We shot a hawk and a woodpecker, and took them home; but, not many minutes after we had laid them on the tiled floor of our room, we became aware that we were invaded.  The ants were upon us.  They were coming by thousands in a regular line of march up our window-sill and down again inside, straight towards the birds.  When we looked out of the window, there was a black stripe lying across the court-yard on the flags, a whole army of them coming.  We saw it was impossible to get the skins of the birds, so threw them out of the window, and the advanced guard faced about and followed them.

On the sand in front of the village the Castor-oil plant flourished, the Palma Christi; its little nuts were ripe, and tasted so innocent that, undeterred by the example of the boy in the Swiss Family Robinson, I ate several, and was handsomely punished for it.  In the evening I recounted my ill-advised experiment to the white-jacketed loungers in the verandah of the inn, and was assured that I must have eaten an odd number!  The second nut, they told me with much gravity, counteracts the first, the fourth neutralizes the third, and so on ad infinitum.

We made two clerical acquaintances in the Isle of Pines.  One was the Cura of New Gerona, and his parentage was the only thing remarkable about him.  He was not merely the son of a priest, but his grandfather was a priest also.

The other was a middle-aged ecclesiastic, with a pleasant face and an unfailing supply of good-humoured fun.  Everybody seemed to get acquainted with him directly, and to become quite confidential after the first half-hour; and a drove of young men followed him about everywhere.  His reverence kept up the ball of conversation continually, and showed considerable skill in amusing his auditors and drawing them out in their turn.  It is true the jokes which passed seemed to us mild, but they appeared to suit the public exactly; and indeed, the Padre was quite capable of providing better ones when there was a market for them.

We found that though a Spaniard by birth, he had been brought up at the Lazarist College in Paris, which we know as the training-school of the French missionaries in China; and we soon made friends with him, as everyone else did.  A day or two afterwards we went to see him in Havana, and found him hard at his work, which was the superintendence of several of the charitable institutions of the city—­the Foundling Hospital, the Lunatic Asylum, and others.  His life was one of incessant labour, and indeed people said he was killing himself with over-work, but he seemed always in the same state of chronic hilarity; and when he took us to see the hospitals, the children and patients received him with demonstrations of great delight.