"I now have the contract for cleaning the streets and have been connected with the city government a long time. The present system of cleaning the streets is a combination of old and new. When I took up the work about five years ago, I ascertained that the system was very deficient, so I went to New York and studied up the matter. To begin with, the pavements were very bad. The automatic street-sweepers cannot be used to advantage, though I have two sweeping-machines. At night time my people go out with the sweeping-machines and a sprinkler and clean the streets, and from there the dirt is taken to the railroad cars and from the station about nine miles from here, and there I do some business with it; that is, I make a kind of fertilizer. I employ 230 men. We have no furnace to burn up the garbage. I am now going to make a proposition to the city council to clean the cities for the same price and use crematories, doing it on the American plan. For cleaning the city I am to be paid $2350.50 weekly, but I do not get the money; they owe me $180,000. A year or two ago, by giving ten per cent. to the city mayors, etc., I collected $20,000 in one week. Immediately after I got the contract the aldermen called upon me and directed my attention to certain articles in it, so that I finally had to take these aldermen into partnership in order to collect the money. [Illustration: WATERMAN IN THE COUNTRY.] "I have also had the slaughter-house privilege. I paid the city council $800,000 per year for the privilege of collecting the slaughter-house taxes, and one year I collected nearly $880,000, out of which, of course, I had to pay my men. This has fallen off a great deal. To slaughter cattle, you have to pay 4-1/2 cents per kilo, $1 per head for the corral, $1.25 to kill and dress it, and then 50 cents to take it to the market. The present slaughter-house is a new one, and not very efficient at present, but it could be made into a good one. All the refuse from the slaughter-house now goes into the bay." What is true of Havana is true in lesser degree of the other cities and towns of the Island, the degree being governed chiefly by the difference in size; the larger the town, the nastier it is.