while they talk, may seem curious, but it is a custom that we may not criticize either with fairness or common decency.  The same may be said of the not uncommon custom of using a part of the street floor of the house as a stable.  It is an old custom, brought from Spain.  But I have wandered from description to incident.  I have no intention to attempt a description of Cuban home life, beyond saying that I have been a guest in costly homes in the city and in the little palm-leaf “shacks” of peasants, and have invariably found in both, and in the homes of intermediate classes, only cordial hospitality and gracious courtesy.  Those who have found anything different have carried it with them in their own attitude toward their hosts.  Many of us, probably most of us, in the United States, make a sort of fetich of the privacy of what we call our home life.  We are encased in walls of wood or masonry, with blinds, curtains, or shades at our windows.  It might be supposed that we wanted to hide, that there was something of which to be ashamed.  It might at least be so interpreted by one unfamiliar with our ways.  It is only, like the open domestic life in Cuba, a custom, a habit of long standing.  Certainly, much of the domestic life of Cuba is open.  The mistress of the house chides a servant, rebukes or comforts a child, sits with her embroidery, chaffers with an itinerant merchant or with the clerk from a store, all in plain sight and hearing of the passer-by.  What everyone does, no one notices.  The customs of any country are curious only to those from other countries where customs are different.  Our ways of life are quite as curious to others as are their ways to us.  We are quite blind to that fact chiefly because of an absurd conviction of the immense superiority of our ways.  We do not stop to consider reasons for differences.  A cup of coffee on an American breakfast table usually consists of about four parts coffee and one part milk or cream.  Most Cubans usually reverse these percentages.  There is a good reason for it.  In our climate, we do not need the large open doors and windows, the high ceilings, and the full and free ventilation that make life endurable in tropical and sub-tropical countries.  Their system here would be as impossible as would be our system there.  Houses in Cuba like those of an American city or town would make life a miserable burden.  The publicity, or semi-publicity, of Cuban home life is a necessary result of conditions.  It is, naturally, more in evidence in the city proper, where the houses, abutting immediately on the street, as do most of our city houses, are built, as ours are, in solid rows.  We avoid a good deal of publicity by piling our homes on top of each other, and by elevators and stair-climbing.