On a hillock near Matanzas, with a ragged wood behind it, stood for many years an unkempt cottage. In our land we should hardly dignify it by such a name. We would call it, rather, a hovel. Some rotting timbers of it may still be left, for the black people who live thereabout keep away, especially at night, believing that the hillock is a resort of spirits. Yet not many of them remember the incident that put this unpleasant fame upon it, for--that was back in the slavery days. The brutal O'Donnell was governor-general then. He found Cuba in its usual state of sullen tranquillity, and no chance seemed to offer by which he could make a name for himself, so he magnified every village wrangle into an insurrection. It looked well in his reports when he set forth the skill and ease with which he had suppressed the uprisings, and, as he did not scruple to take life in punishment for slight offences, nor to retaliate on a community for the misconduct of a single member of it, he almost created the revolution that he described to his home government. The merest murmur, the merest shadow was enough to take him to the scene of an alleged outbreak, and he would cause slaves to be whipped until they were ready to confess anything. A black boy in Matanzas, arrested on suspicion of inciting to rebellion, was condemned to seven hundred blows with the lash. At the end of the flogging, being still alive, he was shot, at O'Donnell's order. He would confess nothing, because he had nothing to confess. This boy had been brought up in a well-to-do Spanish family, and was the play-mate, the friend, of the son of that family, rather than his slave. The white boy begged for the life of his associate, the family implored mercy, and asked for at least a trial, but the governor-general would not listen to them, and after the shooting the white boy became insane with shock and grief. Thus much of the legend is declared to be fact.