and graceful indigo; the slow-growing arrowroot, with its palmy and feathery leaves spreading like a tender rampart round its precious fruit; boundless fields of the rich sugar-cane; acres of the luscious pine apple; groves of banana and plantain; forests of cedar and mahogany; flowers of every hue and shade; the very jungle netted over with the creeping convolvulus,—­these, and a thousand others, of which fortunately for the reader I know not the names, are continually bursting on the scene with equal profusion and variety, bearing lovely testimony to the richness of the soil and the mildness of the climate.

Alas! that this fair isle should be at one and the same time the richest gem in the crown of Spain, and the foulest blot on her escutcheon.  Her treaties are violated with worse than Punic faith, and here horrors have been enacted which would make the blood of a Nero curdle in his veins.  Do you ask, how are treaties violated?  When slaves are brought here by our cruisers, Spain is bound by treaty to apprentice them out for three years, so as to teach them how to earn a living, and then to free them.  My dear John Bull, you will be sorry to hear, that despite the activity of our squadron for the suppression of slavery, that faithless country which owes a national existence to oceans of British treasure, and the blood of the finest army the great Wellington ever led, has the unparalleled audacity to make us slave carriers to Cuba.  Yes, thousands of those who, if honour and truth were to be found in the Government of Spain, would now be free, are here to be seen pining away their lives in the galling and accursed chains of slavery, a living reproach to England, and a black monument of Spanish faith.  Yes, John Bull, I repeat the fact; thousands of negroes are bound here in hopeless fetters, that were brought here under the British flag.  And, that there may be no doubt of the wilfulness with which the Cuban authorities disregard their solemn obligations, it is a notorious fact, that in a country where passports and police abound in every direction, so that a negro cannot move from his own home, upwards of a hundred were landed in the last year, 1852, from one vessel, at a place only thirty-five miles from the Havana, and marched in three days across the island to—­where do you think?—­to some Creole’s, or to some needy official’s estate? no such thing; but, as if to stamp infamy on Spain, at the highest step of the ladder, they were marched to the Queen Mother’s estate.  If this be not wickedness in high places, what is?  The slave trade flourishes luxuriantly here with the connivance of authority; and what makes the matter worse is, that the wealth accumulated by this dishonesty and national perjury is but too generally—­and I think too justly—­believed to be the mainspring of that corruption at home for which Spain stands pre-eminent among the nations of the earth.  I will now give you a sketch of the cruelties which have been enacted here; and, although an old story, I do not think it is very generally known.