As a proof of the industry and intelligence of these natives, let us go to a hacienda, or farm, a mile out of town. Though it is a short walk, yet having ordered a fly for a longer ride, we employ it on this excursion. We did not take the carriage of the country, which is a basket on two wheels, about the size of a cot-bed, which cot-bed itself lies on the bottom of the basket, and on which sit the passengers. A wicker covering bends over about two-thirds of this bed; the rest is open to sun and rain. Three mules abreast make this fly fly.
Our three little mules drag a sort of covered coach on high springs, narrow and jolty. They run under the whip and scream of the muleteer. The gate of the hacienda is soon reached. A lazy Indian boy opens it. We rush between a green wall of cocoa-trees a score of rods to a thatched-built house, large, well-floored, high-roofed, clean. The brown lady of the mansion welcomes us, and I try to buy a hammock. She asks three dollars. I have no gold, and she despises greenbacks, whether of Washington or Havana. So the bargain fails. The same thing I have since seen offered in Boston for less money. It is cheaper sometimes to buy your foreign curiosities after you get home.
Her boys take us to a cocoa-nut orchard, pluck off the nuts, split them with a sharp cleaver, and pour their milk into a glass. We drink in honor of the host. An old man runs up to us, with nothing on him but a pair of white pants, a cleaver stuck in his girdle behind, and a straw hat. He offs hat with both hands, and bows low to the ground. Had Darwin seen him he would have protested that he was the man primeval, built ages before the English Adam, who is (to Darwin) the height of attained, if not attainable, civilization. His face looked very like a monkey's, and his posture also. Yet this ape of modern false science was a gentleman of fortune, and industry, and sagacity, who had subdued five hundred acres of this wild land, and made himself a property worth six thousand dollars even here, many times that in the States. He raises hemp and cocoa-nuts, and is rich. His manners were gracious, and when he found he could not talk with us, he bid us
