Has Mr. Dana described the Dominica, I wonder?  Well, if he has, I cannot help it.  He never can have eaten so many ices there as I have, nor passed so many patient hours amid the screeching, chattering, and devouring, which make it most like a cage of strange birds, or the monkey department in the Jardin des Plantes.—­Mem. I always observed that the monkeys just mentioned seemed far more mirthful than their brethren in the London Zooelogical Gardens.  They form themselves, so to speak, on a livelier model, and feel themselves more at home with their hosts.

But the Dominica.  You know, probably, that it is the great cafe of Havana.  All the day long it is full of people of all nations, sipping ices, chocolate, and so on; and all night long, also, up to the to me very questionable hour when its patrons go home and its garcons go to bed.  We often found it a welcome refuge at noon, when the douche of sunlight on one’s cervix bewilders the faculties, and confuses one’s principles of gravitation, toleration, etc., etc.  You enter from the Tophet of the street, and the intolerable glare is at once softened to a sort of golden shadow.  The floor is of stone; in the midst trickles a tiny fountain with golden network; all other available space is crowded with marble tables, square or round; and they, in turn, are scarcely visible for the swarm of black-coats that gather round them.  The smoke of innumerable cigars gives a Rembrandtic tinge to the depths of the picture, and the rows and groups of nodding Panama hats are like very dull flower-beds.  In the company, of course, the Spanish-Cuban element largely predominates; yet here and there the sharper English breaks upon the ear.

“Yes, I went to that plantation; but they have only one thousand boxes of sugar, and we want three thousand for our operation.”

A Yankee, you say.  Yes, certainly; and turning, you see the tall, strong Philadelphian from our hotel, who calls for everything by its right name, and always says, “Mas! mas!” when the waiter helps him to ice.  Some one near us is speaking a fuller English, with a richer “r” and deeper intonation.  See there! that is our own jolly captain, Brownless of ours, the King of the “Karnak”; and going up to the British lion, we shake the noble beast heartily by the paw.

The people about us are imbibing a variety of cooling liquids.  Our turn comes at last.  The garcon who says, “I speke Aingliss,” brings us each a delicious orange granizada, a sort of half-frozen water-ice, familiar to Italy, but unknown in America.  It is ice in the first enthusiasm of freezing,—­condensed, not hardened.  Promoting its liquefaction with the spoon, you enjoy it through the mediation of a straw.  The unskilful make strange noises and gurglings through this tenuis avena; but to those who have not forgotten the accomplishment of suction, as acquired at an early period of existence, the modus in quo is easy and agreeable.