LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

    Santo Domingo, Past and Present; with a Glance at Hayti.  By
    Samuel Hazard.  New York:  Harper & Brothers.

Mr. Hazard, who has already obliged us with one of the best accounts of Cuba extant in modern literature, now does a similar service for Santo Domingo, which he declares to be much more highly favored by Nature, and which he examined with the United States commission of 1871.  This book has the advantage of being prepared within reach of the British Museum, whose stores of Americo-Spanish authorities have enabled him to write up with much fullness the historical sketch which occupies a third of his space.  This is a fair, faithful and skillful condensation, and the most readable narrative we have seen of poor Dominica’s tale of revolutions and wrongs.  The personal portion begins with the author’s arrival at the Salt Keys and Puerto Plata, and follows the steps of the commissioners, with a great many anecdotes and a sprinkling of artistic sketches, to Samana and Santo Domingo City; thence overland to the great inland tobacco-mart of Santiago; and so back to Puerto Plata and Monte Christo, where the commission ceased its labors, being discouraged by the Haytians from an exploration within their domain; while Mr. Hazard, resuming his capacity of private citizen, took his life in his hand and ventured into the proud Mumbo-Jumbo republic.  It is here that the really lively part of the story commences, and the author becomes the hero of quite a tragedy of errors.  At the first Haytian port, Dauphin Bay, he meets the port-captain who cannot read his passport, the port-general who bows and sends him to the chef de police, the chef who asks for half a dollar without countersigning the document, and lets the pilgrim go on in quest of the American consul.  The only hotel is closed and “busted:”  the consul indicates a billiard-room, whose proprietor feeds the stranger, informing him at the same time that the authorities take him for a United States commissioner, and have doubled the guards.  The next visit is to a banker, who plays him a curious practical joke.  Demanding Haytian bank-notes for a few hundred dollars on a letter of credit, the tourist, after a time of waiting, sees the street on which the banker lives completely blocked with donkey-carts, drays, mules, horses with panniers and carts drawn by bullocks.  A negro drayman informs him that “the American commissioner, having come over-night from Monte Christo, is drawing a draft in Haytian specie, and that the carts are to load up with it.”  The banker, being consulted, offers to store the currency cheap in a warehouse, but advises as a friend that the draft be reduced, the bullocks sent away, and that the traveler take a beer.  “I took the beer,” says Mr. Hazard.  A dollar in gold means just four hundred dollars in Haytian paper:  a cocktail cost the traveler “thirty dollars,” and other things in proportion.  These beginnings