Fortuny.  The expanse of the bay is fine, and the large fleet at anchor furnishes it but thinly.  Townward, as the sun’s rays begin to dissipate the brown shadows and define shape and color, the city sparkles like a gorgeous mosaic; but in another half hour, when the sun is higher, the hazy softness has departed and the city is ablaze with light, so that your eyes can scarcely look at it.  Then, if you have seen it earlier, it loses its charm.

I was jealous of Havana from what I had heard and read of it:  if the shore-line, and the entrance, and the bay, and the scene were finer than Rio, I was prepared to be angry; but Rio is grand and Havana is pretty, so that one may like both and not divide his allegiance.  A patchwork of good pictures in the Moorish vein of town, and shore, and water would reproduce, and yet not copy, all that Havana has to offer; but there is not a picture in the world that aspires to the grandeur of Rio.  But I won’t deny the sparkle and brilliancy of Havana.  At this moment the sky is of a perfect “Himmel-blau.”  I can see from my window, near the roof, the rich, harmonious Moorish blending of varied colors in the houses; and beyond these “the white feet of the wind shine along the sea.”  A ship with all sail set is coming into port, the white-capped waves rolling her along before the stiff sea-breeze.  Wind is the bane of the place.  It sets in to blow, as the sailors say, soon after daylight nine days in ten, and blows all day, and sometimes far into the night.  It is not always the soft, perennial zephyr of tradition, but often chill and raw, and then there is no escape from it except to shut yourself in your room; and that means hermetically sealing, for when you close a window here you close a shutter, and thus, if you shut out the breeze, you shut the light out also.  The doors and windows are not meant to exclude the air, and so when the breeze gets on a frolic it whirls up stairs and down—­goeth, in fact, where it listeth; and sometimes one feels it going through him like a knife.

The houses are built in one width of rooms round a hollow square; consequently, when you put your boots out you put them out of doors.  In the midst of the house, with the sky overhead, the umbrageous palm tree and banana spread their broad leaves.  The rooms are high and white, with little furniture, and no curtains, with open ceiling of painted rafters, and iron gratings, like a prison’s bars, shutting out the street in the front of the house.  Behind these gratings the passer-by may see the Cuban family arranged in two prim rows of arm-chairs vis-a-vis, or gathered about the bars as if looking for some means of escape.  Occasionally now in some of the better quarters a child of either sex, but black as night, disports itself in full view, “covered by the darkness only.”  There is an infinite variety of opinion in regard to the clothing necessary to comfort here.  I have often found a light overcoat comfortable, but there is a tribe or clan from some