In the evening was a masked ball in the Tacon Theatre, a spacious building, one of the largest of its kind in the world.  The pit, floored over, with the whole depth of the stage open to the back wall of the edifice, furnished a ball-room of immense size.  People in grotesque masks, in hoods or fancy dresses, were mingled with a throng clad in the ordinary costume, and Spanish dances were performed to the music of a numerous band.  A well-dressed crowd filled the first and second tier of boxes.  The Creole smokes everywhere, and seemed astonished when the soldier who stood at the door ordered him to throw away his lighted segar before entering.  Once upon the floor, however, he lighted another segar in defiance of the prohibition.

The Spanish dances, with their graceful movements, resembling the undulations of the sea in its gentlest moods, are nowhere more gracefully performed than in Cuba, by the young women born on the island.  I could not help thinking, however, as I looked on that gay crowd, on the quaint maskers, and the dancers whose flexible limbs seemed swayed to and fro by the breath of the music, that all this was soon to end at the Campo Santo, and I asked myself how many of all this crowd would be huddled uncoffined, when their sports were over, into the foul trenches of the public cemetery.

Letter XLVII.

Scenery of Cuba.—­Coffee Plantations.

Matanzas, April 16, 1849.

My expectations of the scenery of the island of Cuba and of the magnificence of its vegetation, have not been quite fulfilled.  This place is but sixty miles to the east of Havana, but the railway which brings you hither, takes you over a sweep of a hundred and thirty miles, through one of the most fertile districts in the interior of the island.  I made an excursion from Havana to San Antonio de los Banos, a pleasant little town at nine leagues distance, in a southeast direction from the capital, in what is called the Vuelta Abajo.  I have also just returned from a visit to some fine sugar estates to the southeast of Matanzas, so that I may claim to have seen something of the face of the country of which I speak.

At this season the hills about Havana, and the pastures everywhere, have an arid look, a russet hue, like sandy fields with us, when scorched by a long drought, on like our meadows in winter.  This, however, is the dry season; and when I was told that but two showers of rain have fallen since October, I could only wonder that so much vegetation was left, and that the verbenas and other herbage which clothed the ground, should yet retain, as I perceived they did, when I saw them nearer, an unextinguished life.  I have, therefore, the disadvantage of seeing Cuba not only in the dry season, but near the close of an uncommonly dry season.  Next month the rainy season commences, when the whole island, I am told, even the barrenest parts, flushes into a deep verdure, creeping plants climb over all the rocks and ascend the trees, and the mighty palms put out their new foliage.