so gifted by Nature, is being despoiled by man; and what ought to be a garden will become overgrown with weeds if there is not a change of fortune.  There is taxation without representation under an iron despotism:  there is an army without war, and the people look on.  It is not necessary to find any new means of going to the bad at a gallop.  The rich give practical support to the Spanish, and moral support to the insurrection; but if the insurrection should triumph, I can’t see how it will benefit the Creole Cubans of property.  I think ideas here are confused on the subject, and while they are giving hearty encouragement to neither cause, between the two they are sure to be utterly ruined.

I have spent a week in all on sugar plantations in the interior.  I was delightfully entertained, and reveled in the luxury of soft air and out-of-door life.  I was on horseback a good deal, riding one of the shuffling little animals they have here, whose gait is so easy that it doesn’t amount to motion.  The crops are to a great extent still uncut; the green cane, which looks like our broom-corn at a distance, waves in the winds as far as the eye can reach.  The country is level, but has a frame of mountain-land.  The woods are festooned with air-plants and parasites; palm trees dot the landscape in every direction or run in splendid avenues, sometimes in double rows, alternating with the round, full mamey tree, whose deep green foliage brings into fine relief the white stalk of the palm.  The breeze rustles through the broad plantations of bananas and sways the orange groves.  The gardens are rich in flowers of brilliant hues.  The fields swarm with negroes and ox-carts; the ponderous machinery of the boiling-houses maintains a steady hum; the picturesque buildings are all touched with Fortuny-like tints:  there is much to see and much to tell of, but I must have some regard for your patience.  I have not finished, but I must stop.

F. C. N.

FRENCH SLANG.

Reading the slang of a language is much like seeing the said language in its intellectual shirt-sleeves, off duty and taking its ease:  one feels sure of detecting some essential characteristics of the people who speak it, and one turns over the pages of a slang dictionary expecting to recognize through its corruption and perversions the real nature of the people who have created it.  French slang is no exception to this, theory:  the two hundred and thirty double-columned pages of M. Larcher’s Dictionnaire historique, etymologique et anecdotique de l’argot parisien tell us that the two grand sources and inspirations of our American slang are entirely wanting:  there is not a humorous word or phrase from beginning to end; and hardly an instance of that incongruous exaggeration which is so salient a picture of our best-known and most original slang phrases.  But, on the other hand, there is satire keen and fine on every page, a reckless, devil-may-care