The Prado, it began to be clear, of all the possible places of residence in Havana, was the best; the Escobars went to Paris when they willed; and, altogether, Charles told himself, he had made a very fortunate beginning. He picked up, from various sources on the steamer, useful tags of knowledge about his destination: The Inglaterra, to which he had been directed, was a capital hotel, but outside the walls. Still, the Calle del Prado, the Paseo there, were quite gay; and before them was the sweep of the Parque Isabel, where the band played. At the Hotel St. Louis, next door, many of the Spanish officers had their rooms, but at the hour of dinner they gathered in the Cafe Dominica. The Noble Havana was celebrated for its camarones--shrimps, Charles learned--and the Tuileries, at the juncture of Consulado and San Rafael Streets, had a salon upstairs especially for women. Most of his dinners, however, he would get at the Restaurant Francais, excellently kept by Francois Garcon on Cuba Street, number seventy-two. There he would encounter the majority of his young fellow countrymen in Havana; the Cafe El Louvre would serve for sherbets after the theatre, and the Aguila de Oro.... The Plaza de Toros, of course, he would frequent: it was on Belascoin Street near the sea. The afternoon fights only were fashionable; the bulls killed in the morning were no more than toro del aguadiente. And the cockpit was at the Valla de Gallo. There were other suggestions as well, put mostly in the form of ribald inquiry; but toward them Charles Abbott persisted in an attitude of uncommunicative disdain. His mind, his whole determination, had been singularly purified; he had a sensation of remoteness from the flesh; his purpose killed earthly desire. He thought of himself now as dedicated to that: Charles reviewed the comfortable amount of his letter of credit, his personal qualifications, the derringer mounted in mother-of-pearl, in the light of one end. It annoyed him that he couldn't, at once, plunge into this with Domingo Escobar; but, whenever he approached that ordinarily responsive gentleman with anything political, he grew morose and silent, or else, more maddening still, deliberately put Charles' interest aside. The derringer, however, brought out an unexpected and gratifying stir. Escobar had stopped in Charles' cabin, and the latter, with a studied air of the casual, displayed the weapon on his berth. "You must throw it away," Escobar exclaimed dramatically; "at once, now, through the porthole." "I can't do that," Charles explained; "it was a gift from my father; besides, I'm old enough for such things." "A gift from your father, perhaps," the other echoed; "but did he tell you, I wonder, how you were going to get it into Cuba? Did he explain what the Spanish officials would do if they found you with a pistol? Dama de Caridad, do you suppose Cuba is New York! The best you could hope for would be deportation. Into the sea with it."