to drag each cart to the hard ground in the mill yard. In the meantime, scores of idle mill laborers, representing every type which the island affords, lounged around, dividing their attention between the curious struggle and the strange sight which we made in our motor car. While they watched with curious eyes, they pared long sugar canes with skillful flips of their machetes and sucked the thin sweetness.