dining-room to see what good things the Señores had for dinner. Nothing is stranger than the Spaniard's disregard for those comforts of cleanliness which can fill even the humblest home with "sweetness and light." Here was our host,--a Spanish Cuban of good birth, with the manners of a prince, courteous, kindly, cultured,--content to dine off a tablecloth so stained and filthy and thick with grime that a Pickford's van boy would resent such a cover for his humble board at Café Lockhart or Pearce-and-Plenty. It was nothing to him and his genial, intelligent subordinates that the mustard-pot was dark with dead flies, and that ugly grease spots decorated the cloth, which was ringed with the stains of myriad wineglasses. They were all living like pigs and indeed with them, for the porkers came in and rooted under the table for the crumbs that fell from the rich men. And we were rich as far as food was concerned, for they gave us an excellent dinner of chicken and rice, beef, pork, omelette, boiled plantains and sweet potatoes, with pineapple as desert, the waiters being two Mexican boys who wore their straw hats and blankets all through their dinner-duties. The next morning we took our coffee with the administrator, sitting round the same fly-marked cloth. It was a lesson in Spanish dignity and how a man may tower above his surroundings to hear this grim fever-stricken Spanish gentleman talk history and politics in an almost stately old-world fashion amid such squalor. He insisted that we should stay to take breakfast with him at eleven, and we were glad we did, for we witnessed a curious scene well worth seeing. The previous evening the men had received their week's wages. As we had sipped our coffee we had heard the young Cuban clerk eternally calling "Antonio Rodriguez," "Lucio Perez," and such names; and then the chink of Mexican silver as the money, hard enough earned in those steaming hell-hot sugar swamps, was paid through the little iron-barred pigeon-hole. But there was one of these fellows who had gone away discontented. Each man is paid according to the amount of cane he cuts. This fellow, who had only been employed a fortnight, had cut none because he declared he had been engaged as an overseer, not a hand labourer. But during the two weeks he had had food and drink supplied him on credit, and now he had come up for pay. The clerk told him, naturally enough, that he would be paid when he did some work, and not before. So shortly after breakfast the man appeared before the pay-office to once more air his wrongs. The clerk referred the case to the administrator, who was talking with us, and the latter crossed over to the office. A minute later we heard angry voices, and then, to our amazement, the administrator dashed out of his office through the room where we sat and simply rushed at the grumbler. The latter backed off as Señor Sanchez made for him, apparently to kick or strike him.