Here, as in all other Catholic countries, the spectators uncover their heads at the passing of a funeral cortege.  At the church are ceremonies of reading prayers, burning candles, and sprinkling the coffin with holy water, after which the priest goes his way, and the procession takes up its line of march for the newly-made grave, in the dilapidated and neglected cemetery, where the coffin is deposited without further ceremony.  No females are present during the whole affair.

A family in mourning in Cuba, not only dress in dark clothes, upon which there is no luster, but they keep the windows of the house shut for six months.  In fact, by an ordinance of the government, it is now prohibited to display the corpse to the public through the open windows, as was formerly done, both windows and doors being now required to be shut.

An hospitable people.

The Cuban of the better class is noted for his hospitality.  His door is always open to receive whomsoever calls, be he acquaintance, friend or stranger.  There is a place at his table for the visitor at all times, without money and without price, and no one having the slightest claim to courtesy of this kind need hesitate to accept the invitation.  There is little travel or communication on the island, so even if the guest be an entire stranger, his host will feel amply repaid for his hospitality by the news the traveler brings from the outside world.  There is a good old custom among the Danes, that when the first toast is drunk, it is to the roof of the house which covers everyone in it, meaning thereby it is all one family.  This same custom might appropriately be kept up amongst the Cuban planters, for when one takes his seat at the table, he is immediately installed as one of the family circle.

Education and religion.

Education is woefully backward on the island.  In the absence of recent statistics it is estimated that not one-tenth of the children receive lettered education of any kind, and even among the higher classes of society, liberal education is very far from being universally diffused.  A few literary and scientific men are to be found both in the higher and middle ranks, and previous to the revolution, the question of public instruction excited some interest among the creole population.

At Havana is the royal university with a rector and thirty professors, and medical and law schools, as well as an institution called the Royal College of Havana, There is a similar establishment at Puerto Principe, in the eastern interior, and both at Havana and Santiago de Cuba there is a college in which the branches of ecclesiastical education are taught, together with the humanities and philosophy.  Besides this there are several private schools, but these are not accessible to the masses.  The inhabitants can scarcely be said to have any literature, a few daily and weekly journals, under a rigid censorship, supply almost all the taste for letters in the island.