“But, Conshy--a word in your starboard lug--why don’t you go to the fountain-head--why don’t you try your hand in a curtain lecture on Old Kit North himself, the hoary sinner who seduced me?” Conshy could no longer contain himself; the very idea of Old Kit having a conscience of any kind or description whatever, so tickled him, that he burst into a most uproarious fit of laughter, which I was in great hopes would have choked him, and thus made me well quit of him for ever. For some time I listened in great amazement, but there was something so infectious in his fun, that presently I began to laugh too, which only increased his cachinnation, so there were Conshy and I roaring, and shouting, with the tears running down our cheeks. “Kit listen to me!--Oh, Lord” “You are swearing, Conshy,” said I, rubbing my hands at having caught him tripping. “And enough to make a Quaker swear,” quoth he, still laughing. “No, no, Kit never listens to me--why, he would never listen even to my father, until the gout and the Catholic Relief Bill, and last of all, the Reform Bill, broke him down, and softened his heart.” So there is an allegory for you, worthy of John Bunyan. Next morning we got the breeze again, when we bore away for Santiago de Cuba, and arrived off the Moro Castle on the fifth evening at sunset, after leaving Port Royal harbour. The Spaniards, in their better days, were a kind of coral worms; wherever they planted their colonies, they immediately set to covering themselves in with stone and mortar; applying their own entire energies, and the whole strength of their Indian captives, first to the erection of a fort; their second object (postponed to the other only through absolute necessity) being then to build a temple to their God. Gradually vast fabrics appeared, where before there was nothing but one eternal forest, or a howling wilderness; and although it does come over one, when looking at the splendid moles, and firm-built bastions, and stupendous churches of the New World--the latter surpassing, or at the lest equalling in magnificence and grandeur those of Old Spain herself--that they are all cemented by the blood and sweat of millions of gentle Indians, of whose harmless existence in many quarters, they remain the only monuments, still it is a melancholy reflection to look back and picture to one’s self what Spain was, and to compare her, in her high and palmy state, with what she is now--to compare her present condition even with what she was when, as a young midshipman, I first visited her glorious Transatlantic colonies.