I have already recorded so much of wrangling politics and the debates of infuriate minds that one might infer that I was leading no life of my own.  Do you think that I am only a shadow or a registering machine, and that Dorothy is not flesh and blood?  Sometimes it occurs to me that I am not treating her as a woman in spite of my desire to be thoughtful.  A vast world of rich imagination, of vital emotion was in truth moving about me all the while, and in breasts that I did not comprehend.  For all my life up to this time and beyond it, as you shall see, was occupied with money making and with watching principally the epic development of America.  But I was later to awake as from a day dream or from a life in a shell, to the consciousness of a brighter world of sunlight and of wings.  I was at peace now, and with Dorothy, whose frailty required my watchfulness and my care, and whom I delighted to please with lovely things.  That was the extent of my emotional life.  And so we drove, and visited the shops in Opispo Street.  For I was waiting for Douglas.  I wanted to take him off to a bull fight or a cock fight.  And I was eager to hear him talk of his plans, of America, of anything that came from his fluent and restless mind.

One evening when Dorothy and I were in the comfortable lounging chairs on the roof of the hotel, looking over toward Morro Castle, counting the largest of the richly brilliant stars, Douglas came upon us.  He had returned from his trip only that afternoon.  Finding my note, and leaving other engagements, he had come over to call, delighted and surprised to find that we were in Havana.  Cuba already had a railroad, but it was not of much extent.  He had been traveling by carriage, and in the hillier localities in a vehicle of two enormous wheels, drawn by horses driven in tandem.  He had seen the cave, the pineapple fields, the sugar plantations.  His imagination was already at work for America.

He went on to say to me that whenever the people of Cuba should show themselves worthy of freedom by asserting their independence and should apply for annexation to the United States, they ought to be annexed.  And that whenever Spain should be ready to sell Cuba, with the consent of its inhabitants, the United States should accept the chance.  With spirit he exclaimed that if Spain should transfer Cuba to England, or any other European power America should take Cuba by force.  “It is folly,” he said, “to debate the acquisition of the island.  It naturally belongs to the American continent.  It guards the mouth of the Mississippi River, which is the heart of the American continent and the body of the American nation.”  This led Douglas to speak, and with bitterness, of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, which had given England joint control of any canal across the Isthmus of Panama.  “I was disgusted with this treaty as I was disgusted with the settlement of the Oregon boundary.  Just look at it!  Here the Monroe Doctrine has been