This heart, enveloped in wrappers of tender white leaves, makes a most delicious salad, and it is also boiled, like cauliflower, and served with a delicate white sauce. The trunk of the palm is composed of fibrous matter, which is stripped off and dried, forming a narrow, thin board, which the natives use for the walls of their cottages. The boughs are sometimes made to serve for roofing, though palm leaves are usually used for this purpose, as well as for the linings of the walls. "El yarey" is another variety of the palm tree that is of great utility. From it the native women make the palm leaf hats that are worn by almost all the villagers and country people of Cuba. TROPICAL FRUITS IN ABUNDANCE. The fruits of Cuba are those common to the tropics. Bananas, pineapples, oranges, lemons and bread-fruit all grow in abundance, delicious to the taste and delightful to the eye. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., after returning from a vacation trip to Cuba, wrote a charming description of a fruit garden that it was his good fortune to visit there: "The garden contained a remarkable variety of trees, including some thrifty exotics. Here the mango, with its peach-like foliage, was bending on the ground with the weight of its ripening fruit; the alligator pear was marvelously beautiful in its full blossom, suggesting, in form and color, the passion flower; the soft, delicate foliage of the tamarind was like our sensitive plant; the banana trees were in full bearing, the deep green fruit (it is ripened and turns yellow off the tree), being in clusters of a hundred, more or less, tipped at the same time by a single, pendent, glutinous bud, nearly as large as a pineapple. The date palm, so suggestive of the far east, and the only one we had seen in Cuba, was represented by a choice specimen, imported in its youth. There was also the star-apple tree, remarkable for its uniform and graceful shape, full of green fruit, with here and there a ripening specimen; so, also, was the favorite zapota, its rusty coated fruit hanging in tempting abundance. From low, broad spreading trees depended the grape fruit, as large as an infant's head and yellow as gold, while the orange, lime and lemon trees, bearing blossoms, green and ripe fruit all together, met the eye at every turn, and filled the garden with fragrance. The cocoanut palm, with its tall, straight stem, and clustering fruit, dominated all the rest. Guava, fig, custard apple, and bread-fruit trees, all were in bearing.