A drive of four miles, through a country full of palm and cocoanut trees, brought us to the gate of a coffee plantation, which our friend in the checked shirt, by whom we were accompanied, opened for us.  We passed up to the house through what had been an avenue of palms, but was now two rows of trees at very unequal distances, with here and there a sickly orange-tree.  On each side grew the coffee shrubs, hung with flowers of snowy white, but unpruned and full of dry and leafless twigs.  In every direction were ranks of trees, prized for ornament or for their fruit, and shrubs, among which were magnificent oleanders loaded with flowers, planted in such a manner as to break the force of the wind, and partially to shelter the plants from the too fierce rays of the sun.  The coffee estate is, in fact, a kind of forest, with the trees and shrubs arranged in straight lines.  The mayoral, or steward of the estate, a handsome Cuban, with white teeth, a pleasant smile, and a distinct utterance of his native language, received us with great courtesy, and offered us cigarillos, though he never used tobacco; and spirit of cane, though he never drank.  He wore a sword, and carried a large flexible whip, doubled for convenience in the hand.  He showed us the coffee plants, the broad platforms with smooth surfaces of cement and raised borders, where the berries were dried in the sun, and the mills where the negroes were at work separating the kernel from the pulp in which it is inclosed.

“These coffee estates,” said he, “are already ruined, and the planters are abandoning them as fast as they can; in four years more there will not be a single coffee plantation on the island.  They can not afford to raise coffee for the price they get in the market.”

I inquired the reason.  “It is,” replied he, “the extreme dryness of the season when the plant is in flower.  If we have rain at this time of the year, we are sure of a good crop; if it does not rain, the harvest is small; and the failure of rain is so common a circumstance that we must leave the cultivation of coffee to the people of St. Domingo and Brazil.”

I asked if the plantation could not be converted into a sugar estate.

“Not this,” he answered; “it has been cultivated too long.  The land was originally rich, but it is exhausted”—­tired out, was the expression he used—­“we may cultivate maize or rice, for the dry culture of rice succeeds well here, or we may abandon it to grazing.  At present we keep a few negroes here, just to gather the berries which ripen, without taking any trouble to preserve the plants, or replace those which die.”

I could easily believe from what I saw on this estate, that there must be a great deal of beauty of vegetation in a well-kept coffee plantation, but the formal pattern in which it is disposed, the straight alleys and rows of trees, the squares and parallelograms, showed me that there was no beauty of arrangement.  We fell in, before we returned to our inn, with the proprietor, a delicate-looking person, with thin white hands, who had been educated at Boston, and spoke English as if he had never lived anywhere else.  His manners, compared with those of his steward, were exceedingly frosty and forbidding, and when we told him of the civility which had been shown us, his looks seemed to say he wished it had been otherwise.